Monday, March 30, 2015

the hauntological artist

Guardian Long Read by Charlotte Higgins - "How Mark Leckey became the artist of the YouTube generation"

.....

"When, in January, Leckey gave a talk to a rapt group of art students at the Slade School of Art in London, he said: “This is the best time to be an artist and making work. It is a magical time – I mean it is unanchored and fantastical. It is terrifying and exciting. The access that you have to all points of history, through the internet, is a kind of haunting. The internet is full of ghosts. We don’t know what is substantial and what is not.

.....

on his early formative days as artist in late 90s:

 “At that time one of his demons was nostalgia,” said [Martin] McGeown [of Cabinet gallery]. “It haunted him as a kind of condition, a sickness. He was trying to rid himself of it, but also re-experience it.” McGeown was certain these ideas and emotions would soon find some kind of expression. He said: “I didn’t care what it was – whether a film, a piece of music, a painting, a drawing. I didn’t need to know and it wasn’t necessary to ask.” This effort – to re-experience feelings and things that had been lost, or never really possessed – would come to define Leckey’s work."

......

on Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore

"It consisted of edited-together footage of dancers in nightclubs that, on the one hand, charted a history from 1970s northern soul to 1990s acid house; and, on the other, conveyed the pulsing, ecstatic, out-of-mind glory of the dancefloor in a churning, heady rush. The work is perfumed with wistfulness and tinged with ghostliness. It speaks of an evanescent youth: the time codes on the amateur video footage tick away ruthlessly, as eloquent a memento mori as the skull in the corner of a Holbein. The title, Leckey said, was about the notion that “something as trite and throwaway and exploitative as a jeans manufacturer can be taken by a group of people and made into something totemic, and powerful, and life-affirming.” He made it in a kind of ecstatic fugue. “I cried while I was making it. I make this stuff to feel joy and melancholy and sweet-sadness.”...

"Fiorucci changed the game. In its sampling – and deeply skilful editing – of found film sequences, it anticipated the YouTube generation’s easy manipulation of digital sources. It activated a painful yearning for a recent past just out of reach, rendered almost touchable by the tantalising immediacy of the footage. It expressed a delight in forms of expression that had rarely before been the material of “high” art. And it portrayed subjects – working-class, mostly white, mostly male teenagers – rarely accorded dignity and grace in the wider culture. At the same time, in an art world that could often seem wry, or ironic, or knowing, Fiorucci was different: disarmingly sincere"

....

on the idea that the significant artists are those operating at time of technological rupture who seize the possibilities of the new while emotionally rooted in the previous phase of techne-culture


"He had a kind of heightened awareness of the generation in which he stood – those whose adult experience was on the junction of the pre- and post-internet eras. As [Polly] Staple put it, Leckey could remember “the days when you had to warm up the television” but he also swam with sure strokes in the waters of the web.
"Through this acute consciousness of the historical turning-point between the analogue and digital eras, he had indicated a route to a generation of younger artists: among them Ed Atkins, as well as figures such as James Richards (who was himself nominated for the 2014 Turner prize), Helen Marten and Camille Henrot. These younger artists had, in different ways, developed ideas about the nature of the image in the internet age; about the way that pop culture could invade their art; but perhaps most of all, about having the confidence to make work that was not wry, or ironic, but raw in its emotional intent."
.....
On his most recent work On Pleasure Bent:


"It was a memoir, the story of his life.... He had had the idea for it one late night, drunk, when he had been messing around on YouTube and had come across a bootleg recording of a concert he had seen in 1979 at Eric’s, a club in Liverpool. He’d gone there to see Swell Maps; Joy Division were playing, too, so he saw them by accident. What Leckey had considered a significant but essentially lost and private episode was all of a sudden there, at his fingertips. He realised that he could reconstruct his own history from its traces: from music, from film, from adverts. These scattered shards, which once would have been impossible to reassemble and amass, had now migrated on to the internet as if gathered by an irresistible centripetal force..... For another section of the film he was reassembling the experience of being at the Joy Division concert; it was a process of collage, he said. He was mosaicing together hundreds of sounds and images. “I’ll go through hundreds of pieces of footage. Getting towards evoking something that feels close to that experience, or something that resonates with it.” He paused. And yet, he said, “These words are wrong.” He never felt that what he was creating was authentic, was true to the lived experience."
..........
Yes indeed, I do feel I screwed up by not working Leckey and Fiorucci into Retromania...  Would have fit so perfectly in the chapter on Hauntology, or perhaps the various parts that explore rave nostalgia, or even next to the YouTube data-sea pearl-divers like Oneohtrix/Chuck Person/Sunsetcorp....   
Here's my thoughts on Fiorucci for the Serpentine Gallery retrospective.












No comments: