Spanning video, performance, sound and sculpture, his work documents the shift from analog to digital culture, questioning society’s reliance on technology by literally dismantling it. This fall, MoMA PS1 reaches across the pond to bring pioneering British artist Mark Leckey to the States for his first major U.S. exhibition. Mark Leckey: Containers and their Drivers is the first comprehensive survey of Leckey’s oeuvre, and will include seminal works like Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, his 1999 found footage documentation of British club culture, and Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD, his 2015 autobiography composed of YouTube clips and eBay ephemera.
Considered one of the most formative and influential artists working today, Leckey blazed a trail for artists experimenting with form. Most people look at a smartphone and see a hunk of glass and metal, but Leckey wants to understand what lies underneath, flip it on its head, and make it stand for something new. “It’s not just a deconstruction, it’s the destruction of technology, in a way,” Stuart Comer, MoMA’s Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art, tells The Creators Project. “His work lies somewhere between a dystopian and utopian futurist vision. It evokes all the discomfort Mark feels in that transition, as someone who is not a millennial, but actually of an older generation.”
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A Month of Making (May 2 – June 21, 2014). Installation view. Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.
Leckey’s nimble navigation of internet culture belies deeper explorations of class and history. “One of Mark’s great contributions is to inscribe things that feel brutally contemporary with a much deeper sense of history and time,” Peter Eleey, MoMA PS1’s Curator and Associate Director of Exhibitions and Programs, says. “I think in this time, in which everything in digital culture has instant nostalgia because of the speed with which it’s updated and replaced, Mark slows down the process of viewing and consumption so we can reflect on it.”
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). Still from video. TRT: 15 minutes.
But Leckey’s exploration of creation and appropriation also borders on the cheeky. Made in ‘Eaven, from 2004, is a bootlegged copy of Jeff Koons’ Rabbit, rendered in 3D and fed through a defunct projector. “You have this slick, futuristic image made using the most up-to-the-minute technology, but it’s transferred to an analog, obsolete form. And as it runs through the projector, it actually breaks down,” Comer says. “It’s about paradox and how you inhabit this transitional moment, where we’re all being transformed by technology.”
GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010). Performance view. Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.
Leckey works with a staggering number of mediums, and Comer and Eleey plan to use MoMA PS1’s unconventional space to bring out the anachronism of his work. Composed of utilitarian hallways, airy ex-classrooms, and nooks with raw wood flooring, the repurposed schoolhouse contrasts the sanitized white cube aesthetic of most galleries. They anticipate Leckey will play with scale, like he did with Inflatable Felix (2014), a giant Felix the Cat balloon that Leckey crams into gallery corners, like Alice outgrowing the house in Wonderland.
Mark Leckey: Work and Leisure (Feb 17 – Mar 18, 2012). Installation view. Manchester Art Gallery.
The exhibition will occupy two floors of the museum this fall and bring together a broad array of Leckey works, including breakthrough video pieces, pedagogical lecture performances, a selection of Sound System sculptures (2001-2012) that recall the towering speakers used in London street parties, and hybrid film-performance pieces, like GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010) which interrogates “smart” objects.
UniAddDumThs (May 25 – July 16, 2016). Installation view. Gavin Brown’s enterprise. Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome
As If (Jan 30 – May 31, 2015). Installation view. Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers is on view October 23, 2016 – March 5, 2017 at MoMA PS1 in Queens, NY. Learn more on the MoMA PS1 website.
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