Mark Leckey is making art for a people yet to come

Mark Leckey’s trajectory as an artist began with the cusp-of-century’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a culling of found footage that distilled three decades of nightlife across the UK.

Since he won the Turner prize for Industrial Light and Magic in 2008, Leckey has created many videos, including 2015’s Dream English Kid, 1964 – 1999 AD, a broad retelling of his life beginning with his childhood in the Wirral, and 2023’s glittering amusement park/​seaside fantasia DAZZLEDDARK. The latter featured music from FACE friends Blackhaine and Iceboy Violet; generally, Leckey’s draw on cultural touchstones, such as clubbing and music, as well as themes of release and folly, reinventing their narrative potential. He also hosts a very good and eclectic show on NTS, but more on that later.

The 61-year-old artist is currently presenting an exhibition, As Above So Below, over three floors at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris. Some of it, like Fiorucci, is old, while some of it is new, not least a sticker-dotted map of Alexandra Palace (located near Leckey’s residence in North London), and a levitating sculpture manifested from an image he screenshotted.

Hi, Mark. This new exhibition is being shown at Lafayette Anticipations, a Rem Koolhaas-designed space. It’s also so there are multiple ways to configure it. How did that frame how you were going to do things?

It’s a really complicated space, which I don’t mind – the worst is a blank white cube. This one’s unique. You think, Okay, I’ve got the measure of it. And then they say, Oh, by the way, the floor moves. And you’re like, Just throw that in! So it took a lot of planning.

On the first floor, sound overtakes the entire space. Can you talk about that choice?

You gotta have a moment to figure out where the sound is coming from. I wanted the sound to do the heavy lifting. I make videos, and the problem has always been that these spaces are not designed for AV of any sort: they’re like 19^th century buildings trying to put this tech inside them. So, organically, my work started to get more theatrical, more environmental. That produced effects that I thought were interesting, one of them being an idea of just being in sound. I’m hoping people come in and go, this is a bit confusing. They go upstairs, then they come back down and they’ve been semi-concussed – then they can come back to normal. This book I was reading recently is all about medieval churches and the way that the church back then would make everything available to all the senses. There’d be smells, there’d be songs, there’d be icons. It’s called The Saturated Sensorium, and that is exactly what I’m after. You’re in this sensual space, but the main sense is sound, music – that’s what’s carrying everything.

Do you read a lot of nonfiction?

I do read a lot of nonfiction, but I glean – I don’t sit down with a book and read it cover to cover. I’m reading non-fiction for material. I did read a lot around the Byzantine [Eastern Roman Empire].

What attracts you to a Byzantine aesthetic?

You get this weird, very brief period of Byzantine icons: something that’s closer to Renaissance representation, but still very non-perspectival, very flat. That’s the stuff I love. I think after the Renaissance, it all goes wrong. It gets too muscular.

That’s quite a statement.

It gets a bit hench, as they call it. I don’t like that. I like it when it’s all ethereal and all about light. I can look at that work and understand the present through that. The thing about those images is they’re not pictures as we know them – they’re trying to bring you closer to God. Their objective isn’t to make a good picture; they’ve got a function. Images are changing now through their overproduction and through machine learning and the rest of it. I can’t go to an image anymore for information; their function is something else.

What is their function?

Say I wanted to understand a particular subculture historically: I’d go through archives and look for those images. Because they were rare, you were looking for something that was hidden or forgotten. But now those images are readily available. Also those images are maybe performed by someone else doing them so well that it’s hard to tell which one’s authentic and which one’s a LARP. Then there’s AI producing them as well. So images are untrustworthy. You’re not looking for them as a record of something.

Was there a point at which you realised that images stopped having the same informational potential they used to?

It was just a gradual mistrust over time. I’ve always been sort of mistrustful of images, because of their power.

You have sculptures, installation pieces and still images in the exhibition – are they legible in a different way? There are also sodium lights and a bus terminal, among other urban signifiers… Are they more trustworthy?

Maybe. They’re things I grew up with, and they’re part of my environment. I put them in the show because that’s how I work, from things that are familiar and recognisable within my own autobiography. Then I can go from the material to the imaginal: that allows me to make that leap. They’re like a magical object, something that allows you access to something else through the mundanity, the everydayness.

You’ve shown your work all over the world, but do you consider yourself a particularly British or even London artist? On one hand, contemporary culture is so global, and on the other hand, you’re really rooted in where you came from and have a particularly English gaze. Does anything shift by showing in France, or anywhere else?

Definitely. I always think, it’s not going to translate. For example, there’s these TfL posters that, if you live in London, are super familiar. They’re everywhere, and the campaign has been running for years. I don’t know if people over here know that. And then, in terms of time – now I show Fiorucci to 20-year-olds who weren’t born when I made it… and I have to explain what all of it is. And in that, I kill it [laughs], I can feel it just dying as I’m explaining. So, I’m not like, I’m British, and I’m proud of being British, but it’s the same thing with the sodium lights and all the rest of it. I can only make things from where I am, or where I come from. That’s how I figured out how to make art. I went to art school, and I was very confused when I left, because I thought I had to work with concepts that seemed very distant and remote and intellectual, and I just couldn’t grasp those things. With Fiorucci, I started to make something about what I had experienced, what was in my own bailiwick. It’s like, Oh, I know this – and no one can doubt this. The other way, I’m just full of doubts and anxiety. When I was at art school, I felt very adrift. I felt like everything was too big, too complicated. If I just did from what I knew, then that made sense to me. And I can still make work like that.

As you were saying, Fiorucci signals a certain era. Your collaboration with Supreme is on view too: it’s another cycle of iconic branding. Is that something that matters to you, to connect with contemporary youth culture?

I wasn’t looking to. I did something in New York recently – I do a radio show on NTS – and we invited these young SoundCloud rappers, and they were all about 19, and I just felt ridiculous. I was like their granddad. I think if I try and directly reach out, then it’s always a bit uncomfortable.

There’s intergenerational friction?

No, not at all! No, they were very cool. None of my peers came, so I was the only one there. I felt a little bit isolated, you know? It was more like that. But music’s a big part of what I do. I’ve always liked this idea of music as a continuum, and along that continuum, generations meet generations, and it evolves like that. Within that, that feels more comfortable. I don’t if it’s the same in art.

You made new work for this show. What will visitors who are already familiar with the videos online discover?

They have a workshop in the basement. So you come in to do a show, and they say, we can make things for you, which is very unusual. In terms of the new things, all of that came out of that workshop. There’s a hanging polygon figure, some light boxes; I had a go trying to make some canvases, which were meant to be painted, but every time I tried, I was like, Nah, don’t be ridiculous. I just put stickers on instead, and they’re much better. Every time I do a show, I want to make something by hand, and then I just realise I can’t, and I never do. [laughs]

I have these videos downstairs, and they were all made together in the same period. One of the things with video is that they don’t sell because you’re making a false scarcity with digital. Whatever! But the other side of that is that video is endlessly manipulable, right? Plastic. So when I do these shows… I don’t like the word remix, but that’s basically what I do. I slightly remix things and make them do what they need to do for whatever space they’re in. You might have seen these works before, but they’ll feel different. They’re not constant, and the way that I show them isn’t constant. I’ve pulled things out of the videos and then made them physical, but without them being props.

Tell me about the title.

​“As above, so below” refers to hermeticism. It’s like this pre-modern philosophy, that everything in the cosmos had a kind of correspondence, right? So everything’s linked to everything else. It sets up these echoes – like how poetry works. It’s just associations. The ​“void” sign is in the video downstairs but also it feels like what the kid in the bus stop is jumping through; the bejewelled void sign in these lights is very inviting and becomes something else. You get this chain of meanings.

I don’t know if you think this is the right adjective, but the work feels very playful. In Paris, there’s often a self-seriousness, so it’s fun to have a cheeky twist on things by contrast.

I struggle with that one a bit though. Whenever I make a show, I always think, Oh, why can’t I be more serious?

Why would you aspire to that?

When people are more serious, it has a different resonance, doesn’t it? I make shows and they’re not entirely joyful. I can’t say they’re just joyful. I think they’re also melancholic and kind of uncanny – but I do want there to be a joy there. I guess it’s hard to do serious joy, isn’t it?

To me, it’s a triumphant thing. Maybe it’s a feeling based on how music is in so much of what you do, there’s a looseness that comes from the sonic element.

Some of my favourite records contain both laughter and tears. They can do that in three minutes. You can feel all of this stuff, but in art it’s either conceptually serious, or it’s kind of funny. That’s why I look more to music, because it seems to be able to contain multitudes. The very best songs have that compressed in two minutes.

When you’re creating a video, do you envision it at a certain scale? You know people will watch it on their laptops – but is a large screen in a museum setting the ideal viewing space?

Two of those videos – the bus stop one and Carry Me into the Wilderness – they were made during the end of the pandemic. I was on my laptop; I made them there. They’re on YouTube, and they work on YouTube. I mean, they’re all on YouTube – I put them all on there. I’m happy for them to be there, or I’m happy if someone says, Can we screen a video? and they can just show it any way they want, and then they can have this more sculptural element to them. I think video is the anti-medium. It’s not fixed. It’s not a real thing, in a sense, it just circulates and it just moves, you know? I like that about it, that it’s always looking for any kind of support that will have it. It could be anywhere. I’ve shown the same video on different screens. It’s promiscuous.

Video is definitely slutty.

That’s what I like about it! A little bit slutty! Not so formal.

Do you have any rituals in terms of how you search for things online? What’s your approach to internet consumption?

It’s not an approach. It’s an addiction. It gets more and more complicated, because – here’s the thing I’ve been thinking about a lot. I heard someone else say this, this isn’t mine. But basically they were talking about how experience now is translated into information. And I look at my videos, especially Carry Me. I have this quite profound experience, and my immediate response is to make something of it and to put it out into the world. I can say to myself, That’s because I’m an artist; that’s what artists do. They use these things as raw material – but so does everyone else. That’s the instinctive response now, when something happens. It’s like the classic of people getting fed up with everyone on their phones at a gig. That’s what they’re doing: they’re translating it into information, right? Put it out there and watch it circulate. I’m an artist; I gather material. Most materials come from the internet. And then I metabolise it and it goes through this process of my authentic self. There’s like 11-year-olds doing that. In some sense, everyone becomes an artist.

Well, maybe not to that extent… but it’s a kind of collective behaviour.

It’s a collective behaviour, and I guess what I’m trying to say is what I do is no different from what anyone else does. It’s specialised – I don’t know if that’s the word – but it’s the same way of operating that everyone else does. I mean, magic is what I’m after – and ritual. I think the one thing that art can still do that does make it unique is it can be this gathering space for ritual. Physical bodies in a space, making this thing become special. That’s what art can do. That’s why I’m still making art. If it didn’t do that, if it was just exhibiting images, then I’d be less interested. I always like that communal aspect of it. One of the galleries I’m with, they always talk about having a constituency.

That sounds kind of government-inflected.

You’re kind of right.

I didn’t mean to ruin it.

I don’t like to throw around theory, but I do know [French philosopher Gilles] Deleuze described the idea of making something for a people yet to come. I like that idea a lot. Your audience might not quite be here yet, but they’re coming. They’re in the future, waiting. I find that very hopeful – that there’s a people yet to come.