Mark Leckey at Goldsmiths and Tate Britain
Mark Leckey came to Goldsmiths yesterday and chatted about being Slain by the Spirit.
I feel the same about these things: you see something and you just want to know all of it. Taking places, paintings, objects, and carrying them with you over and over again. Re-building a section of the M53 flyover at Tate Britain for “O’ Magic Power of Bleakness” at Tate Britain (2019), becomes a way to possess it. I can’t get close enough. In his words, I want to “feel it, know it, satisfy this fixation.” Making work becomes a way to filter or dilute this feeling that arrives at you, the possessive and overwhelming joy of it all. Carry me into the wilderness, take me from this place into yours.
When you photograph Made in ’Eaven (2004) installed at Tate Britain on an old Sony TV, the difference between the TV’s refresh rate and an iPhone camera’s shutter speed creates a black band that cuts across the image. Our eyes blend the frames into a continuous moving image, but the phone captures it in real time. Handling the reproduction of this work reveals something that was always within it, a trick of the eye. What looks like a video of Jeff Koons’s 1986 Rabbit in Leckey’s studio is actually a CGI rendering of the artwork. The video therefore is an illusion, and the Rabbit gives it away, with no reflection of the camera crew to be seen in its surface.
Photos of Mark Leckey’s Made in ’Eaven (2004) at Tate Britain
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/leckey-made-in-eaven-t12163
What’s interesting about Leckey’s video works is how they seem to unlock something that was already present in the image, through his handling, or collaging of new elements together, as he described yesterday as the the real hand at play in his practice. The iPhone’s version of this artwork does something similar; it unlocks what was already there. Made in ’Eaven (2003) speaks again through this glitching reproduction again twenty-two years later. It’s a trick.
Mark Leckey: O’ Magic Power of Bleakness. credit: ArtReview
https://artreview.com/online-exclusive-september-2019-mark-leckey-tate-britain/
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