This is an absolutely brilliant, transformative piece of work, hugely staged and thrillingly experienced. It consists of a massive installation and three videos by contemporary artist Mark Leckey. Here’s the promotional video to gt a quick feel:
The big exhibition space on the east side of Tate’s central atrium has had all its partitions removed to create one enormous gallery space. In this space they have recreated a lift-size model of an enormous concrete motorway bridge. To be precise, a recreation of a section of the M53 flyover close to Leckey’s childhood home on the Wirral where he used to play with his boyhood friends.
The bridge goes over our heads at a diagonal, supported by enormous concrete piers. Off to the left is the concrete slope between the hard shoulder which ramps up to the underside of the bridge. It is an enormous brooding presence and absolutely brilliant, cavernous and terrifying.
The first motorway was opened in 1958 and these huge concrete monsters have been part of the British landscape for over 60 years. Why is so little written or painted or arted about them, and about the poisonous mega-roads and planet-strangling super-traffic they carry.
The room is almost pitch black. I nearly bumped into one of the enormous fake concrete motorway piers. But just about made them out because they – and the handful of concrete ‘benches’ scattered about are illuminated by the flashing, fleering images from two enormous video screens on the far wall, and from a suite of six or so smaller screens off to the right.
Onto these are projected three art videos or films:
- Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)
- Dream English Kid, 1964 – 1999 AD (2015)
- Under Under In (2019)
I used to work in TV. In the late 1980s I produced and directed a dozen or so videos for commercial clients, before going on to produce live and prerecorded programmes for Channel 4, ITV and BBC1 So I’ve spent a lot of time in edit suites, with editors and directors, editing, discussing, cutting and mixing material. This means I have quite high standards and so find a lot of experimental art videos unwatchably amateurish.
To my own surprise, however, I ended up staying to watch all three videos in their entirety and being riveted, transfixed, transported. Yes yes yes, I wanted to shout, this is actual modern life in its shittyness, in its squalor, with working class lads making the most of the appalling built environments, the failing schools, the windswept concrete shopping centres and the high-rise slums designed for them by avant-garde architects and progressive town planners, by getting off their faces on booze and pills and dancing themselves stupid on the dance floors of thousands of provincial dance halls and clubs.
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is a compilation of found footage from dance floors chronicling Britain’s underground club scene from the 1970s to the 1990s, from the era of mullets and Northern Soul through to the ecstasy-fuelled raves of the 1990s.
God it takes me back to having that kind of haircut in the 1970s and crappy church halls discos where lads in Doc Martens ended up fighting each other, through the pogoing and gobbing of the punk era, with the straights going to crappy mirror-ball discos, and then on into the suddenly hard core, techno, trance and rave scene of the late 80s which burst out of nowhere with its amazing sound systems, lasers and powerful psychotropic drugs.
So much for the social history, but what makes Leckey’s films a cut above others in the same style is the use of sound. He has a phenomenal grasp of the importance of sound, sound effects and sound editing. Having sat in those darkened edit suites for years and years and years I can vouch for the drastic affect sound editing and mixing has on the pictures in TV or film. Take a sequence of a beautiful girl smiling: then superimpose on it the sounds of – someone having an orgasm, a woman screaming, or a little girl saying a nursery rhyme. Identical image, radically different impacts.
The picture cutting is brilliant and worth commenting on in its own right; but what lifts Leckey’s films into brilliant is the extremely sophisticated and creative use of sound effects; mashups of music, deep ominous booms, clips of speech, electronic or industrial sounds.
So it’s the sound effects which, in my opinion, make these more than films, but into a fully immersive experience. The space under the mocked-up motorway is pitch black, cavernous and echoing. That’s why it’s worth traveling to Tate Britain to have the full huge, disorientating, slightly scary and sense-bombardment experience. Watching it on a computer or phone screen is too small and contained. You need to be overwhelmed by it. Possessed.
Dream English Kid, 1964 to 1999 AD
In 1979, Leckey went to Eric’s, the Liverpool nightclub, to see a gig by Joy Division. Recently, the artist located amateur footage of the event on YouTube. He realised that many, maybe most, of what we think of as treasured personal memories can now be found online, and that was the inspiration to assemble a film.
So Dream English Kid 1964 – 1999 AD uses archival material from television shows, advertisements and music, to recreate a record of all the significant events in his life from the 1970s until the 1990s.
God, it’s wonderful a) as straightforward nostalgia – I didn’t grow up in Liverpool or a slum, but I remember the look and feel of shitty England in the 1970s, and the sequence which shows all the horrible packed food – Nesquik, Marmite, Smash, Kelloggs Frosties – brought back the look and taste of all the crap our parents stuffed us with;
b) again because of the sophistication of the picture editing, but more than that, of the sound: it creates a really haunting beguiling, shocking, in your face soundscape, alternating soft silent moments, with raucous live gig sound, urchins in the street, lads, and other much more haunting, weird and unsettling sound effects. It is as if History itself is struggling to break through the bounds of petty human existence. As if some deeper force is struggling to break free from our everyday concerns about haircuts and boyfriends and pop songs, and tell us the big all-important thing, which we’re all too busy to listen to.
Under Under In (2019)
The last of the three film is Under Under In 2019 is noticeably different in feel. It’s because the other two are mostly made up of old film and video footage cannily edited together, while this one is all contemporary, shot on digital camera.
It is all shot under the actual motorway bridge whose model we are standing under and it features half a dozen or so young gang members, dressed in up-to-the-minute street fashion (I assume) – Adidas hoodies zipped up over their faces, trainers, rap hand gestures. For the first ten minutes or so they’re just hanging under the bridge, pushing each other, giggling, and what looks like getting high by car oil products (I think).
But as I’ve highlighted above, the real impact derives not from the visuals – but from the amazing soundscape Leckey has crafted, in which whatever conversation the lads are having is cut and fragmented and distorted and mangled into spare phonemes and loose grunts and blips and frags of speech, echoing, dismantled, lost under the roaring motorway bridge.
Still from Dream English Kid, 1964 – 1999 AD (2015) © Mark Leckey
Apparently the film in some way addresses a supernatural encounter Leckey believes he had under the bridge as a child.
Many of my works have their wellspring in things and experiences from my childhood and youth that still haunt me.
What this means is that one of the larking-about kids seems to see something, a creature tucked in the angle of the bridge, hands reach out, small hands, large hand, white images, intercut sound track, it’s impossible to make out what’s happening but a little kid’s voice repeats, ‘Where you been?’ in a strong Scouse accent.
I’ve made it sound much more comprehensible than it is, the images are quickly intercut, treated, amplified distorted shown from above, the camera swoops down, the same gestures are repeated in juddering cuts or vanish.
It’s all shown on the six smaller screens I mentioned above. You have to stand throughout the entire screening but after a while I realised that behind us, up in the cramped space where the ramp meets the bridge of the model, was another screen onto which were projected images of the pumped-up lads crouching in a row, pushing each other joshing and interacting, which complemented the main action on the six screens. Which cut out at some moments, leaving us in puzzling darkness. Haunting & spooky.
Suddenly something more or less understandable emerges out of the blizzard of fragments and rave-era jump cuts. This is a completely computer-generated diagram of the flyover bridge, and then the point of view descends, under road level to reveal… another view o the same thing, an older type of wooden bridge… and keeps on going down to reveal an older structure yet over the same ravine… and down again and again until we come to a layer of standing stones, dolmen like Stonehenge is built from, and the camera stops descending but moves forward, between the stones, into some dark ominous mysterious chamber.
Leckey has written and spoken about his interest in older visions of Albion, in older imagery connected with faeries and magic inhabiting the countryside, and this sequence obviously comes out of that interest. But it’s one thing to say something, and quite another to come up with a visual and audio presentation of it which is so huge and overwhelming that it makes the viewers’ hair stand up on end.
The film below doesn’t feature in the installation, but it gives you a good sense of the mashup of ancient magic, incantation, a visionary way of reconceiving the shitty, concrete slabverse of our poisonous, toxic streets and motorways and flyover cities, choked with fumes, killing us all, and the aggressively visionary cutups of imagery from all available sources which Leckey uses. And the weird spellbinding obsession with the motorway flyover as a metaphor for our entire ruinous civilisation, which I found preposterous, ungainly, and yet weirdly compelling
Related links
- Mark Leckey: O’ Magic Power of Bleakness continues at Tate Britain until 5 January 2020
Books & Boots 