« Enchanter la matière vulgaire » (26.09.2014 – 11.01.2015), Mark Leckey, the Wiels in Brussels

3 March 2015

columns: Variations on a Theme Citation - Replay

The deformed shadow of Pinocchio, the mirroring mises-en-abyme of Blade Runner and the Arnolfini Wedding,¹ the grimacing face of Aphex Twin by Chris Cunningham, the hyperbolic chignon of Madeleine… all of these figures were present in the exhibition Enchanter la matière vulgaire and have recurred several times within Mark Leckey’s work. The integration of citations constitutes the artist’s raw material, who carries out a veritable transubstantiation of sources for the production of his own vocabulary. From the integration of a cult image (Vertigo) to the recreation of an object (Rabbit) via an exhaustive presentation in a specific display (Windowlicker), the methods of appearance are combined to give rise to a network of meaning that surpasses its creator, while systematically invoking him. The use of Felix the Cat is emblematic of the rebounding operating mode of the work. The image convokes the source drawing while also functioning as a signified for other artworks by Leckey in which it is represented. Felix gets broadcasted provides the most explicit reading of the “Felix sign”: the link between the virtualisation of the body and the journey of souls, between technical knowledge and ontological knowledge. For Leckey, technology is not disembodied but on the contrary, it offers new possibilities to the body and mind, especially that of penetrating a dimension of essential understanding about the world.

“There’s this idea that technology is very cold and distant, and that everything human has been excised from it, but that’s not true. That’s the greatest lie. […] I’ve noticed a lot of video lately in which hands are involved; hands trying to get ‘in there’ and manipulate this phantom matter. I feel there is a kind of a phenomenological perplexity – your body is beguiled by the technology and it makes you feel that you can do that. Reach in, touch it.”²

The various media representing Felix act in Leckey’s work as markers used by the artist, clarifying his logic: the reality of the objects is as much to do with their material as it is with what we project onto them. “You’re looking at stuff and then you’re producing them at the same time.”³ Therefore, the tail of the cat in Flix operates through metonymy, bearing all of the signified Felix along with it, yet dividing the screen, assuring us of its physicality. A real Golden Calf, a surface of projection, Felix hosts offerings that are like so many little miniatures of the other artwork-signs in the exhibition. The procedure functions through the evocation of artistic figures of reference. Here, Henry Moore and Richard Hamilton. The name of the former is reified in a collection of posters forming an evocative trilogy: Samsung, Fiorucci, Henry Moore. The latter appears via the presence of his computer in the UniAddDumThs installation. The figure of Hamilton not only convokes the former artist, having studied the mechanisation and digitisation of images, but above all, a methodology. Calling for theories of information and communication from his era that he transposes into the field of figuration, Hamilton approaches the collage as “image and message” and images as bits.⁴

UniAddDumThs, version for the exhibition “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things” at the Wiels,⁵ enables us to grasp Leckey’s thoughts on the intentionality of images and objects and, reciprocally, on the materiality of the mind. Refusing the term “curator”, Leckey considers this project to be an image sampler⁶. In its English version, the source images, stored in his hard drive, were presented to the visitor in their complete forms. Hence, a car loaned by Nissan, a mummified cat dating from 11 years AC, and a portrait of William Blake all rubbed shoulders in dioramas composed by the artist. At Wiels, the objects were replaced by 3D printouts, POS displays and other replicas, serving as a way for Leckey to re-appropriate them and make them his own. ⁷Running counter to the theory of the disappearance of the aura at the time of mechanical reproduction of an object,⁸ Leckey feels the need to copy the artefacts in order to get closer to them, considering in the end that the presentation of the originals produces a less powerful effect than collage or projection, carried out initially on a computer. “Because to copy is to do nothing; it is to be the books being copied.”⁹ In so doing, the objects also acquire an ambiguous status, equidistant from their initial contextual incarnation and from their digital existence, which corresponds to what Leckey was seeking to attain with the exhibition: “a spot where the membrane between the actual and virtual worlds is especially leaky”.¹⁰

The various versions of the project adapt to the environment that they evolve within exceptionally well and, while the principal schemas remain identical, certain elements travel from one assemblage to the other: the giant inflatable Felix passes from a singular symphony with Sander Mulder’s Woofer and the very ancient “Hapi canopic” jar, to a solitary glorification, when the Amazon boxes highlight the accessibility of goods through channels of communication. The objects are juxtaposed with one another, following an editing principle that leads the subject in various directions, offering the same position to the spectator as the one the artist affirms, as a “producer and consumer, maker and viewer”. Mark Leckey appropriates museum, academic, advertising, cinematographic, commercial or domestic tools in order to create the systems of display precisely required for his discourse – a physical, choral and sensory voice.

“Where the doctrine becomes blocked, images are eventually liberated. Where the philosopher’s dialectic becomes exhausted, the dialectic of the lyrical editor can begin.”¹¹

Editing, intimately accomplished using technical tools, enables the expression of these “familiar objects full of voices”¹². Hamilton’s aforementioned computer thus refers, like an asynchronous mirror, to Leckey’s practice of editing, inseparable from the technologies and scientific conceptions of his own era. ¹³ Defined by Leckey as an automaton¹⁴, the computer is one of the mediums of the artist-ventriloquist, the one that gives expression to this famous ghostly matter¹⁵, when the Sound Systems amplify this voice between two worlds ¹⁶whose virtual character confirms its lyricism. ¹⁷

Translated from the French by Anna Knight

Notes

www.youtube.com/
Mark Leckey, “Dan Fox interview with Mark Leckey” in Mark Leckey – On pleasure Bent, Koenig Books, 2014
www.youtube.com/
cf Brigitte Aubry, Richard Hamilton, Peintre des apparences contemporaines, éditions Les presses du réel, 2009, p247-251
www.e-flux.com/
“So this exhibition began as a process of aggregating these things in a plastic, malleable way virtually, by gathering everything together in folders on my desktop and collaging them together.” Mark Leckey, in interview by Kathy Noble, visitor’s guide, “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things” exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary
Dan Fox, “Interview with Mark Leckey” in Mark Leckey – On pleasure Bent, op. cit.
Elena Filipovic, “Real Embodiment and Ersatz Things”, in Mark Leckey – On pleasure Bent, Koenig Books, 2014
Michel Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library” (1964), in: Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1977, p. 109, cited by Elena Filipovic, op. cit.
It is difficult not to identify the play on words leaky/Leckey. Mark Leckey, in The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, Hayward Publishing, South Bank Center, 2013, p 5
Georges Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position, L’oeil de l’histoire 1, Les Editions de Minuit, 2009, p 172
“[F]amiliar objects full of voices where even rocks and stones have names”, Mark Leckey, citation from The Long Tail, in The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, p 5
We will not be surprised, then, by the invitation of Graham Harman, founder of the Object-oriented ontology (“OOO”) to speak within the framework of the exhibition “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things » at Nottingham Contemporary. The conference is archived on line: www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/
In The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, op. cit., p 64
“The word ‘ventriloquism’ comes from the latin ‘to speak from the stomach”. […] The noises produced by the stomach were thought to be the voices of the dead, who had taken up residence in the stomach of the ventriloquist, who would interpret the sounds.” Mark Leckey, in The Universal addressability of Dumbs things, op. cit, p 13
This is the AND / The sound of AND / The AND between Up AND Down / Above AND Below / Upstairs AND Downstairs / Overhead AND Underfoot / Way up in the Sky AND Deep down in the Sea” Mark Lekey discussing BigBoxStatueAction, in The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, op. cit., p 53
On this subject, see both Philippe Hamon, on the “pure branding of the virtual origins of speech” in lyricism, “Le sujet Lyrique et ironie”, in Le sujet Lyrique en question, under the direction of Dominique Rabaté, Joëlle de Sermet, Yves Vadé, Édition Presse Universitaire de Bordeaux, 1996, p 21 https://books.google.fr/ and Erik Bünger, The Girl who Never Was,www.erikbunger.com/