A brush with... Mark Leckey

A brush with is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the app for arts and culture. Created by Bloomberg for Lentropies, Bloomberg Connects lets you access museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world on demand. Download the app to access digital guides and explore a variety of content. Hello, I'm Ben Luke and welcome to A Brush With, the podcast where I talk to artists about their influences from art to literature, film and music and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work. And in this episode it's a brush with Mark Lecky, who's enormously varied and experimental practice sits on the cusp of digital and analogue worlds. Working mostly in video, sound, performance and installation, Mark explores the meanings of media and technologies alongside themes including class and capitalism and personal and collective history. Deeply subjective and emotional, yet seeking universal truths, Mark's practice has made him one of the most influential artists working today. He was born in Birkenhead near Liverpool in northwest England in 1964 and grew up in Elsmir Port, a town across the River Mercy from Liverpool. He came of age in a period of enormous political and cultural disruption in the UK, which, as we learned from his alter-bar graphical video work, Dream English Kid, from 2015, made a huge impression on him. The culture he experienced then, from the street fashion of the so-called casual subculture to the post-punk and new wave music he experienced in Liverpool's music venues like Erics, made an indelible impression on him. He had a slow start artistically. He graduated from Newcastle Polytechnic in 1990, but it wasn't until the end of that decade by which time he'd moved to London that he made his breakthrough work, a piece that remains his most famous today. Fieryck Cheat made me hardcore from 1999, which used his sample footage of dance subcultures like Northern Soul and Raive, alongside other footage, including images of groups of casuals on the streets, edited into a dream-like montage. Music has remained at the core of Mark's work. For his 2003 performance, Big Box Statue Action at Take Britain, one of his sound system works. He positioned a speaker stack exactly to the scale of Jacob Epstein's Hulking Alabaster sculpture Jacob and the Angel, and through a sound collage of spoken words, song and sample music, tried as he put it to coax a response out of this strange, mute monstrosity. He's also explored film. He was professor of film studies at the Stadl-Tula in Frankfurt in the 2000s, and among his best-known works is Cinemart in the Round, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in which, wearing a black tie, he delivers a characteristically unorthodox lecture on art and cinematic history and technology's role within it. And whatever his subject marks personal engagement with it is clear. In Green Screen Refrigerator Action from 2010, a video and installation that looks at smart objects and how we're increasingly immersed in technology in our daily lives, Mark inhaled the coolant from a Samsung smart refrigerator in order to inhabit the life of the object. This subjectivity is perhaps most profound in Dream English Kid 1964 to 1999 AD, a video and sound collage of what Mark has called "found memories", a kind of sequel to Fierrucci. As well as YouTube clips and nostalgic ephemera found on eBay, that piece included both digital and physical props and models, including of Mark's 1990s flat in the West End of London and a concrete bridge over a motorway near where he grew up. A full-scale reconstruction of that bridge also appeared as the setting for "O Magic Power of Bleatness". Mark's 2019 show at Tate Britain as a setting for a new work of O'King Childhood Memories, including one in which he claimed he saw a fairy in the bridge's undercraft. As a response, he created a hologram using a Victorian illusion technique called Peppers Ghost of young people occupying the space under the bridge, a spectral presence which carried over onto multiple screens around the room. Increasingly, Mark's work uses this hybrid form of "found and constructed imagery". He show in London that opened in March 2022 features two such pieces. To the old world, thank you for the use of your body, includes footage of a young man deliberately crashing through the glass window of a bus stop shelter, which Mark then built a magical and strange video around, and carry me into the wilderness, uses a painting by the 14th century Italian master Lorenzo Monaco as a spur to explore the isolation and transcendence as the UK's Covid-19 lockdown period ended. As with all of Mark's work, I was aware again of being pulled into the heart of these pieces, subject to their vacillating moods and meanings, the familiarity and mysteries of his visual and sonic languages. Witnessing Mark's art were always tangibly aware of his role in its making, his distinctive voice. He's talked about this process and how, as he often says, he gets lost in the paradise of the work. And it's with this that I began our conversation. What does he mean by that phrase? It's stolen, it's a Blake, it's the line I got from him, and I think he was expressing the idea of paradise in a much more expansive way than I am, but still, I mean I don't know if this was always the way, but it seems a very contemporary way of making work now as you kind of gather, you gather lots of information, and then you start to assemble it in some way. I mean this is alright, this is what I was thinking recently because Lizzie had to go away, so I was with the kids, this is your partner. This is my partner, so basically I assemble and then I build a kind of an environment, I guess, that I can then go into and then close the door behind me. And I'm in this place, I've built, and that's when I enter this kind of like potential paradise, this kind of, it's a very joyful place most of the time. There's always a moment when I make an edit and I kind of squeal with delights, or it may, I just get very excited by it, I'm lost to any world outside of that. It's a kind of intensification, I guess, I guess that's what I mean by paradise in that sense, it's like, I always like this idea of Catholic martyrs that they're kind of martyred and allows them for a particular kind of idea of heaven, like a super-intensified idea where they're just in perpetual ecstasy, eternal perpetual ecstasy and it's like, I guess I became aware of this sense in when I was working and in myself, I've tried to amplify that as well. So I kind of prepare myself for it. And when you say you prepare yourself, do you mean you just within the sort of tools that you're going to use from a sort of, in terms of images and sound and all that sort of thing, or is there a sort of physical kind of structure that you build in order to enter into? No, I don't need a physical structure, I mean I used to do a lot of this just at the kitchen table. Now we've moved and I've got a little studio, so I have got a space that is closed off from the rest of the house. It's more a mental space. I've got my kind of library, I've got my archive of sound effects or whatever, and then I've got access obviously to everything online. So yeah, I'm kind of, everything's surrounding me, and then I'm allowed to just get on with it. Because up to then also it's a kind of procrastination, and there's a point where I can't procrastinate anymore. So I just have to enter this kind of booth, and then say, this is it, you know, and that's usually at the last minute. I remember hearing you talking about Fieroucch, you once, and you said that at some points when you were making that, you got drunk. So you went into the kind of different kind of altered state. And how important was that to the way that the work turned out in the end? And when you watch it back and you say, you achieved something through that that you might not have ordinarily done, you know. Yeah, I mean, that's a funny one because for me, if I rewatch Fieroucchi, it's, I wouldn't say unbearable, but it's uncomfortable, because I just find it very mordling. It's like me basically being a mordling melancholic drunk, just feeling sorry for myself. And I honestly was very surprised that the reaction it had, because I just thought it was very self-indulgent. It's hard for me to tell, because it's like I sort of imprinted myself on that with aspects of my personality I don't particularly care for. So it's always a bit tricky, but you know, I think it's a very morbid piece of work. I think it's quite, I'm not morbid, but mirrored. I also think of it as a kind of, it's like a ghost film, you know, it's a kind of haunted video. So those were the kind of thoughts that were circulating when I was making that, yeah. But I was aware that watching you on a new film carrying me into the wilderness, there's a moment where we hear you in a state of kind of you're overwhelmed. Yes. And so I'm aware that in many moments in your work, we're carried into a different space. In this case, it's what you call the wilderness. And then, but there is a moment where we ourselves as viewers are sort of transformed through the work, right? Right. Okay. Great. I guess I'm looking to kind of affect the viewer in that sense. I mean, again, it's back to this kind of idea of being in the paradise of the work. It's like, I'm just looking to, I don't want to overuse this phrase, but intensify. I've been looking at a lot of iconography or sort of late iconography. There's that sort of period just before sort of pre-renaissance, which I've always liked. I had a weird introduction to art history. Most people, you know, learn about war, holding up for some reason we learned about jotto and frangiella koanato, which I'm always grateful for. So I was completely fascinated by these particular series of paintings of the desert fathers, like Saint Jerome and Saint Anthony. And then I guess I was trying to imagine those ecstatic experiences, you know, they're just overwhelmed in sense of isolated from everything else, but then the world just is allowed to come kind of rushing in. And I guess it was a lot to do with coming out doors after two years in a sense and just a release, I guess. I think that's what that video is essentially. Well both of them are the more than the bus stop as well. They're both. Yeah, they're very basic. They're just trying to get out. But they're enormously complicated and let's talk about the bus stop work because this is a piece where you used a YouTube clip of somebody or not even YouTube, it was bantz.com or something. UK bantz. UK bantz. There's a bunch of movie clips. Somebody jumps into a bus stop and crashes through the glass. So you took, I think, what you describe is a kind of sorted suburban moment or urban moment. And then it becomes something from which you go on a path and a journey with. How do you conceptualize how you see this sort of random moment and turn it into something that ultimately is art? I tell you why because I didn't think of it as art. I didn't think of it particularly conceptually as well. I mean, I did. But I was trying to kind of withhold that. I'd use the sound from that to make a record I'm missing the video. It has this incredible rhythm. It's very cartoon-like here. This kind of pitter-patter, pitter-patter, smash. And then his friends react. And on a loop it's just, it was very satisfying loop. And you could kind of close one eye to the kind of self-inflicted violence and all the rest of it. But it's just as a kind of a sonic artifact. It was very satisfying. So I'd use that before in a record. And then I've been looking to start a kind of a summer course or a school. And the idea is that it's a music and video course. And part of the reason for that is that I was thinking this is a way. I mean, when I say I want to escape art, there's I mean there's things in art and the art world that I find constrictive. And so I'm always looking for ways to kind of escape that. And so I thought about this video is a I thought I'm going to make a music video and I'm going to make the music. And I don't know what that's about. I just knew I had the sound, I had the clip and I sort of tried to write a song essentially. And I didn't know where it was particularly going to go. I started to think of the bus stop as a kind of portal. I mean, it's a window and spending all this time just looking through and that windows. It was just that was very obvious. The thing that I found very overwhelming again during the pandemic was this sense of being constrained and but at the same time the online world expanded, right? And it just multiplied. So there's this weird kind of like back and forth with that. That's what I was thinking. But these are all very vague thoughts in the back of my head. So he's kind of launching himself into another realm, another dimension trying to what's he trying? What's he trying? I don't know what he's trying to do, but it's impressive. And it's very human. That's essentially what I thought at the end. He's just trying to do this thing that I don't quite understand, but I love him for it. There's this balance in that film that's very powerful in lots of your work between a very sort of hard physicality and then the realm of the digital or the realm of images, all of the mediated image or whatever. And it seems to me that that's sort of an abiding concern, but always translated in different ways in your life. Okay. All right. I mean, to what extent is that a sort of stated intent and to what extent is it just sort of a natural inquiry in a way that comes through? It's kind of it's both to be honest. I mean, I would say I'm determined by images and they kind of engulfed me at the expense of other experiences. I would say, you know, I'm trying to feel, but you know, there's always this mediation. Right? So it's like if I can enhance or again amplify that kind of mediation maybe then I might start to feel something because it has worked before. I mean, I did this performance a long time ago with Catherine Wooder, take Britain called Big Box Statue Action. And that was about trying to address this big ugly statue by Epstein that always did something to me and I could never fathom it. And so I set up this sound system to kind of interrogate it to try and make it speak back to me. That was the kind of conceit. But I realized in doing that that it worked because I realized I couldn't address the statue directly. You know, if I just go up to a piece of work to an object in a statue, it's always mediated. There's just there's just too much noise, right? I mean, this is post the show. I kind of realized or I thought to myself that if I try and address something or apprehend something indirectly, you know, if I again amplify it or this sort of mediation around it, then I actually get closer paradoxically to feeling it or kind of experience in it in some way. So that's become part of what I do because I just want to know I just want to know why these things affect me. That's essentially the reason I make art. They affect me deeply and I want to know why. And then there's also this side of your work where you want to communicate with your audience. In a way that a lot of artists either don't privilege in their work or just don't have the same need in the sense that you can find Fierrucci on YouTube. You can find your latest work on YouTube. You just go there and it's free and watchable and yeah, and it seems to me that that you know, you talked about the sort of constrictive nature of the art. Well, one of the constrictions is the kind of network of the market, right? You just kind of transcend that. You've got a gallery, you've got two galleries, but you don't need the gallery to communicate with an audience, right? Well, I do. I need the gallery for a number of reasons. And also, you know, in any real metrics, the stuff I put on YouTube is insignificant, you know what I mean? I always remember someone putting under Fierrucci a link to a sausage-making video, you know, and it was like five times the amount of hits. I got, you know, it's just like, I mean, Fierrucci does very well on YouTube and I thought, you know, that's done well. I put other stuff on and then you're just down in the low hundreds, you know what I mean? So, so it's, you know, it's very particular. People want something very particular. I put Fierrucci up there originally because it's not mine in any real sense. You know, I have no copyright claim over it. And I guess most of my stuff, I don't feel like I own it in that sense, you know, I mean, the boss stop piece, I found that. Like, I do try and find who made it. Sometimes that works, but I haven't found the makers of the boss stop piece. It would just feel ethically wrong, I think, not to return it there and to say this is what I did with it in on a minute. The new video that carry me into the wilderness, that's edited with TikTok filters because I like that aesthetic and I like what people are doing. Let's move on to the questions that we ask all our guests. Yes. So, who was the first artist's work you loved? When I first started thinking about going to art school, the artist I was really interested in was Diego Rivera. I wanted to be a mural painter. I wanted to be a muralist. I wanted to make political murals essentially. I think now if Banksy had been around, that's the path I would have taken. Then I got into, do you remember Peter Howson? Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I can't say I like Peter Howson's work anymore. And then, Peter Howson was a sort of very physical, realist painter, lots of thick and pasta and a thing. Yeah, I had very conservative tastes when I was young. I've since become more refined. And then I have to redo my level and then I went to foundation. And the art history they were teaching us then was like early Renaissance. Some reason. And Geoto, I fell in love with Geoto and his peers. And then Red Brandt. So, they're my very early ones. Peter Howson, I think, was an artist who was very dominant in that period. Sort of early 80s. There was a whole school of painters from Glasgow and from Scotland more generally that were sort of very, really, realist physical painters that sort of had quite a widespread sort of impact on art at that time. Yeah. But I think it was sort of dishonest, I think I was actually more like, who's the other one, Adrian? Was Nensky? Was it? Yeah. Was that right? Yeah. Who I kind of still, I look at that and think I find that still interesting. I came from quite a macho culture. And I think that was the only way I could kind of appreciate fine art was by sort of butching it up a bit. Yeah. And Peter Howson was very butch. You grew up in Elsmir Port, which is so looking over Liverpool, but it's within Mersey, so Liverpool's nearest big city. Yeah. And obviously Liverpool at that time when you were growing up was enormously politicised. There was a whole minute and thing happening. Yeah. So was that part of the sort of inspiration for your sort of political engagement and that muralism, that concerted muralism? Yeah. There's definitely, I mean, the first thing I remember ever doing is a kind of painting, a sort of, I guess a cartoon for a mural of an orange march. The music that was coming out Liverpool, even all around the country, I guess, was very politically engaged at that time. So, but yeah, I mean, I left school in the midst of like a massive depression in Liverpool and it was everywhere. It didn't seem at that age a young age that I could resist. But you've talked about emerging from that culture as a kind of productive process, as a because you were sort of suburban Liverpool. You've described the way that you were sort of in some ways enhanced your observation of what you could see from a distance. Yeah. It's a kind of narrative, I tell myself, but yeah, I think it's weird because it's kind of returned to me in my later years a sort of envy of people who see me at ease in the world, you know. And I guess looking at Liverpool, people, scouts were at ease with being scouts as you know what I mean? Whereas we were like anxious about whether we were ex scouts or woolly backs. Yeah, it was that. It was that it was just seeing people at ease and able to just be and enjoy their own culture, their own kind of experience that you were like left feeling slightly envious of and yeah. We're now going to move on to the question which is which historical artist you turn to the most. And these things that at the moment it's Lorenzo Monaco you've used for this campaign into the wilderness video. You broadly describe what that culture has given you. But can you tell me something about how you particularly engage with that work? I mean it's on the cusp of the landscape being introduced into art history. But it's a very made up landscape. It's a kind of an imagined one. And so it's floried and quite surreal. I mean actually at times I thought when I was trying to make this piece it was getting too close to Dali. There's something quite dali-esque about it. Everything feels a bit kind of melted and soft. I guess that's what excites me about it. It just looks very alien and these paintings of the wilderness are like about being in this alienated place, this alienated state. So that was the attraction essentially. And there's that amazing glistering quality that those icons have. And you really zoned in on that. This is whole sequence towards the end, isn't there, where you have a kind of a screen of gold? So that this interested in icons came alongside when I was looking at bus stops. Because icons are very conflicted in terms of imagery, in terms of iconography. There's an injunction against realism, against or any kind of depiction. So they're always kind of slightly fighting with that. One of the excuses that they could find to say it's not a grave in image is that it's not an image at all, it's a window. So you're gazing directly onto heaven, it's a portal, it's a channel of grace. So you're looking into this gold, which is heaven, and it's not a representation, it is heaven. And these saints that you look on are looking back at you. I mean, I just think that's beautiful. I think that's extraordinary. And again, like I said at the beginning of like a way of trying to move around art, or it's like trying to think of it not as a representation, but as a direct gaze into this sort of realm that really excited me. The interesting thing to me is because I love those images too, but I'm an utterly irreligious person, but I somehow am able to be transported. And I guess to me, it seemed like you were trying to work out what that was. And you know, the word spiritual is probably wrong in this instance, but it's something akin to spirituality. Yeah, there's something there. Yeah. And I think it's in the very depiction because it's about light, everything's suffused with this light and this lightness. You know, they're trying to make the light within, within the painting, within the subject. And so I can't see how you could not be taken by them. Do you know what I mean? They're irresistible in that sense, but and then everything gets all meaty and muscular. And that's where it all goes wrong. And there's sort of elements of can we call it CGI or is it sort of a digital animation that you use in that? There's a bit of CGI in there. I mean, this is a thing. It's like you can bring in so many different what would you call them media or techniques. And so there's CGI in there, there's digital effects. There's there's cheesy effects. There's all, you know, as I'm making it, I'm just reaching for everything. It's not like I have a palette prepared before. It's just as I'm making it's like this needs to happen or this will be good if this happens, you know. And there's the voice that sounds like a sort of standard historical kind of interpretation of the image. Yes. But it's put through some sort of AI filter, is it perhaps? It's just, no, it's just a text-to-speech voice. If you look on on TikTok or whatever, they always announce when something's about to happen, there's this device everyone uses where they put on like a little, you know, I went to the shops and this happened and it's always in this text-to-speech voice. So I just needed a way to introduce it, that just seemed a good way to introduce it. But it also seemed in the way that you were talking about Jacob and the Angel earlier and about your form of interpretation being a kind of abstracted interpretation. That was a sort of head-on interpretation, which somehow for me, you sort of seemed inadequate given what else happens in the case if you like. I guess I wanted to say that this was a real thing. I guess I needed to give a context. So the voice is giving it context, but then I don't know if you believe it. I wasn't got much authority, I said, but it just seemed enough. It needed a beginning so I could get to the end, I would say. I sort of preempted your answer to the, which historical artist you turned to the most. Were there any others that you might have mentioned? Yeah, the two artists I would say I tend to the most is Mike Kelly and Lutz Backer. And then beyond that, there's works I like, but I don't know if I'd study them would be the right word, but I'm, I studied Mike Kelly and Lutz Backer. I want to know how they did it. I want to understand and, you know, I like Velasquith, but I don't need to know how he did it. I mean Mike Kelly, I can really understand because he's such a shape-shifting artist. Yeah. And that seems to me to be something that you are keen to do to never be fixed in terms of how you work. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's a way of trying to address class without being, you know, prescriptive that I like about him, but it's always there. It's funny, but there's a tension there. There's an anger even, you know, there's a kind of, or even vengeance. And they say, you know, Lutz Backer, I think there's something, you know, at the first, the peer is playful, but I think there's need for some retribution. Let's talk about contemporary artists then. Okay. Which contemporary artist you most admire? I mean, I make friends with people that I like, so it all seems quite nepotistic. So I was trying to think of people that I'm not friends with first. I find Jesse Darling interesting. I like Jesse Darling. I don't know. They seem to kind of put me in a position where I have to question, or kind of doubt. I like the doubt that they bring about in me. They're inducing me. Martin Sims, like their work. But then over the last two years, there hasn't been a lot of work. So I've turned to music more. And there's people in the music world that I would say I'm very interested in. One of them being Klein, a former called Klein. And then the other week, there's someone I knew already, who is a painter, just by Marseilles, but goes under a pseudonym for music, which is Slaurson Malone. And I saw then the other week at Cafe Otto. That was incredible. I don't know if this is a particularly part of myself that I want to celebrate, but I do get excited about artists who make work that then makes me envious or competitive. You know, it's a bit ugly. And I saw that and I was like, "Oh, right." And turned to the spur you to want to get into this. Exactly. Yeah, it's a sort of spare. When I see something really good, it's definitely. I mean, I can like things in themselves. It's not, it doesn't always have to be better, but there's particular certain works. I guess it's worked that's close to mine. Yeah. And then I feel, I feel spared on Arthur Jaffer. I didn't see there was a new work you just made that has only been shown in America, but it was. I don't know, I kind of felt it from over here. And part of the reason I felt it is because of, I think, the kind of description of it felt physical. It's a very physical video. It's a video of like his black rocks kind of moving, like the sea, like the roiling rocks. And the way people were trying to describe it, you kind of felt, which I found interesting this idea that you could just not see a work, but you can kind of gather all the kind of responses to it and say, "Oh yeah, I can feel that through the matrix." You know what I mean? What do you have pinned to your studio wall? At the moment, I have a picture of a goat herd. I don't put pictures of it. I stopped doing that some time ago. I guess the couldn't when we were in our last place because I was at the kitchen table and all the kids' pictures were up. So I used to do a lot. I used to, when I lived in Wimmel Street, my walls were covered in images. I guess now also I look at work on screen. It's not often I need to see a physical image, but I do have one picture of like a goat herd or off because I wanted this new piece we're talking about to feel very pastoral. So I wanted this sort of pastoral image of a kind of andalusian goat herd. The idea of achieving pastoral goals through digital means. Yeah. In a way, again, it sums up so much of your interests around what can technology do? It seems to me that there's both a celebration and a deep skepticism about technology. Yeah. Almost like the work thrives on that tension. Yes. Yeah. Definitely. In one sense, it's like I just want to succumb because of its inevitability, why resist? These are our new overlords. But in that succumbings, I do find it transformative and experiential. I mean, so I can't ignore that either. I mean, I think this is already come a bit hack-need, but I think it's acute to me because of the, I remember the analogue age. So that sense of being very aware of the change and its total, it's so totalising and enormous. And then watching it kind of how it manifests in my kids, you know, who inhabit this different realm. Yeah, but it's the same with art. It's like what's the phrase I always like? It's I did both attracts and repulsives and I kind of need that dialectic or that contradiction to make work. It's like I want it, I know that it frightens me, it excites me, you know. So I guess I feed off that in some way. The app offers access to more than 60 cultural institutions through a single download. If you download Bloomberg Connects, you'll find digital guides to several museums and galleries where Mark Lecky has exhibited across his career, including the serpentine galleries in London, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and MoMA PS1 in New York, which held the first comprehensive US retrospective of Mark's work in 2016 to 2017. In the guide to MoMA PS1, you can explore the many site-specific works around the building and listen to artists like Lawrence Weiner and Pippa Lodge-Y Rist, recalling their interventions. You can also find details of all the latest exhibitions and events, among them stage, the participatory installation created by Rashi Johnson, a former guest on this podcast. To explore interactive guides to all the partnering institutions, download Bloomberg Connects today. The app is available from the App Store and Google Play and you can keep up to date by following Bloomberg Connects on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Which museum or gallery do you visit most frequently? Recently, it's been the National Gallery and I guess the British Museum. I went to the British Museum to look at these. They've got some really nice icons there. So I was going there quite frequently. Before that, I used to go the Chisan Hale quite a lot. I still like to go there. I always go the ICA. It's almost like a pilgrimage when I'm in the West End. I'll go to the ICA. There's two different experiences in a way that you're describing there, which is looking at contemporary art and then also the kind of information gathering to it. Yeah, it's actually a historic space. Yeah, exactly. The contemporary one is usually more casual, unless there's obviously some one I particularly want to see. But the historical is very deliberate and very particular. I'm just looking for something. I literally walk through the British Museum, not looking at anything else except what I want to get to. So, in a way it relates to the studio wall discussion about so much of your work you've talked about as you mentioned it. And this interview about haunting about the ghostly presences. And I'm interested in what that relationship with the things that you might go and see at the British Museum or the things that you're seeing on your screen is that haunting something which says long gestation or is it more instant than that? Do you grab it and instantly want to involve it or do it percolate in your mind for some time? And probably it's percolate. When I talk about haunting often, I'm talking more like something I want to rid myself of. So like, I'm not haunted by the icons. I'm just, I'm fixated on them. There's two relationships I have with images. One is to be fixated and excited by them. When I say excited, I mean the sense of like potentially overstimulated by them. Not necessarily entirely healthy way. But it's fetishistic, I would say. And then the other one is just to be haunted by something that's just, I just want to be rid of. I'm sick of it. And I find the kind of nostalgia that is both very British, but also a kind of condition of contemporary capitalism. Just that haunts me. It won't let me go. You know, that haunted work is always more, I guess that's my politics in some sense, whereas the other is just very subjective, entirely subjective. I mean, the whole brand thing, the whole capitalism thing, you're not a hectoring kind of political artist in that sense. So you, so for instance, that green screen piece that you did for the serpentine, where you're sort of in bi-beings, fridge fluids, but you know, Samsung, the brand is a very prominent word in that performance, in the audio of that piece. Can you say something about how you investigate brands and what the political stance is if you like on those, because it's not, and this is obviously a very deliberate thing. It's not obvious to somebody coming into the room that they're going to think brands are bad, capitalism is bad, are they? They're engaging with some, with discussion or, you know, because brands, to me, are like their environmental, right? Their wind, their rain, their brands, and they've determined somewhat of my life, you know, but at the same time brands, you know, if you look at like, for your roots, you know, the, which is a brand, you know, that whole title explains it. I mean, I've said this endlessly, but that title to me now means something exploitative, you know, there's something that comes from this exploitative system is then taken and transformed into something more kind of nourishing or potentially even spiritual, right? I read this thing recently, someone said that the 20th century subcultures they were talking about was determined by, by brands, by, by consumption, right? By what you bought, what you wore, determined who you were and made you, you know, it spoke, right? But they were saying that that shift did that's gone, and I think that's true. I don't think brands work in the same way that I grew up with brands that somehow, that there was something you could appropriate or incorporate. So I don't really touch brands anymore. I'm off brand. Hey, you know, part of brands to me is like, is about aspiration. And it's somewhere I think a lot about in the art world, because to me, the art world is aspirational, you know, well, and so there's always this drive that is conditioned, this condition drive to kind of aspire, particularly and through, you know, the working class channels of that aspiration is through, you know, brands and through clothing and I'm just trying to grasp this stuff. So that's why it's never didactic because I don't know, I don't know what these things are. And that's what the work is is me trying to kind of fathom them. Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world? It's got to be, it has to be music just in a very boring way or obvious way. I mean, I remember 12, 13 listening, we had one record or two records at home, one was one of those top of the pop cell piece, remember those compilation little piece with covers and it was like a rock and roll one. And I just remember being very excited by that. And then a little bit later going to the local disco and they would play American sort of post disco R and B in the early 80s and being kind of taken by that, being very excited by that. So it's, yes, it's music really. And then I also went into railing on my own and I went to see the cysteine chapel. I guess this, this thing about being mediated maybe began there because I couldn't see it. I kind of made this pilgrimage and then it was, it was sort of denied by the crowds and everything else and it was just, it was horrible. It was so disappointing. So is this just like like a dream and realize project? To put a big box in the bottom of the cysteine chapel and talk to that, certainly. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, I don't know if I consider the cysteine chapel anymore. It's kind of gone, hasn't it? It's like those, those kind of huge cultural monuments just seem very distant to me now. It affected me deeply, I guess, going and making this journey and then realizing that it couldn't be seen. It couldn't be experienced. Let's do the music question now. Okay. We'll come back to literature but let's do the music thing as you mentioned it. There was a really intriguing thing that you've talked about it a fair number of times but I've been intrigued by this piece of music by Aces and which is called Trip to the Moon which is Trip and then two as in two Roman numerals of the moon. Why is that so significant? It's actually Trip to the Moon, two. I like. There's about six versions of it and there's one particular mix I like because it's basically the blueprint for what I'm trying to do. It's just taking all these very disparate samples and trying to collage them into a state of transportation or it's trying to excite a feeling and it works. It's very effective and there's a sort of magic to it. I'm not alone in thinking it's like a great piece of work. There's a kind of magic that I need to unpack and figure out. I played it to other people and they think it's horribly cheesy but it's not. It's sublime. It's what I was trying to do with the bus stop. Basically you work with this, whatever that word was I used, sorted or toldry or something like a poor piece of video and you transform it into something powerful or meaningful. So I like that's what Trip to the Moon does to me. It's like you're working with cheap offcuts and you make prime steak. That's a terrible metaphor. I don't know. It's got this sort of extraordinary thing that happens in the piece. So you've got the break beats and you've got the speeded up voices and you've got the 303s. And then there's this moment where this extraordinary kind of whity brass comes in and it's again like a portal. Yeah. Well the version I like it uses James Bondy, well it's a moon raker I think it is. So then suddenly that drops in. That's what I like about it. There's a sort of audacity about it and it feels very in the moment. You know it still feels like that when you listen to it's like I'm just going to try this if it works and it does work. and it's like back to your original question about being lost in the paradise of the work, it kind of, I feel that off that record, I feel that moment when he put those samples in and he's kind of like glee or kind of thrill. And of course your video, Dream English Kid, it's a kind of autobiographical piece. Yeah. Because there's the chord from Hard Days Night, which begins it, right? Yeah. And so you use music in a sort of knowing way, as well as a kind of romantic, if you like, way. There's a sort of knowing quality too. Yeah. Well, that's what samples do. I'd have cynic dogs, aren't they? They're kind of like, and they just bring in the entirety of all relations, you know, and the more kind of reductive it is, the more effective that is. But also in that piece, it was going to a joy division gig. Yeah. That was a sort of trigger, but actually finding a bit of footage of that joy division gig, which kind of triggered off the whole work, right? Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Well, it was audio. It was just someone on YouTube that put up the audio of, you know, and I'd bore people to death with that anecdote all the time, you know, because I was like 15. It was a matinee, Eric's tonight club that did it, used to do a matinee performance for under 18s. So we were all kids watching joy division. And I just thought there's no record of it, and then 30, 40 years later, someone had made a recording and materialised on YouTube. And I just yeah, that kind of kicked off the whole idea. Is it all out there? You know, it's every experience I've had. Can I find recordings of that? And then that sort of triggered a whole, it's like Proust's Madeline or whatever, you know, that whole idea of that was the kernel for a whole series of other images, other sounds that you then assembled. And some of them we believe as kind of very directly autobiographical, but then others become almost fictions within the work, right? Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. I don't know. I mean, I was trying to rid myself of some shame, I guess, about certain things. So I was trying to use those kind of nostalgic pleasure spots to smuggle in some, I guess I was too afraid to do it very nakedly, so I could hide behind a lot of those artifacts that I knew people had responded to. But I could still talk about what I wanted to talk, but I could kind of slightly camouflage, yeah, I guess. In terms of the music devices that you use within your work, I'm always intrigued by the fact that you hear auto tune techniques, you know, sort of familiar vocal technology and music in the most recent film in carrying me into the wilderness. There's elements of that plus elements of sort of vocoder with the reminded me of auto-barn by Kroff. So you're using musical devices in a kind of, is it a piece of music? Is it in a way that sits between those two conditions? Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of this has come from, I do a show on NTS. I regularly and monthly show. So this is a sort of online radio stage. Exactly, yeah. It's an online radio station comes out London and LA and I've been doing a regular spot enough for about five years now. So it's been a big influence, you know, every month I have to put together an hour's worth of not just music, but I think it's a sound collage, I guess, that's what I usually do. When I made that piece, the new piece I was thinking of that in terms of I wanted to hear it. It was almost for the show and the reason that I used like auto tune and vocoder and all the rest of it is I, at the beginning of doing NTS, I just played everything from my past. I basically paid a lot of hardcore UK garage jungle wherever all the way back to like post punk that I began with and then I ran out, you know, I ran out of everything that I had. So I started listening to like contemporary music, you know, and having to find it because I didn't know because I was a middle-aged man by then. I didn't know where these, where this music was, but through the help of NTS, I sort of found ways of accessing it. And the music I've ended up liking is, I don't know what you call it, it's kind of like, there's a book, there's a really good book called Neon Scream. He's describing it as kind of vocal, psychodelia. So he's talking about people like young thug, it's kind of stuff coming out of trap, but it's like, it's much weirder. And they're doing a lot of things with their voice and one of the things that you hear is a kind of, where they're trying to sort of say something directly, but through all these distortions. I mean Kanye did it, Kanye does it in the end, the runway, there's a beautiful passage at the end of that where he's kind of like just wailing, but it's all crushed and and all so tuned. You know, it's what, it's how I was just trying to clumsily describe Dreaming his kid, it's like, I want to say this stuff, I want to tell this stuff, but I guess one I'm too embarrassed to do it nakedly and two, I guess I'm suspicious of the idea of any kind of like very direct, authentic way of speaking, you know, that's very immediate. So it has to be mediated in order for me to feel like it's real. I don't want to get into some horrible postmodern paradox, but that's what it is for me. And it's so it's like the more it's slathered in this stuff, the more authentic I feel I can be. Let's talk about literature then, which writers or poets do you return to? Oh, by me. I kind of, I gave up reading. I struggled sleeping, so I have a Kindle and I just buy endless kind of horror books. So that's all I really read at the moment is just horror. This helps you get to sleep. And it actually helps we get to sleep. I know I find it very comforting. It's like watching a horror film is the same. I think it's because it returns me to like my 14, 15 year old self, you know, that's my comfort blanket. And then, you know, because of my nature, I become obsessed with these things and I become very one-tracked. So I find it hard to read anything else. I mean, the honest answer would be, what author do I return to? It would be Stephen King. Right. That would be the very honest answer, but I don't know how much there is to say about that. One of the things that has been documented about your work has been you had this very curious relationship with critical theory. Yes. And in the one sense, you found it kind of seductive, but in the other hand, you rejected it. Yeah. And that seems to have informed the work in various ways. Yeah. But also, as I say, through that sort of rejection of it to a degree, you took on some of the principles or ideas within it and then explored them through different languages effectively. Yeah. Yeah. It's not that I'm against critical theory. It's just, well, for me, it was just very prescriptive, but also, I was, you know, I was intimidated by it. That's why I talk about that because I just found it very intimidating. And sometimes with teaching it, I think it seemed helpful to tell other people that, you know, you found it difficult, you know. So it's just, it's just on that level, but I have an enormous library at home that's like stupid because I stupidly took someone's advice, which was whenever you see a book that you find interest in just buy it. So I did. And now I've just got this overflow of books. And, you know, I'd say 80% of them are critical. You know, I read a lot about music and sound. I read a lot about the internet. I read a lot about gender. So I do pick these things up, but I no longer am able to sit down with a book and read it. I just don't have the time to devote myself to kind of books in that way anymore. With the kids and everything to sit down and just read a kind of difficult book, you know. Let's talk about other media. And I think there's an obvious answer to this question, but what other media influence your work? Yeah, I've kind of said it already. I've nice sort of, yeah, YouTube. There's a thing that I work from a while ago. It's still going now called YouTube Poops, which is very much in the spirit of trip to the moon. It's kind of they just take things that they find on YouTube and then just distort it and make it stupid. TikTok, like I say, I see things on TikTok that I find mind blowing, you know, particularly these strange kind of like potted lectures. Have you seen any of them? Or just the edits, just the creativity of the edits. I mean, I genuinely mean this. It's not, it's not Gordon Brown on Desert Island. Yeah, I'm not trying to be hip. Like I like the new piece I made this carry on into the wilderness, but I just look at TikTok and find that their edits and their creativity is like, I would strip in mine. It's like, it's like, fuck, I don't know, you did that. I don't know you, I don't know you came up with that because I couldn't. So again, this back to this kind of competitive envy thing. So I find that a lot of that on TikTok. Is there a particular discipline in your daily working life that you see as an essential ritual? Tea, I drink massive amount of tea. Did I say this earlier about stimulants? So that was always part of the ritual, cigarettes, the drink or whatever, mostly cigarettes. Now that's switched to tea, tea and biscuits. The classic British ritual. Well, I don't know, I was just thinking of it, you know, George O'Keefe never taught like that about how she gets down to the studio. But then the kids nick the biscuits, so I don't even get out of them. Yeah, if you could live with one work of what would it be? I had this obsession with icons. It has to be, there's one in the British museum I've gone back to, which is the one I was originally going to work with, but it didn't pan out. And it's Saint Jerome in the wilderness, which was one zone by Roskin, by John Roskin. And it's lovely, it's a beautiful little thing. Saint Jerome in kind of. in red robes nursing a lion. We've seen that Instagram account when they talk about medieval animals that are wrong. Yeah, yeah. So it's like one of them. It's a kind of lionish creature. And then this kind of very nice early landscape behind them. And that kind of non-perspectival church or citadel that sits on a hill, which I always like. Yeah, so that's lovely. I'd love to have that. Closowski, there's a particular Pierre Closowski that I find bigiling in all the right ways, which is called reverse sessois. It's just his wife, reverse sitting on the edge of the bed. She's wearing this kind of red blouse, but there's these two ghostly hands hovering around her like a kind of aura. I guess it's the enigma of it that attracts me. Is Closowski belted his brother? Yes. Yeah. And he was a philosopher, but made drawings with collar pencils. And I guess if you first saw them, you'd think they were a bit clunky. They're sort of naturalistic, but wrong. I guess I like him in the same way. I like icons. It's like they're not anti-naturalistic, but they're not interested in kind of realism or naturalism in any form. So I like that. And then Janone Louise Bourge was tree drawings. Have you ever seen them? The drawings she made of trees. She did like a series of trees. I don't think I have seen them. Ah, they're fantastic. They're like these, how would you describe them? They look very edible. Again, they're not naturalistic, but they feel tree-like. They're kind of essential, I guess. There's some kind of essential tree-ness to them. So I'd love to have one of those. And then the last one is a more obvious one. I would still have Jeff Coons' borny. I was interested whether you were going to say Coons in the sort of contemporary artist you most admire, because like so many people have a kind of vexed relationship with Coons. Exactly, yeah. Is your sort of relationship with his work vexed or do you still admire what he's doing now or is it just that work or-- That is just that work. I'm in an away, the mystery's gone. I mean, what I liked about the bunny was it's its flawlessness that is the attraction for me. It's like it's absolutely flawless in that you can't see any hand in it at all or even any machine in it. It's like the perfect commodity. It's like Marx's description of like a table or wooden table. It's like it just appears like as an idea. So I just think it's a beautiful representation of capitalism. And I think he was good at that at that stage. And then I'm not-- I'm not interested in him now. But I think as an expression of late 20th century capitalism, the bunny to me is iconic. It is an icon quite literally. So I'd have it. I definitely have that. And lastly, what's art for? You know, the reason I make art is-- I mean, it's the best tool I have for like being able to like grasp things or understand things. I wouldn't say it's therapeutic, but it allows me to approach things in a way that is much more in the round. I guess this is in terms of what we've told about, you know, I've gone from a path of from Peter Housen to like Klazowski or 14th century iconography. And art has allowed me that enrichment. There's a sort of nostism that I think excites me about art. Yeah, it's not stick, I would say. I think nosticism outside of art is bad. But within art, it's a good path. It's a productive path. And it's a shared path, you know. [MUSIC PLAYING] Mark, thank you very much. All right, good. Thank you very much. [MUSIC PLAYING] Mark Leckie is at the Cabinet Gallery in London until the 30th of April. And as I mentioned, you can find all his latest works, as well as previous pieces like "Fear Richie" made me hardcore and dream English kid on Mark's YouTube channel. [MUSIC PLAYING] And that's it for this episode. Please subscribe to a brush with wherever you're listening and do give us a rating or review on Apple podcasts. And do also subscribe to our other podcasts, The Week in Art, a deep dive into the latest big art world stories, the top shows, and the key issues every Friday. We're on Twitter, @tanaudio, and on Facebook, and Instagram, of course. Production, editing, and sound design on a brush with are by David Klaak. And the producers of the art newspaper podcasts are Julien Mahalska, Amy Dawson, and Henrietta Benton. Thanks also to Daniela Hathaway. And a big thank you to Mark Lecky. See you next week. Bye for now. [MUSIC PLAYING] A brush with is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects. Download Bloomberg Connects today and discover cultural institutions on demand.