Mark Leckey came to visit the students at UEL. I wrote these words to introduce him:

Keeping it real… Living in an age when identity and relations feel shaped by the crisp certainty of algorithmic synthesis, it is fortifying to know there are artists who are prepared to navigate this space with a generosity of spirt and the conviction of a trance ritual encounter. Mark Leckey’s art seems to come from an understanding that to understand we must entertain the idea that some things are necessarily unknowable. That he does this by stepping into the esoteric void without the distantiating* anthropocentric devices of artists, such as for example, insert name of cynical contemporary artist here, results in a genuinely moving kind of art that reconciles thought and feeling. I make no apology for the awkwardness of my language here – the specificity of encountering the feeling of the really real requires us to avoid the pre-given habits of saturday night saturated euphoria tv awesomeness. Outside of seeing the paintings of Pirosmani in Tbilisi, I struggle to think of another exhibition that bypassed interpretation and held me in a febrile state of longing so completely as Mark Leckey’s Cabinet Gallery installation, To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) (first shown as part of his Tate emerging retrospectre).

 Its worth quoting Eddie frankel’s review here,

 “Throughout this, Leckey is drawing links between a spiritual past and a grotty, collapsing present. He treats the bus stop and the underpass as places of holy communion. It’s hard, intense, beautiful and so good it almost makes you want to start huffing brake fluid.” 

Mark’s generosity of spirit was clear the first time I heard him speak, choosing the work of three other little known artists to discuss the way in which film can create a visceral embodied experience and counter act the curious sense of our hands withering that working in digital media can induce. His recent two night curated music event at Cafe Otto was another actual occasion and restored my faith in art and music as an encounter inside the event of the unknowable knowledge of the entity that speaks back. Mark was keen that non of the acts were overlooked. From this I understood that developing our individual practice need not come at the expense of others and in fact trusting the intra-relational dynamic of art as music might be the key to navigating the world with integrity and improvised pragmatism. Please let’s put our hands together for Mark Leckey.

*term borrowed from Fred Moten in Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era

 Mark Leckey,  O’ MAGIC POWER OF BLEAKNESS