All words are dead metaphors Lugone
I am the child of a Liverpudlian, and one wall of my childhood bedroom was an image of the Kop my art teacher dad had assembled from multiple copies of a single colour-supplement double page spread. So, when Paul Farley asks Mark Leckey about the sense of nostalgia for the city they had both moved from I get an intuitive intensity of feeling. Now as an adult artist having chosen to immerse myself in non-representational and affect theory as a way of explaining how I feel to myself, I’m convinced that nostalgia is intellectual cognitions way of ringfencing our ability to understand the world through felt intensities. It’s a banishment to the side-lines of culture – a culture, which has grown from aesthetic understanding into the parameters of a monopoly board we call organisation. Coincidence is the lost twin of nostalgia and I’m not certain if it’s a coincidence that I now feel Liverpool (Jung’s Pool of Life) is truly the aesthetic ontology I believe in or if my childhood version of the city of the Beatles, The Kop (via the Kop Choir LP), Shankly and the Mersey Sound is now just the basis of my specific confirmation bias. Is it a coincidence that Liverpool feels to me to be such an aesthetic culture? If my felt intensities are that which is outside cognition’s remit but within real-life then perhaps Liverpool is their metaphorical home.
Mark Leckey’s assemblage form of film making has a material vitality, which allows all sorts of material to entangle on a plane of immanence. I mean images, feelings and concepts all interweave into something immediate rather than something to be read at a distance. This way images are not sign-posts and we are easily reacquainted with the textures of our collective memories. I read that Mark Leckey looks for a figure to occupy the space of the films he makes and in Dream English Kid there is a dark figure with its back to the camera overlooking the city. This figure intensifies our own feelings of confusion about the sense of longing the film evokes in us. My favourite part of my dad’s art lessons was the slide lectures in the dark room with raked seating, which was like no other place in the school. Looking at a screen like this is instantly nostalgic and one time we looked at Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. This wanderer, the teacher tells, us is looking down upon the fog of twentieth century progress and the critical distance this man embodies is what fills us with such shameful nostalgia for a time when we understood through aesthetic exuberance.
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler
I once heard Mark Lecky describe how he felt his arms were withering due to his practice being almost solely about digital editing. To embody (not illustrate) his point he showed some films by emerging artists he felt used a more visceral approach to film making than himself, which I thought was a very generous and unself-trumpet blowing act. In the light of these films his own project, which I seem to remember involved a black monolithic fridge freezer seemed more clinical. But even that particular piece, GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction, 2010 still feels pioneering in the way it explores a sense of non-human consciousness pre-empting the ideas around inorganic consciousness, found in Steven Shaviro’s Discognition, for example. This film enters into a dialogue with the habitual idea of cognition as generated by the human brain,
As we create increasingly smarter objects, Mark Leckey predicts a world in which things become sentient, start communicating, and alter our environment into new digital ecosystems.
The fridge freezer, shot against a green screen has an inner monologue about the nature of being and is heard intoning “becoming becoming becoming…”
Affect theory can feel like a hinterland because the point about felt-understanding is easily destroyed by the academic form. In interviews Leckey seems to describe himself as non-academic but his methodology also seems to place him at the forefront of cutting-edge academic discourse, namely how do we encounter non-human consciousness and find a way out of the maze of anthropocentric conceptualism? These things matter because they maintain a certain pre-ordained form of organisation. Admittedly there is a problem here for academics who build careers out of using a linguistic framework to retell a borrowed truth. Elisabeth Grosz’s The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism explores meaning as immanence in a flat or aesthetic ontology,
the world pre-exists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike.
Perhaps using his practice, rather than writing, to inhabit this flat or non-hierarchical space is what Leckey means by being non-academic. Increasingly, via non-representational theory and affect studies, academia is becoming interested in other ways of knowing or felt knowledge. (My own doctoral supervisor prof Tony D Sampson has been amazingly encouraging of art practice as a means of collaboratively speculating about non-representational understanding.) For me Leckey is one of a few high-profile artists who have maintained a simple position that art, rather than having to report back to the human command module for validation, is actually a way of knowing. I had a similar experience to this when I encountered Patrick Keiller’sThe Robinson Institute installation in the Tate Britain. Essentially Keiler is enthusiastic about the specificities of an inorganic territorialisation but the exhibition, far from being dry and academic had a feeling of happening upon a culture I could not entirely fathom but took pleasure from becoming acquainted with, whilst my understanding of the then emerging economic crisis was expanded. Leckey’s films have this internal grammar as well. I mean they are not necessarily read but understood via total engagement. Through assemblage and a tapestry of layered digital materiality an intensity of immanence emerges.
And so, it was with a heightened sense of anticipation I took myself to experience, O Magic Power of Bleakness. This feeling of anticipation is my embodied knowledge aforethought that I will encounter something nourishing. And what this nourishment is exactly cannot be reduced to a check list of my favourite things, i.e. nonhuman consciousness, mystery, colour, nostalgia, modernity … it just breaks down as soon as I try and make a list. Fiction is, how more people are beginning to intuit a means of exploring something outside of and within the present (modern) way of doing things. The problem with OMPOB, for me was that the fiction’sedges were defined the institutional perimeter (Keiller, perhaps anticipated this flaw by calling his installation an institution.) This ring-fencing is of course, almost impossible to prevent, such is the responsibility the institution places upon itself to chaperone the visitors who have all at some point bought a lottery ticket, if even only in their minds. I was able to maintain the magic of the fiction through suspended disbelief, but this is not as nourishing. Leckey’s work already uses fiction. His work understands that making is always making fiction – making something from all kinds of detritus and images like the bower of the Amazonian Stage-maker bird. The adage “art is a lie that tells the truth” is not quite right because it is an anthropocentric idea of a lie – perhaps anaesthetic truth that tells a truth then.Perhaps what I struggled with was how the main component of the OMPOB is very much an overtly constructed fiction rather than exuberant making, which does away with the need to call it fiction.
In earlier interviews for the Tate magazine I felt Leckey had really pushed the sense that art gives us an access to other modes of being and now that the show was installed, he was presented as talking about himself as having been delusional. The work now had a wanderer’s critical distance from that delusional foggy state. I am not saying hey lets all be deluded, only that delusion can be framed as an event viewed from the life-guards chair of conceptual reason. There is a school of thought that through creating we navigate the order and chaos or light and dark of the Apollonianslash Dionysian and whilst this does map the surface ultimately it is a post-rationalised guide to the high seas beyond the known. Prior to an all too human narrative is the non-human smooth space or the plane of immanence where consciousness is ubiquitous and human cognition is a porthole glimpse onto this cosmos of actual meaning under the waves. Deleuze’s song book is always close at hand but he learnt the tunes from A N Whitehead. Through exploring Whitehead’s rejection of his own attempts to impose a paradigm of logic onto our complete sense of the cosmos (principia Mathematica) I now prefer to place feeling or aesthetic at the heart of becoming. This is what I feel when I watch Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore for instance, but I also think it’s what drove the academic, Phaedrus, insane in Zen and the Art of Motor Cyclemaintenance. Phaedrus’ Quality is the neutral or felt intensity prior to when intellectual or conceptual frameworks kick in. Of course, we now so fully embody these ordered frameworks that their presence feels fundamental to being. According to Dogon Egg theory, modern humans embody the cognitive machine model that defines the human-command-module. Art in all its forms and most specifically fiction allows us to speculate about embodying a felt or aesthetic mode of being, which is not so much a rejection of conceptual order rather than a re-placing of concepts into a less prominent role of useful guide and not auto-pilot. Within a vast and deeply established institution the lightness of touch required to reduce the influence of the anthropocentric voice of reason becomes harder to access and perhaps this shaped the way O Magic Power of Bleakness was received and perhaps, therefore, how it was created. Backwards causality at work.
In a recent, nutritiously open, interview about William Blake with Tate Etc, Mark Leckey is asked about the privileging of the imagination over the rational and he gently avoids a direct answer, perhaps sensing that this is a false choice – in a smooth or pre-personal space, reason is not banished but once simply entwined with all other modes of being, rather than directing action from the top of the pyramid. I feel that what Leckey then describes as appealing to him about Blake gets to the heart of the matter and returns us to his earlier suggestion that his hands were withering due to digital removal from events,
I want that same kind of bodily exuberance that Blake brought. There’s also sensation, there’s touch – all these things are included in art, but sometimes they can be abstracted away, academically, intellectually whatever.
Leckey could be seen as addressing the Descartian error (Damasio 2006) of seeing emotions as an add on to the primary mode of reason. Emotions in their uncommunicated state are feelings or affective registers. Through an emancipated connection with art we can arrive at an embodied ontology with feeling as central to being. What Simon O’Sullivan describes as,
an autopoiesis of affects whose proliferating excess escape capitalized structures of subjectivity and social relations, most importantly the discursive sign and its linear relations reducing affects to neutral referents, and to the pre-given banalities which “everyone knows”
Could this be moreairy fairy, touchy feely? (see how easily reason can weaponise words). The installation, Under Under in explores or exorcizes Leckey’s childhood encounter witha pixie under a motorway bridge in East Rake.His poem Exorcism of the bridge @ Eastham Rake contains the same sense of bodily exuberance Leckey finds in Blake and I feel deserved to be more prominent in the Tate exhibition. That it wasn’t, for me, derives from the hardening of categories that occludes capacities and makes it hard to find the practice as a tapestry of all creativemateriality. Oppression of capacities is where we find fascism, I believe Foucault suggests in his introduction to Anti Oedipus,
not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilise and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads, and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
Now to suggest that the Tate is a fascist institution would be an empty post-card punk statement, but we still need to feel a sense of how an institution shapes our collective speculative experience. The institution can’t help pointing at things and in the case of the placement of Under Under in I felt the audience were distracted away from an encounter with the otherness towards a reading of an idea of otherness. To be fair it is a very subtle shift but I can’t help but feel that the institution has possibly ushered Leckey into a position of critical distance, from where he describes the encounter with a pixie as a “bizarre delusion”.
In truth fact is always aesthetic and Leckey’s art has always embodied this experiential quality in a practice that assembles and entangles voices, textures, sounds, images and forms into a tapestry of immanence. The key to understanding in this form is what Claire Colebrook calls reversed Platonianism i.e. it’s not that this world is a flawed version of transcendence, but that transcendence is projected from a radical empiricism or an exuberant bodily engagement with the specifics of actual occasions. Sprites in this sense are not other worldly (mondly) but other modely. Blake, after all, was all about encouraging humans to remove the self-imposed limits on their modes of being, limits which ultimately occlude empathy. Like Blake, Leckey takes us into the grime and the texture of the specific actual occasion and here we find meaning in a state of just about to happen-iness. All things are always events rather than the tidy-up, put-awayable Lego-block universe of Carlo Rovelli via Brian Cox.
In an essay for Leckey’srecent Tate exhibition publication Catherine Wood usefully describes how he,
Digs down under the enlightenment confidence in notions of human progress, excavating that space that hypermodernity believes it has transcended, to connect to the buried ghosts, faeries and beliefs that lurk there with his, and Tate Britain’s, ancestors.
As a Tate curator, Wood is also making clear the relationship Leckey has with the institution. As a Turner Prize winner this is a given and is something he directly explored in Bigboxstatueaction’s dialogue with Jacob Epstein’s Jacob and the Angel. But I am aware of my own bias and I confess I remain a total fan of Leckey’s O Magic Power of Bleakness. I want to find the excess registers within its materiality or the intensities of its radical empiricism. My visit was part of a personal decision, having finished my doctorate in fine art, to return to an old rather habit of the artist’s date, which involves visiting something nutritious without feeling any encumberment from anecessity to make conceptual sense of things. On entering I was a little underwhelmed by what felt like a sparse exhibition. It seemed to be revealed all at once with the double projection of Dream English Kid under a well-made reconstruction of the East Rake motorway bridge but I had a strong sense that staying in the space would allow the experience to emerge. I’m not sure how much the sense of art as a mode of knowing was helped by housing two earlier films (Fioruccimade me Hardcore and Dream English Kid) in the Under Under in installation space. Perhaps they needed to be re-entangled into the son et lumière experience by being further dismantled? I’ve no complaints because I enjoyed seeing them but they didn’t feel as much part of a layered tapestry of discovery as the son et lumière analogy suggests. Their presence on the far wall seemed to guide the audience into the mode of watching a screen in a set position. There were glimmers of the collective movement but the piece de resistance of the holographic,Pepper’s Ghost stylehoody apparitions within the bridge’s niche was a foot-note whilst I was there. Perhaps this peripheral quality of the ghostly projections really works as a means of encouraging just that – a more peripheral vision.
The concrete structure itself did indeed speak of the problems inherent in the edifying Platonian transcendence that Modernism pursued. The strongest association I had was with Le Corbusier’s Philip’s pavilion for the 1958 world fair – a parabolic concrete cave made in collaboration with Xenakis and a collective of master-builders who handmade each section by hand pouring concrete into wooden moulds. Within this project’s parabolic fluid form, Le Corbusier interwove sound, materiality and moving image to make a genuinely primordial experience that hints at a way to re-volve out of the deadends of modernism’s conceptual formalism and grow into,
‘a new civilisation’ inhabiting an earth that is ‘accessible, productive, and maternal.
In a similar way to Leckey, Corbusier chose not to include the poem containing these lines in the final multi-media experience. Corbusier probably did this in order to retain the pavilion’s ambiguous or non-institutional qualities. Leckey’s poem, though, is less didactic and could have helped flatten some of the institutional constructions leaving more rubble from which to create an experience of encountered understanding,
Out! Fallen Colossus of Post War
Consensus, down on your hands and
Knees struck with Paralysis!
Burst Out! Ya fuckin’ blurt! Antwacky,
Plazzy scouse, Givin’ it down the
Banks. I’ll fuckin’ burst ya! (yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah.) Burst out!
Text by Mikey Georgeson
Photos by Harry Pye
Copyright 2020 Mikey Georgeson
