Mark Leckey, Tate Modern

Mark Leckey's exhibition arrived right in time for me as I had just started to get interested in video art and short films when it opened in the Tate. I had been looking at a few by a friend who I studied on foundation with and I was writing about Bill Viola in my dissertation. I don't know much about video art but I know a little about what I like. The video art I have seen an enjoyed so far have been quiet and drawn out, spacious with delicately composed soundtracks of ambient noise. I like a subtle narrative that allows you to just observe the surroundings in shot. I enjoy artful framing and composition and a somewhat eerie atmosphere. I have enjoyed works that explore rundown, industrial type environments, snapshots of the fishing industry and travel footage. I have to admit some video art escapes me and I am not quite sure how the artist intended me to react or what the overriding theme was, but I don't dismiss these works, I can see the complex and nuanced nature of creating video art and I respect the ability to bring together the many different art forms into a unity of the senses. The works that have resonated with me tend not to be focussed too much on people and their interactions, but more to do with a space. I am a big fan of cinema and a lot of skills I've observed in use in arthouse cinema and some more mainstream artfully directed films crop up in video art and that is a language I can understand and be more critical on.

Mark Leckey's exhibit consisted of three sections, the first being a row of dot matrix screens on the right of the room, a double set of projections on the back wall, and a full scale recreation of a motorway underpass with a portion of it projected on at times on the left of the room. The exhibit rotates the videos on show between these three areas which draws the audience around the room and creates movement, unlike most video work viewings I've seen in which the audience is very much stationary.

The double projection wall seemed to be the main focus of the exhibition, with the most amount of footage shown there: two of Leckey's seminal works: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore 1999 and Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD 2015. I really enjoyed these short films, the highlights for me in Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore included the footage of the young woman who looked quite anxious in a nightclub, the strange 3D rendered manipulation of some old footage of a Joy Division gig that Leckey attended as a youngster and the intense sound and footage of a man under the covers in a depressing little bedroom, which gave the impression that he was suffering quite a nasty comedown after a night of drug-bashing, 90's rave style. The highlights of Dream English Kid included the footage of pylons seen from a car (pylons are an unexplainable love of mine), the animated children's drawings that looked just like some I did as a child and the computer graphic replica's of the bridge underpass.

When these two films finished the son et lumière (sound and light) experience begins, an immersive installation called Under Under In 2019 that uses the dot matrix screens and the projection under the bridge together, alternating, to tell a story inspired by a spiritual experience Leckey had as a child under the M53 motorway flyover. The projection on the bridge is a 19th-century illusionist technique called Pepper’s Ghost that picks the figures out and plots them in the space with gaps between them, instead of a regular rectangular projection. The children in the film are all filming each other on their phones, and at times you can see the footage they are filming of each other on the dot matrix screens. The multiple view points, visual effects and surround sound make for an exciting experience that feels a lot more immersive than most film screenings.

The films were inspiring and represented a lot of the themes of short films and video art I like and made me want to go out and start filming and editing together found footage. It also came as part of a chain of contemporary art exhibits I went to around the same time that made me start to question why I was focussing on something as traditional and old-media as painting when technology like this represents the present day more appropriately. I was worried that as an artist I should be pushing towards the Avant-Garde and making unique work and that perhaps painting and collage was less relevant to people my age and the technological capabilities of today. I spoke about these thoughts to Dan Coombs and a few other people and was provided some interesting viewpoints and counter-arguments. One thing that stuck with me was Dan saying that he felt that Leckey's exhibit in particular was bordering on becoming theatre as opposed to fine art. What the distinction is there, and the relevance of that is something I'm still pondering.