Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel

Haus Der Kunst, Kunsthalle Basel

Sanchez called Leckey a hack ( in the sense of what "artist John Kelsey discussed"), taking issue with Leckey's lecture's magisterial administration of an audience swooning: hypnotic affection that would one day be called a Ted Talk or manipulating an audience. Thing was Leckey had always been trading in affects. It was like his thing. Taking cue from that other realm that predicated itself upon it, commerce, entertainment, advertising that was constructing the world and the commodities, objects, films, and talismans that produce it, and, Leckey, attempting to build the work from it. Fiorrici Made Me Hardcore - Leckey's seminal origin - is only and entirely affect, a semblance of surface run like warm oil over your grey orbital, and in the 15 years since a practice built of discerning this surface force, kin Sturtevant and Trisha Donnelly among others, giving birth to today's youthful irrevant abuse of it seen in the New Museum's Surround Audience and even badly by all those anonymous materialists speculated upon. What, at the moment, separates Leckey from his progeny's use of affect is attention to it, amassing at the very least an index of it, and interest examined, and not necessarily just exploiting it.


See too : Venice v Triennial , Mark Leckey at Wiels, Trisha Donnelly at Air de Paris, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse, Sturtevant at Moma, &Thaddeus Ropac 

Group Show at le-1

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Graw surmised returns of sculpture’s figure as inalienable from its subject as commodity, particularly Harrison/Genzken's:

THESE SURROGATES thus reveal the embattled subjectivity at the heart of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have famously called the "new spirit of capitalism," which demands the exploitation not only of labor but of personality, emotions, social relations, and other noneconomic aspects of our individual lives. Since this new regime works on and within subjectivity itself, even absorbing it into capital's own flows, Harrison's and Genzken's recent sculptures could be seen as delivering what is currently most in demand: subjectivity as a product. It is hard to decide, in fact, whether these works merely satisfy the current desire for staged subjectivity, or whether they exaggerate it in order to point to its problems.

4 years later human invasiveness find artists still struggling to refoot it in view, depicting it not in the commodified space of the real but in virtual space of video/painting where desire is the limit to treat it like a grotesque punching bag, finding glee in its horror.

See too : Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers

Mark Leckey at Wiels

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A youth couched in music videos, it was a pleasure, and Leckey understood the potential of its seduction.  If Fiorucci experimented with the pop address as upload into the viewer, the hypnosis of spectation, then “Shades of Destructors” 5 years later was an experiment of what could be done once inside, and everything since about what it means to place an object inside another’s head and the possibility of that inside an object’s.  The states of reality, virtual, image, filmic, object find their superposition between phase shifts, and Leckey moves us between all with a deftness. If Sturtevant’s interest in film/video was its capability for dissociative fugues and blackouts, Leckey’s interest is the possibility of a plasmaticness and production within it, a velvet couch where Leckey is the dentist administering gases of mildly psychoactive potential.

See too : Pipilotti Rist at Hauser & Wirth

Mark Leckey at Gavin Brown



Leckey has always been a direct artist, his dramatically unmysterious expunging of the work - and lectures as work often - frequently makes the objects stranger, their power more communicable, aren’t simply veiled surrealist abstraction; and instead great pains to make sure you get it - I mean read the PR- opposing Baghramian’s Art-turned-subject-monster DnD beholder, instead the pop psychologist flair for a sort of Trisha Donnelly cum Darren Bader cybernetic cultural-academic bent. It’s definitely a way out for a lot of cornered art, but few able the flat finesse of Leckey. The dry exposition of the original proposal 4 a show video stunning relief of so much overwrought hand wrung art, too badly not seen here.