Mark Leckey
Mark Leckey’s Londonatella was last year’s one and only dominator of bastard pop video, trespassing a cover of techno novelty act Altern 8 under the historical footlights of the English capital’s crumbling, perilous backstreets. Using found movie footage and overlays, Leckey resurrected an eighteenth century London ruled by upper-class gangs such as the cane-carrying Mohocks, who regularly demolished taverns and slit the noses of their victims. Big Box Statue Action was a furious bonhomie in January. Men, women, children, provincials and foreigners of all parties gathered around Leckey’s sound-system at Tate & Egg Live. In front of Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill, he blasted Dadaist poetry. The sculpture of the rich quarter was forced to stand up, bareheaded, amidst mobs of loafers, dandies, and casuals, crying, ‘Life! Life! They wanted to break lines to give Epstein fresh blood. Some whispered accusations of narcissism, others of the macabre nature of his art. Undaunted by the fetch-and-carry classes, Leckey continues to press his repertoire of sartorial quirks to the sublime service of William Blake, John Martin, Walter Pater, Mark E Smith and Beau Brummel’s Anatomy of Dandyism. For the future, he confesses a large solo excursion at the Migros Museum in Zurich.
Neil Mulholland
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The Apostle of Terror: Mark Leckey as Saint-Just
Neil Mulholland: You are known to some as ‘The Angel of Death’, some whisper accusations of narcissism, others of your macabre nature. Are these rumours true?
Mark Leckey: Let me say to those who seek to judge me that I can’t judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time
that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in. I can’t dislike you, but I will say this to you: you haven’t got long before you are all going to kill yourselves, because you are all crazy. And you can project it back at me . . . but I am only what lives inside each and everyone of you. . . . I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.
NM: To which service are your sartorial quirks being pressed?
ML: Fashion is about ugliness- since, were we ever to encounter true beauty it
would decisivley defeat the desire to consume ever new things.
NM: What are the novelties and pleasures of your freedom lately?
ML: I enjoy the very traditional and the very modern, I find pleasure in both
the left and the right, the nationalistic and antinationalistic, the human and
inhuman, I am for the maximum of good as well as for the maximum of Evil.
NM: Are you truly as incorruptible as your reputation suggests?
ML: I haven’t got any guilt about anything because I have never been able to
see any wrong. . . I have always said: Do what your love tells you, and I do
what my love tells me . . . Is it my fault that your children do what they do?
What about your children? You say there are just a few? There are many, many
more, coming in the same direction. They are running in the streets-and they
are coming right at you!
NM: What plans for the future might you confess?
ML: It is only the glory of the great altar of perfection in the colossal cathedral
of eternity I seek.
