desiderata (in media res)

The rooms of the Madre museum contain a string of seductive and pointed transfigurations in works, by British artist Mark Leckey, that are faultlessly topical comments on how objects foster desire via the way they are represented.

The itinerant retrospective exhibition on Mark Leckey, born in Birkenhead (UK) in 1964 and 2008 Turner Prize winner, has arrived at the Madre museum in Naples.

With changing titles and a slightly different selection of works each time, it has already visited WIELS (Brussels) and the Haus der Kunst (Munich).

The Neapolitan institution’s agenda features extensive solo exhibitions on mid-career artists (including, previously, Giulia Piscitelli, Mario Garcia Torres, Francis Alÿs and Walid Raad). The Mark Leckey exhibition once again investigates the status of the artwork and the portrayal of reality explored by the museum in the weighty Sturtevant exhibition which closed in September 2015, and its Italian version is of particular significance.

Mark Leckey, DESIDERATA (in media res), exhibition view. Courtesy Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, Napoli Photo © Amedeo Benestante

Ever since the work that brought Leckey international fame, his Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore video (1999), he has viewed Italy primarily as a pop icon. That work celebrates the power of Italian fashion and its brands to shape and, most importantly, provide an ideal wardrobe to the shared imagery of the British dance culture. Elena Filipovic (co-curator of the exhibition with Andrea Viliani) even tells the press conference the story of a young Leckey whose aspirations for Italianness took the form of a passion for frozen pizza. The curator commented, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that the exhibition’s arrival in Naples and offering the artist a chance to eat real pizza is a logical extension of his work and his relentless comparison of the truth and its surrogates.

The rooms of the Madre museum contain a string of seductive and pointed transfigurations in works (video installations, sculptures, posters…) that are faultlessly topical comments on how objects foster desire via the way they are represented.

The exhibition prologue is dedicated to a recurring protagonist of Leckey’s works, the black and white cartoon cat Felix, present here in the form of a balloon sculpture (Inflatable Felix, 2013).

The artist says that a statue of this character was the first image broadcast by US TV. Felix, a forerunner of the animal given human-like features to add to its appeal, is an avatar of the electronic image and professional entertainer. It is a cat become famous in image-form. Here, it again takes shape with a – huge – body made of air forced into a museum room just as it was pushed into the first TV boxes. Felix is also the protagonist of Leckey’s performances, educated, absurd and spectacular talks during which the artist illustrates a digital economy concept known as the “long tail theory”.

Just like the Internet consumer system, the cat has a sinuous tail and the inflatable Felix is set beside a digital video showing a tail with changing metal reflections (Mercury Tail, 2015). The attractively rounded and stylised cartoon drawing takes on a cold, optical and slightly hypnotic sensuality. This harsh coexistence of seduction and iciness returns mainly in the first rooms of the exhibition where different scenarios interpret the mechanics that drive us to desire, to want to be there and to be inexplicably attracted to and physically bowed by something that looks perfectly complete within itself, inaccessible and for this reason infinitely desirable.

Mark Leckey, Pearl Vision, 2012 — Pearl Vision, 2012, video HD, collour, sound, 3’:06’’, projected on back projection machine. Courtesy Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, Napoli Courtesy the artist; Cabinet, London; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin-Köln

The Pearl Vision video (2012) is named after the Vision drum range by Pearl, the percussion instrument manufacturer. It is shown inside a structure that makes the back projection clearly visible, immediately clarifying that he intends to reveal the mechanisms that produce and show desire. The protagonist is a snare drum played by the artist in accompaniment to a persuasive and distorted siren’s call. Leckey, first dressed and then naked, holds a drum between his legs, beating it rhythmically with rounded drumsticks; everything in this video alludes fairly shamelessly to sex.

In the next room, the GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction installation (2010) centres on a black Samsung fridge. Today’s version of Kubrik’s monolith or Frederick II’s sarcophagus, the electrical appliance sits in the centre of a green-screen stage. It is an actor to whom Leckey lends his voice, distorted, in a video in which the fridge takes the liberty of spouting its thoughts on its mechanical functioning and dreams. Next comes another shiny and desirable object, Jeff Koons’ Rabbit sculpture. In the Made in ‘Eaven film, the blow-up rabbit (like Inflatable Felix) made by Koons out of untarnished stainless steel (aseptic like the snare drum in Pearl Vision) seems to have been placed in Leckey’s studio and duly filmed by a constantly moving video camera. The phantasmatic image is actually entirely digital; the scene never took place and the Koons sculpture has always and only been in art market heaven.

Mark Leckey, Circa ‘87, 2013, stampa offset. — Mark Leckey, Circa ‘87, 2013, offset print. Courtesy Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, Napoli Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin-Köln

At this point of the exhibition, visitors have followed a triptych of objects of desire: sex, the technological object and the work of art – all shown by Leckey to be highly effective ploys.

The exhibition route then gives way to the now customary Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore and ends with vaguely landscape-like rooms featuring wood, rubber and cardboard casts of light pylons, overpasses and other suburban objects.

These spaces are dominated by the Sound System installation (2011–2012), which returns the focus to the centrality of music and Leckey’s operational model of the DJ set, and are illuminated by orange motorway lights.

The exhibition ends at sunset, in an affected melancholy that serves to heighten the compelling desire to dance, the beauty of the night make-up and the compact black of advert backdrops, from which floating forms awaiting “Next Level Perfection” (as written on the label of the provocative Pearl drum) might emerge.

desiderata (in media res)

The rooms of the Madre museum contain a string of seductive and pointed transfigurations in works, by British artist Mark Leckey, that are faultlessly topical comments on how objects foster desire via the way they are represented.

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