The installation evolved out of Leckey’s earlier artwork ‘Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD’ (2015) and became a way for him to create a sort of memoir. He recreated his own history as well as the social history by using the phases that the bridge had been through: from being a “white heat of technology” when it was built in 1968, to a “dystopian neglected ruin for the threat of violence and dread” in the 1970s, to a “post-apocalyptic landscape” in the 1980s, to finally being “repainted and rebranded as part of New Labour’s program of taking Britain back to the swinging sixties” in the 1990s.

“In that way it’s some kind of allegory of the internet as this vast repository of history that can be called up at any time.” The bridge reflects this notion of being a sort of archive and is symbolic of the “weird between-state” that we find ourselves in: “Time is passing over, but down here it’s sub-temporal, it’s below time – time has stopped down here.”

Mark Leckey (b. 1964) is a British artist, whose artistic practice spans from installations, prints and sculptures to video, performance and sound works. Since coming to prominence in the late 1990s, Leckey’s art has addressed the radical effect of technology on popular culture, such as the transition from analogue to digital culture. He first shot to fame with the video work ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’ (1999), which is a celebration of British dance culture. Leckey was later awarded the Turner Prize for ‘Industrial Light and Magic’ (2008). His works and performances have been exhibited internationally at prominent institutions including Haus der Kunst in Munich, MoMA PS1 and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate and the Serpentine Gallery in London, as well as Centre Pompidou in Paris. He lives and works in London.

Mark Leckey was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in May 2017 at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) in connection with his installation ‘He Thrusts his Fists against the Posts but Still Insists he Sees the Ghosts’, which can be experienced in the X-room venue from May 4 – September 3, 2017. In the installation, Leckey has recreated a distinctive place from his own childhood: the ramps underneath the M53 motorway bridge in Ellesmere Port, where he and his friends hung out in the early 1970s. The installation also includes a new audio work, which represents a continuation of a performance that Leckey staged in connection with his most recent exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York, where the bridge was constructed for the first time. For more see: http://www.smk.dk/en/visit-the-museum/exhibitions/mark-leckey/

Camera: Klaus Elmer
Edited by: Klaus Elmer
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2017

Supported by Nordea-fonden