Mark Leckey is considering one of the big turning points in his life. A self-confessed “scally” and teenage troublemaker around Liverpool’s Wirral, he had the opportunity to join his mates on a lads’ holiday to Benidorm. Instead, he went Interrailing, alone, to see the Sistine Chapel in Rome. “I was really obsessed with Italy,” says the now London-based artist. “That’s when I first really got into Giotto and Piero Della Francesca and those true pre-Raphaelite sort of artists.” Leckey likes to get obsessive about things, and his Italian period was no different. “To the extent I would get my mum to buy me Findus pizzas and cannellonis and that would be the only thing I would eat!”
The trip was a disaster. The Sistine Chapel was crowded and annoying, travelling solo was a chore and the local cuisine was no match for the Findus factory. “I tried lasagne and found it repulsive,” he laughs. “I was 19 and just totally unprepared for a European tour.” His mates, on the other hand, had a great time in Benidorm.
Nonetheless, the trip stands out for Leckey as the moment he broke with his past. Or, to put it another way, from the future mapped out for him. Up until this point, Leckey’s prospects hadn’t looked great. He was 19 years old and had already been up in court three times (“Twice for things I didn’t do, but I got done for all three”). “I couldn’t see another future,” he says. “I thought I had to be a lad and run with the pack.” Art hadn’t crossed his mind as an escape route until his stepfather suggested it, and he retook his A-level art.
Several decades later, Leckey has presided over a career in which he’s frequently stood apart from his peers. A former football casual, he arrived in London just as the YBAs were making waves. While irony ruled supreme in the 90s, he made his first groundbreaking work – the hazy montage of clubbers that was 1999’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore – which dealt with real and raw emotions.
His latest exhibition sees him wrestling once more with how to do things differently. In The Offing is about to open at Margate’s Turner Contemporary and is more of a group show than a solo one – Leckey has commissioned work from a variety of artists on the theme of the near future and then “mixed” them with his own, creating a 45- minute loop of video work that will show on various screens in the gallery. “I’m endlessly trying to come up with ways that you can show videos that that isn’t just shoving people into a black box,” he says.
It’s a couple of weeks before opening when I visit and there are ladders and loose cables everywhere. Leckey – well-whiskered and wearing a light blue woollen shawl – has brought a few notes with him for the interview to remind him of things he wants to say. I can see why he needs help staying on topic; Leckey talks more like a drinking companion than an interviewee, with conversation tumbling off in niche directions. Let’s just say that the concept of negative theology – “where you try to deny God in order to affirm it” – wasn’t on my list of questions.
His own video piece for the new show is DAZZLEDDARK, which he describes as a “visual poem” about seaside towns. Featuring fairground cuddly toys, ominous music and some vertigo-inducing spinning, Leckey says it deals with his two overriding emotions around funfairs: pleasure and fear. In the video, the bright neon cacophony of Margate’s Dreamland contrasts with the vast darkness of the water. “I can’t stand at the sea at night and not feel like I’m gazing into the abyss,” he says.
For years Leckey has put together a show for internet music station NTS – stitching together everything from gabba to psychedelia via headscrambling bursts of interference and strange interections. This, he says, is what inspired him to mix together DAZZLEDDARK with the work of other artists such as Blackhaine and Hannah Rose Stewart. “I thought of it as a mixtape but one that goes vertical as well as horizontal,” he says, explaining how all the different videos will be running at different times and interacting with each other. Trying to make art that “aspires to the condition of music” has long been one of his main artistic goals. “I’ve been listening to music for 40 years and I haven’t got bored,” he says. “In some ways that’s a bit of a problem because I’d like to give it up and just get into, like, gardening or something instead.”
Given that Fiorucci was a monument to British club culture – from Northern Soul dancers to ravers – and Leckey grew up attending gigs at Liverpool’s legendary venue Eric’s, I wonder if he mourns the way music has become less a communal experience and more a digital, bedroom-based one. “I think I said to myself, don’t mourn, don’t lament,” he says. “It’s doing something different from what I, as part of the older generation, did. So you can’t just go, oh, it was better in my day. Whatever the conditions were that created those large-scale happenings from the 60s through to the end of the 90s, those conditions have gone essentially.”
Of course, Fiorucci was quite mournful itself, in the way it homed in on clubber’s brief moments of youthful transcendence, now lost to the past. “Well, I think I got it out of my system. That was my one lament!” he laughs. “All this nostalgia kind of built up in me and I needed to release it. But the further I’ve got from it, the more I think that Fiorucci is a ghost film. Especially if I play it to young people who were born after I made it. I’m like, well, at the beginning, these people are probably dead. So you are watching ghosts. You are watching this kind of weird haunting.”
You can see the legacy of that work in pop culture ever since – the ghostly fragments of fractured memory that haunt everything from Burial’s music to films such as Aftersun. Leckey plays down his influence, and says that listening to artists he admires such as Burial and Lee Gamble made him question his own limitations. “”Why didn’t I pull that thread out a bit more? They kind of expanded it in a much more interesting way.”
Despite his success, Leckey still makes his work in a way you wouldn’t expect a previous Turner prize winner (2008) to go about it – using a laptop, on his kitchen table, surrounded by artwork that his kids have made. Partly, he says, because he’s lazy, but also as a way of keeping himself grounded. He remembers starting out and meeting an artist’s assistant who “basically told me that they were essentially making the work. And I can see how easily that can happen. You can become like a kind of corporation and kind of step out of it in some ways”.
Perhaps because he hasn’t embraced the art scene, his work has often felt like it’s only half a part of it. He prefers not to think of his work as being art, certainly not while he’s making it, for fear of him resorting to art world tropes. Critics have struggled to get a handle on what it is he does. “Actually, I just think my stuff is quite funny,” he says.
It would be hard to argue with that. Past works have included adding his own sozzled soundtrack to a strip of Viz cartoons and attempting to communicate with Jacob Epstein’s 1940/41 alabaster carving Jacob and the Angel by blasting noises at it from a sound system. For 2010’s GreenScreenRefrigerator, Leckey decided to inhabit the persona of a smart fridge and went full method by inhaling its coolant to do so. “Have you ever done poppers? It’s basically like poppers,” he says. “Inhaling the solvent kind of allowed me to bypass my kind of embarrassment and awkwardness about doing it. It was enough to get me over that. Then I could just be in that moment with the fridge.”
When Leckey was younger he used to stay up all night smoking, figuring out how to use the latest software to make his work. Not for nothing did the Guardian label him “the artist of the YouTube generation” – his ease with the shifting world means that he has no qualms with letting works exist online for free. These days, though, he’s got two kids and no longer smokes. “So I can’t pursue that kind of learning any more. He remains “quite ignorant” of developments such as AI, he says.
Does he worry about being left behind by the kids? “I’m worried about that all the time,” he laughs. Recently he’s noticed a cultural shift emerge between the younger artists he meets and himself. “A different approach to the world, much more responsible, more inclusive. People ask if I get nostalgic about the 90s and the reason I don’t is that you look back on it and its values were, basically, hedonism, nihilism and irony. Young people can’t afford any of those now.”
Is this why he included young artists in his show? “Yeah, maybe. I kind of want to listen. I want to see what they do with technology. So I can steal their ideas!”
More seriously, he’s keen to give younger artists a leg up, knowing how lucky he was to escape his own dismal-looking future. Art school was a less conventional path to take when Leckey moved to study in Newcastle in the late 1980s, but surviving as an artist was a lot more feasible. “There were still roots of escape, do you know what I mean? And that includes things like squatting, things that were quite miserable, but at least they were there. And you could maintain a creative life through those kinds of gaps. Whereas all those gaps are sealed now. They’ve had concrete poured into them and you can’t manoeuvre in the way you used to be able to.”
For Leckey, the future does not look particularly bright. Which is why, no doubt, he wanted the new works in Margate to be themed around the idea of what it may bring. What really is “in the offing” for the people of Britain and beyond? “That’s the dread question,” he says. “When I think of the future I feel dread. Dread and anxiety. And the only response I have to that is to make something.”
Mark Leckey’s In The Offing is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, from 7 October 2023 until 14 January.
