On the occasion of his joint exhibition with Arthur Jafa, Mark Leckey speaks with Ethan Price about film as collage, magic on TikTok, and the mythology of shopping centres.
The context is the message. Two seminal video works, Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016), are currently being shown in a former electronics shop in the Whitgift shopping centre, Croydon, presented by Conditions. Poignant in different ways, they nonetheless interconnect, exorcising emotion: sadness and celebration, cut-ups of shared and personal memory. In this shopping centre, the videos are being tested against the edges of indifference, where the concepts of the art world are of little relevance. They play in a pitch-black room, a screen at either end of the space. When one video ends, the other begins, and in the moment of complete darkness that exists between the two, you must turn and, disorientated, find where to look next.
Casual shoppers may well be the predominant viewers of this show. A perfect audience for such works, rather than the often-narrow demographic they usually receive when shown in the exclusive environment of the art gallery. My working-class South London family would never have seen these works, but when my Nan is next browsing at the Whitgift, she might just come across these videos. Formed of reality, they are universal works, now shown in a universal space. Here, their talons grow sharper — and they are going right for haute art’s fine, swanlike throat.
I met Mark Leckey for a coffee and discussed Croydon, immanence, our neo-medieval current reality, the art world, and more.
Ethan Price: You’ve mentioned that Fiorucci has a spectral quality, and I find there is something ghostly about the way we live now. We’re haunting our own lives in a way. We spend so much time on the internet, looking at ourselves from above, from outside of ourselves.
Mark Leckey: Media is spectral; it’s phantasmagorical. A big part of that was the transition from analogue to digital. That was massive — that transference to anything being available at any point, distributed anywhere in the world, at no cost. Fiorucci was made on the cusp of that. I could only make that video because there was equipment that allowed me to transcode analogue video to digital. It wouldn’t have been possible to make that film even two years before. So, there’s this massive transformation that was going on.
I left school when I was fifteen and I did loads of shit. I ended up in America. I used to work at Portobello Market selling clothes. But I was always into music, fashion, always trying to understand culture. I’d stored all this stuff up, and I’d never found an outlet. Then I was able to take all of this pent-up energy and put it into this video. That’s what I mean when I talk about Fiorucci having this ghostliness. I transferred some of my spirit into that tape. There was something of myself that was encoded into that thing in a supernatural way. I think that video has supernatural properties.
Why shouldn’t it?
And the best art has. I mean, I haven’t been able to do it since…
Looking at your work, I see a constant exploration of the physical and spiritual planes, an attempt to bring them together. I read about your experience as a kid — seeing a fairy or pixie underneath a motorway bridge. This bridge comes up frequently in your work. As well as this combination of the concrete and then something you can’t quite grasp, on the periphery of reality.
There’s always something contradictory or conflicting, and when I think back, the bridge spells it out. There’s this concrete, material thing, in which this ineffable, supernatural, paranormal occurrence happens. One is very graspable and solid, and the other is the opposite. I think that’s something to do with the way I grew up. I was made aware from a very early age of material conditions and historical materialism. There are forces — capital, class conflict — that happen on the material plane. But then I’m attracted to art. I’m attracted to the esoteric, to the spiritual. It’s hard, but I’m always trying to find a space that can reconcile or contain both of those things. Music can. That’s why I keep going back to music. You can make some super grimy song, but still have some ethereal, angelic voice in it. And it can do both those things in two minutes. Fucking amazing. That’s why I love music. Why is that so hard to do in art?
But I think that grappling and trying to understand and reconcile these different planes is what makes your art interesting. If you were able to just do it, then you wouldn’t bother doing any work.
This takes us to the Croydon show. There’s something about that shopping centre that contains…
Memories?
Memories. I guess, once you’re in memory, then you’re into the possibility or the potential of dreams. So, it’s a dream space as well. But it’s very gritty and real. It oscillates between them.
Absolutely. All shopping centres have that quality. Especially when you’re a kid, it’s got this enormous, monolithic presence. When I saw the H. Samuel in the Whitgift, I was like, How is this still here? It has the same quality as the bridge in your work — this memory that keeps being rehashed from childhood. It gets retold and then becomes mythologised.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, these places? I’ve got two young kids now, and you can see their memories being formed. The shopping centre for them is aspirational, or it’s accumulative. It’s the promise of stuff.
Which you’re obsessed with when you’re a kid.
Right. But then dreams, even spiritualism, all of it, is also horribly entwined with the desires of capitalism. And you look to them as some kind of escape, or some kind of transcendence. But inevitably, you’re still caught up in this matrix, this desire that is both produced by you and produced in you. I think all these things have increased, amplified, and become more systematised and complex. Maybe that’s something to do with this ghostly feeling you were talking about before — that you live in something that’s more like a kind of dream than any sort of concrete reality, or material existence.
But that transcendent quality of brands, where you could buy some Nike trainers and be the God of the playground — I’m not sure that exists anymore?
No, because that was to do with a kind of rarity and novelty — taking a totem and mobilising around it, which is how subcultures were formed. But in order to do that, there has to be not much else available — and a sort of boredom. It’s a concentration of energy, right? But you can’t do that on a vast subcultural level anymore.
People have mourned the death of British subcultures, but if we were all gathering around these kinds of capitalist totems, was that really a good thing?
Those subcultures also had an inherent violence to them; there was a policing. There was a “You’re in the group, or you’re out of the group.” Part of the reason to join those groups was to establish difference, maybe so you could have someone to dislike.
And that quality still exists.
But it’s more diffuse now.
It’s uncontainable and vast. It’s like medieval witch trials on social media.
I remember my early teenage years just being chased… Now I actually look back at the twentieth century and see it as a mass mobilisation of some kind of magic, or some kind of invoking of the supernatural.
What do you mean?
[Laughs] I’m not sure what I mean. I heard this line that was like, “All popular culture is paranormal.” It’s about trying to escape a rational, quantifiable self. It’s seeking the supernatural, the hidden. I read something that was saying that the sixties were a reenactment of medieval mysticism. So, with the Reformation and Protestantism and all the rest of it, the world became disenchanted. Before that, the world was kind of seen as an enchanted space. And magic was possible, and the supernatural…
Felt more accessible.
Exactly. The Enlightenment chased off superstition, and everyone became much more rational. What the sixties were doing, like the Romantics and William Blake previously, was trying to return to this prelapsarian time when anything was possible. The sixties were using the tools of their time, like amplification in music, to create these rituals to achieve transcendence. And a countercultural need to escape, to invoke a kind of spiritualism. If you look at it like that, it’s amazing. I was watching a video of some metal band the other day, from the eighties or nineties. You just watch all these people hurling their bodies around, like a medieval ritual. It’s this orgiastic response to a very rigid structure. If you follow that through, then magic is always there, like with Bowie and Burroughs. And these very real influences from people that lie well outside popular culture, like Aleister Crowley. There was always this invocation of magic that was happening. AJ [Arthur Jafa] and I were talking about Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. That has everything in it.
You’ve spoken before about how you think our society has returned, metaphysically, to the medieval. Thanks to the internet, we now, like them, inhabit a two-tier, mixed reality between the material and the immaterial realms. Time has become more cyclical than sequential and progressive.
Yeah, because I think magic is a denial of material reality. It works against physics. It feels now that the laws of physics, or the logical structures that we have inhabited, are somehow no longer intact, which is something that Trump is utilising. The world is being de-realised, like what you were talking about before. Reality has become…
Malleable.
Yes. Magic is the realisation that reality is malleable. There is the idea that at the same time that you’re hungry, you’re ploughing the field, you’re also aware that Jacob is wrestling the angel at exactly that moment. Everything is contained in God’s mind, right? Everything is happening all at once, at the same time. Your awareness is that — that all of these things are happening at the same time. The biblical, the mythical, the supernatural, and your need to grow and plant.
It’s not even duality; it’s a swirling constant happening. It’s interesting to see it from that perspective. It makes everything a little bit more bearable.
That’s what I’m looking for! I don’t know if there’s any truth to it, but it helps me navigate the world as it is now. It’s a tool to allow me not to feel trapped, not to feel depressed. It doesn’t feel like it’s escapist. It just feels like a way of mapping a world that is being disordered and reordered as we speak. It’s an agreed consensus, right? That reality doesn’t feel the way it did ten years ago. Everyone feels like that. What the fuck is going on? All I’m trying to do is speculate on what I think is happening to the world.
I feel like you touched on that with O’ Magic Power of Bleakness — the modern and the ancient, and two tiers of reality being mixed up. I wanted to talk to you about immanence. In a basic sense, transcendence is taking yourself out, and immanence is a kind of going in. I feel like, potentially, immanence is something that we should be striving towards more now, rather than transcendence.
I one hundred percent agree. It’s easiest to talk about in terms of God and spiritualism. Immanence is both within and without you on this material plane. You’re not transcending out of the body; with immanence, you’re in. You’re embodied in this great spiritual oneness. That’s what I’m interested in. That consciousness pre-exists matter, and it’s consciousness that makes the universe, which is the opposite of what you’re taught at school.
There’s a sense in your work that you’re grabbing things from all over the place and trying to pull them together to make sense of the world.
It’s a kind of collage, definitely. And I don’t know if that makes any sense, and collage might be a kind of twentieth-century medium, but I don’t know if artists of the future — whoever they may be — will be using collage. I don’t know what they’ll be using.
It’s a way of creating art now which feels most natural, because we’re so exposed to so much all the time.
When I first got into art, it was quite an esoteric thing to do. It’s quite a weird occupation. And now I just feel like, with Instagram and everything, I’m just the same as everyone else. There’s no difference — especially with the collage thing we were talking about before. In some ways, you think, did art win? Did everyone actually become artists?
That’s an interesting idea. The amount of effort and creativity that some people put into Instagram or TikTok can be on a similar level to the amount of creativity that an artist puts into their work, just in a different kind of format.
Massively. To be honest, I struggle going to galleries now. If I’ve just been looking at TikTok, and an eighteen-year-old is inventing the most insane editing, or strange combination of images, but then I’ll go to a gallery… I think that art has maybe given up on the pursuit of formal change. I don’t mean that in a crusty way, but just in the same way that, you know, trap is a formal change to grime. It’s like art is happy to just go back to painting or ceramics.
I wonder if the limit has been reached, though, with formal change.
I just think, if you’re gonna be creative now, why would you go into art?
What would you recommend instead?
Magic on TikTok.
You’re going to become a druid, summoning things? In your robes, in a stone circle?
A stone circle that’s made out of extruded plastic.
I look forward to seeing that!
[Laughs] Let’s go back to Croydon. Did you go to the opening?
I did. It was an amazing atmosphere.
I loved it! I think the reason it was an amazing atmosphere is that we managed to bring together a lot of people who are kind of tangential to the art world. I’ve been hoping for a long time for that. The boundaries of these things keep touching each other, and I felt they came together there. I felt that at the Whitgift, collectively. Gavin [Brown], AJ, and I had wished for these people, and they came. It was extraordinary. It’s one of the best moments I’ve had. I want that, I still think that’s a possibility. I don’t want to live in an art world that is just the same people.
Attending an opening, and there are the same fifty people there.
The same fifty people, but also just the same people from the same background. You know who they are before you even talk to them. That doesn’t feel like London to me, either. I go to these events in the art world, and… I’ve always been uncomfortable with that. Anyone who comes from a background where they’ve never experienced that, it’s always quite a kind of surprise and a shock, right?
It is. It can be very uncomfortable. I also come from a working-class background, and I often feel very different to everyone else in this world. For this show to be in the Whitgift, it felt relaxed and normal, not a scary, fancy white space.
That’s why I really loved it. Seeing those people at the Whitgift, it was normal, but then there were also the weirdos. I want an art world that looks like that, feels like that.
ARTHUR JAFA / MARK LECKEY: HARDCORE / LOVE continues at Conditions, 48 Whitgift Centre, through August 10th, 2025.
