Mark Leckey @ Cubitt

in Lynne Kouassi’s work at the Goldsmith’s MA degree show, i had a bit of a moment. in a small pale room behind everything, there was a smoothed out, discoloured tyre limp and folded in the centre of the floor looking like a snake-thing. There was an A4 piece of paper framed next to it that read ‘Please help her out if she feels dry,’ and there were spray bottles with greenish ‘water from the river’ dotted around that you could pick up 2 use on the tyre sculpture. On a wall, nice khaki wireless headphones were waiting. u could don them and hear some caressing elevator/jazzy music - and in doing so, something formal happened to me: I was inside, really not feeling like I was in a degree show. the installation created some gravity so that the tyre felt ~ more than a sculpture. instead it felt like a responsibility.

It’s that headphones moment I want u to hold, because I’d got the the same satisfaction/entertainment/complicity from Mark Leckey’s show at Cubitt which i’d gone to the day before. Leckey had Eclipse of The Sun posters on one wall, heads of tungsten streetlights like level animal heads along the edge of the gallery, a diorama of an overpass in the middle of the room, and an urgent shouty soundtrack reeling ‘I CALL UPON THE ASTRA, THE VECTRA, THE VIVA,’ ‘IN THE NAME OF THE LEVELLERS, THE DIGGERS AND THE NAVVIES OF THE M53,’ and ‘OUT HIGH-FUNCTIONING FAN-BOY GREAT ATTENTION TO DETAIL’ (the full transcript was available next to the press releases when u walked in, thanks for that btw). but those words! The space was somewhere between vulnerable and confident like how gases and liquids take the shape of their container,, and the soundtrack set an atmosphere that cooked the space. It stressed Zarina out but I was ok and I think that’s because this exhibition is a tributary of Leckey’s film Dream English Kid, which I’ve seen twice now, get me (at Cabinet on Halloween 2015, n at the Liverpool Biennial last summer). I don’t know if the exhibition would have gotten to me as much if I didn’t see that the exhibition was the film turned inside out, focused + placated. bc of that, the Cubitt exhibition feels like a good pay-off, and I wonder how Leckey positions it in relation to Dream English Kid; whether this show is like a peninsula for it as the main event, or a moment to take account of the similar melancholic politics boiling over rn. I’m glad the exhibition exists

ah

I've been so in the mood for a good solo show. story is tangible, settled. I kept walking round the space and being drawn in2 the model of the overpass/bridge in the exhibition, pulling me in by some dolly-cam zoom: little model sculpture, had that sense of responsibility and care like the Kouassi alter. something i wanted to stay with. ; so I’m glad that I took away the page with the transcript on, took one for myself 2 bring the words back to Liverpool with me. I lost the paper in my bedroom somewhere so I got in touch with curator Helen Nisbet to ask to send me a copy n she sent a picture of it: attached. have a read. it is a ranty spell to shout at protests. it is something that artists should study n feel.

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‘Affect Bridge Age Regression’ is on until July 30;;;; https://cubittartists.org.uk/2017/06/15/mark-leckey-affect-bridge-age-regression/