MARK LECKEY
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore , 1999 Video, color, sound, 15 min. Courtesy the Rosenkranz Collection
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) is a dreamscape of underground dance culture in working class Northern England from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Leckey’s elegiac montage of video and sound, made right after the scene had faded, is a fusion of personal and collective memory, written in borrowed images. The video begins with tinted clouds scudding in slow motion across the sky, indicating the haze of daybreak after an all-night dance session. The artist’s crude video editing process is evident throughout, here indicated by including a “play” arrow at the top right, the first of many visual and aural clues that ground the video in a subtly wrought low-fi montage of grainy 1970s and 1980s TV clips, and a soundtrack that layers slowed- down and distorted music fragments with whistles, trance-like extended electronic notes, the voice of the artist, and a DJ who declares “We do not need anybody; we are independent.” The first part of the video shows footage filmed at the legendary Wigan Casino and other northern soul clubs in Lancashire for the 1977 documentary film The Wigan Casino by Tony Palmer, commissioned by the Northern TV station Granada TV. At one point Leckey lifts a bluebird from a dancer’s tattooed arm and sets it flying into the dance hall, in a magical animated intervention into the original film. In the second part of the work, footage from 1980s Acid House raves and all-night warehouse parties becomes increasingly frenetic and fractured. This later moment anticipates the imminent arrival of the internet, Youtube, and a dispersal of subcultures into more individuated and commercialized communities. Leckey’s portrait of a Northern working- class community whose own culture he felt to be as valuable as anything found in the art world lives in both the art world, online, and as a vinyl record, returning it to its roots in music and the hardcore commitment to an in-person shared experience.
Top: Installation view: Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore , 1999, in Mountain / Time, Aspen Art Museum, 2022. Photo: Carter Seddon
Bottom: Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore , 1999.Video, projection, color, sound, 15 min. Courtesy the artist and the Rosenkranz Collection. (still)
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