Mark Leckey has come a long way since his pervasively influential ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’ (1999), the earliest work in this bijou sampling of his past decade’s production. That video installation, a lovingly collaged, abstracted documentary of UK dance culture that’s at once celebratory and melancholic, laid out Leckey’s stall: he deals in how external forces shape us, agreeably or not. Here, those forces proliferate. Henry Moore’s towering, greenish bronze ‘Upright Motive No 9’ (1979) faces off a demotic upright: a rough stack of speakers hooked to amps, mixer, etc, which occasionally relays ‘a specially created sound piece’ (I missed it).
Moore, here, might stand for mouldering tradition or an intimidatingly resolved take on sculpture, the sound system for a timeless will to party-starting that is, in its own way, beautiful and aesthetic, as is brusquely suggested by the Walter Pater quote about burning with a ‘hard, gemlike flame’ scrawled on a speaker cabinet.
The relativism is resonant; still, because it’s mostly silent, the piece feels prefatory to something else. Leckey has become fond of such (increasingly zeitgeisty) decentring: witness ‘TRAILER FOR SEE, WE ASSEMBLE’ (2011), a video (also on YouTube) which opens the show and serves as an ambiguously priming advert for it. ‘GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction’ (2010-11), meanwhile, involves a fridge, talking loquaciously in a synthesised voice, situated against walls painted chromakey green, as if about to star against various pasted-in movie settings.
A decade and a half ago in ‘Being Digital’, the writer Nicholas Negroponte prophesised that our fridges would talk to us; the result, here, is less than utopian. The fridge chatters inhumanly, numbingly away: the inference is that our technologies are unstoppably assuming more active, glamorous, even domineering roles in our lives. Fair point, but the effortless poetics and pull that animated ‘Fiorucci…’ have vanished; and the dark, cultural studies-laced absurdism that replaces them doesn’t feel like a satisfying swap.