How can something feel completely otherworldly and viscerally, personally real at the same time? Or maybe it toggles back and forth, faster than a toggle, a vibration, a quantum state where quotidian sensation and transcendence are both present until the instant you take measure of it. And then you realize you’re in a darkened gallery, with several of Mark Leckey’s multichannel video and audio works looping around you at once.
And some of the things on the wall are paintings, icons, and some are monitors, and some are apertures. But then Leckey’s comment about icons collapses those distinctions: “they are not an image, or a picture, but a window through which we can mediate between material reality and disembodied realms, and between distant persons and ourselves.”
A fleeting credit title in one work and and the shoutout to the artist’s longrunning radio show orient Leckey’s Gladstone Gallery show toward music. But it’s only when I’m home that I realize how familiar some of the overwhelming elements of the installation are, and why: they include audio tracks on his Bandcamp and videos on his YouTube.
These platforms are as much studio as presentation, especially in the moment—2021-22—when the most intense experiences of the pandemic remained largely unprocessed, and normal [sic] life was still a tentative thing.
Leckey’s show, 3 Songs from the Liver, is at once an evocation of these moments and memories of trying to live and connect online while barely holding it together, and a rejoinder that physical experience and IRL encounters can be sublime, even sacred. For all their elegiac sense of having made it through the wilderness, the show’s visual references to 14th century painting also nod to the future. Taken together with the most disturbing sculpture/video from the present, it’s not clear whether Leckey sees another Renaissance awaiting us, or just wars, plagues, and tyranny. Maybe it’s both.
Mark Leckey’s 3 Songs from the Liver is at Gladstone Gallery on West 21st St until February 15th, 2025 [gladstonegallery]