mark leckey – greg.org

Of Saints in the Wilderness

a c. 1400 panel painting of saint jerome in a white tunic standing in the mouth of a dome-like cave of grey smooth stone, with an outcropping of rocks on one side, and a few trees on the other, all against a background of gold leaf, by lorenzo monaco — Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni), Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1398-1400, tempera and gold on poplar, 23 x 34 cm, put up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2005

In 1965, during its 50-year disappearance into a private collection beginning in 1929, this painting of Jerome in a stylized grotto-like cave was reattributed from Pietro Lorenzetti to Lorenzo Monaco, and proposed as one of five predella panels from an altarpiece/polyptych Lorenzo executed for a chapel at Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence between 1398 and 1400.

the digitally reconstructed altarpiece by lorenzo monaco for the church of santa maria del carmine in florence has a virgin and child at the center, with two prophets or probably evangelists on either side, all on gold ground with gothic gilded frame elements, and a row of tiny landscape paintings of other saints mostly outdoors, on the predella underneath. — Piero di Giovanni’s *Carmine Polyptych* as it would look if everyone lent their pieces to the Galleria dell’Accademia like they were asked. via wikipedia

It turned up at Sotheby’s in 1988, then again in 2005, and was to be part of the first reuniting of the polyptych in the 2006 Lorenzo retrospective at the Galleria dell’Accademia. It didn’t sell, and I don’t know that it was lent to the show, but the wilderness geology of the various predella panels would look great together.

a square painting of oil on gold leaf on panel by mark leckey which is centered on the unusual dome/hut-shaped cave from lorenzo monaco's st jerome, which is flanked by stone outcroppings on either side, and with three towers of a hilltop town or cirtadel small in the background. the square format gives much more room for a gold ground sky. from mark leckey's bandcamp — from Mark Leckey’s Carry me into the wilderness, 2022, via bandcamp

When Mark Leckey made a gold-ground painting for his 2022 audio work, Carry me into the wilderness, he gave a shout out to Lorenzo Monaco, where he got the cave, but he squared it up, and added a hilltop city or citadel. And the hermit saint who wasn’t there was Saint Anthony. While the possible theological nuances of Leckey’s saintswapping are lost on me, I find this image of the empty hermit’s cave resonates with the central sample of Carry me into the wilderness: a recording Leckey made of himself being overcome by an instant of natural beauty while in a park during the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic. The liberated hermit here, was him, and us.

‘I Just Walk Out Into This, And’

a wall in a dark gallery photographed at an angle with various rectangular forms along it, receding into the left distance. one group of four vertical rectangles are lit gold-ground icon style paintings; a series of apertures in the wall, most around painting height, fill the middle, and on the near right is either a monitor showing a painting or a spotlit gold ground painting. mark leckey installation view at gladstone gallery, nyc, nov 2024-feb 2025 — Mark Leckey, 3 Songs from the Liver, installation view, 2024-25, Gladstone Gallery, NYC

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.

against a dark background of a cell phone video, a square gold leafed icon painted in the style of lorenzo monaco depicts a starkly painted hermit's cave surrounded by other barren rocks, a hilltop town or fortress in the distance. below the painting a cluster of fat votive style candles glow, though the actual light on the painting is not entirely from them. the screenshot from mark leckey's 2022 video, carry me into the wilderness, on youtube — Screenshot from Mark Leckey’s *Carry me into the wilderness*, 2022, depicting an icon after Lorenzo Monaco, via youtube

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]

Be Kind, Rewind: Mark Leckey Throwback Fiorucci VHS Edition

The image for the edition being a screenshot-timestamped.png makes it feel like we’re right there in the studio, dubbing via gladstonegallery

This is the 25th anniversary of Mark Leckey’s epic video work, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), and to celebrate, he released a throwback “final version” as a VHS edition of 100. I am always too slow to get his limited edition album drops, and I figured I’d already missed this, too. But I just saw an edition in the White Columns Benefit Auction, and I wondered…

Sure enough, Gladstone still has some, and practically at 1999 prices. Now I just have to pull a VCR out of storage, and figure out how to connect it to my digital TV, to relive the hollowed out cultural promise of that haunted ghost-space.

[Until then, though, I’ll just keep watching it on Ubu.]

Buy Mark Leckey: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore: Ghosted on VHS, 25 Years Later, 2024 [gladstonegallery]

Untitled (Satelloon), 2007, In Mark Leckey: Containers and their Drivers at MoMAPS1

via [instagram/365days_in_nyc]
I will have more to say about it because it is blowing my mind in unexpected ways, but it has already taken me too long to shout it out: Mark Leckey has included my piece, Untitled (Satelloon), in “Containers and their Drivers,” his survey at MoMA PS1.
The satelloon is incorporated into a new installation of Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD (2015), an autobiographical piece Leckey assembles through what he calls “found memories.”
The satelloon is a refabrication of a Beacon satellite, the 12-foot Mylar inflatable that was shown publicly at the US Capitol and other sites in the run up for NASA’s Project Echo. Echo 1A, which launched in 1960, was 100 feet in diameter, and was the first visible manmade object in space. In Leckey’s installation, though, the satelloon serves as a reference, I believe, to Echo II, the 135-ft successor, which launched in 1964.
Satelloons have been big around here for nearly 10 years, and I’ve been engrossed by their aesthetic power, and what can only be called their exhibition and display. They are beautiful objects created to be seen, and they have many implications.
Part of this became the subject of “Exhibition Space,” a show I organized at apexart in 2013, which was the occasion for fabricating this particular object. At the time, I was reluctant for a whole host of reasons to declare the show, and the objects in it, to be artworks. But I’m chill with it now, thanks in no small part to Leckey’s own powerful and generous practice over the last several years of curation-as-art, as well as my own subsequent developments.
In any case, a huge thanks and congratulations to Mark Leckey, along with curators Stuart Comer and Peter Eleey, and the folks at PS1, who have been a pleasure to work with. I had no idea how Mark would end up incorporating the piece, but it looks utterly transfixing, and I cannot wait to see it in person.

Mark Leckey’s In A Long Tail World @ICA

Last October, Mark Leckey presented In A Long Tail World at the ICA in London. From the writeups, it sounded like a cross between Chris Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Ted by way of the Guggenheim Las Vegas.
Leckey’s now loaded the whole thing onto YouTube, in six parts. Though he’s got a big, Laurie Anderson-y screensaver of an ending, my favorite segment is probably part 1, above. It includes both Leckey’s re-enactment of the earliest TV broadcasting experiment [a recap of his 2007 work, Felix Gets Broadcast] and his quotes from Charles Sirato’s Dimensionist Manifesto from 1936 which posited a new, dematerialized art with humans at the center.
If Leckey didn’t quite make the case that the Long Tail was the fulfillment of Sirato’s vision, it at least crossed its path. And it’s a good watch. [via gavin brown’s (!) blog]