Mark Leckey is Fabulously Weird and We Love Him For It

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Much like a music video for an artist, Turner Prize Winner Mark Leckey's offbeat performance/interview for the Tate advertises both the artist and his work in a concise and curious 6 minute clip. Dressed in a suit and tie, Leckey walks us through pieces such as Cinema in the Round and Made in 'Eaven while speaking into a concave mirror or while seated on a rotating platform. His intricate explanations carry on like this:

"I'm here now in my flat. Well, it's not actually my flat. It's a set of my flat. Um, but I'm recording and making a new piece of work. Or an old piece of work that I've made new. The piece is called Search Engine and it's a slide projection piece which allows me to enhance photographs, 2 dimensional photographs, so they appear 3 dimensional and allow me to look into corners and rooms within my flat that I wasn't sure existed. This is based upon a scene in Blade Runner with a machine that basically scans a 2 dimensional photograph and kind of renders so it becomes 3 dimensional. It becomes a space that Harrison Ford can then investigate..."

Matthew Higgs once described Leckey as a "part drifter, part dandy, part flaneur-artiste" for ArtForum in 2002, and his mental meanderings follow this portrayal. This wandering is also apparent in his work, such as in his epic montage of found rave footage Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a piece that draws on the same pleasure of diversion and voyeuristic viewing practices which drive contemporary platforms such as YouTube. In this clip for the Tate, which is distinctly self-referential and self-aware, one could suggest that in performing his eccentric dandy-ism in such a pronounced way, Leckey is dually channeling the specter of Baudelaire and celebrity culture à la Andy Warhol.