Mark Leckey - Openings

ArtForum, April, 2002 by Matthew Higgs

When he's not researching his next project, Leckey finds time to publish the occasional journal Saturday (which he coedits with Polly Staple, acting director of London's Cubitt Gallery) and to go on the road with his two-man band, donAteller (named after Donatella Versace). DonAteller (Leckey and his friend Ed Liq) detourne existing pop riffs and lyrics into new and often unrecognizable forms. Leckey's stage presence is minimal, confined to lurking in the background, wearing his trademark Aquascutum raincoat and barking out the occasional rap. Disregarding copyright laws, donAteller create a music that sits somewhere between the Pet Shop Boys and Suicide. Eclectic, to say the least, in their choice of material to appropriate--their first, self-released album, Radiohead (2001), includes fragments of the Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited," the Guess Who's "Glamour Boy," "Never Never" by All Saints, and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"-donAteller, if nothing else, provoke a response. (A recent gig in Glasgow w as continually interrupted by catcalls from the audience, culminating in an onstage mooning by one increasingly irked clubgoer)

Seen together, Leckey's unhurried but measured production shares something of the sublime idleness so beloved by Balzac and Debord. Unlike most art that seeks to implicate itself in popular culture, Leckey's recent projects eschew ironic posturing in favor of a more reverential, loving tone. His art possesses a strange nonartlike quality, operating, as it does, on the knife's edge where art and life meet. Mark Leckey may indeed be the closest thing we have to Constantin Guys, Baudelaire's famed "painter of modern life."

Matthew Higgs is associate director of the CCAC wattis Institute at the california College of Arts and crafts in San Francisco.

In this ongoing series, writers are invited to introduce the work of artists at the beginning of their careers.