Mark Leckey
GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction
Single channel video. 2010
Widely celebrated for his graft of archival and pop cultural forensics Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci made me Hardcore is a master class in how to capture the symbiosis between ecstatic embrace and the accursed share. Balancing a pharmaceutical-grade deadpan and vitalist elan his Theater in the Round stands out as an entirely unique genre of storytelling and critique asking the question central to GODMODADOGGEREL, what animates stuff? Or as he eloquently puts forward asking after Guston, what distinguishes the intersection of an image and a thing, where something is both mental and matter? That is both “hunks and lunks; dunce and dense; thunk and stuff… thunk-n-stuff?”
But for an absolute distillate of contemporary hauntology and the long tail of occult sciences nothing beats GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction and the pathos it inscribes on the hybrid objects that we cohabitate with. As voiced by the eponymous interlocutor here “buried within these walls gaseous coolants goes through changes.. constricted released contracts and expands as the spirt goes through all all states of matter.”
The infamous theologian and philosopher Giordano Bruno understood magic as being the chains that bind one thing to another: person, place, object, labeling that energy as pneuma and the controlling apparatus a “pneumatic synthesizer”; this analogy of transforming desire into control fuels the condenser action that is culture and that Leckey expertly tunes for our edification.
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