Towards the end of last year I spent a couple of hours underneath a flyover of the M53 motorway on the Wirral, between Ellesmere Port and Wallasey. Near Eastham Rake train station, Delamere Community Centre, and a branch of not just Bargain Booze, but Bargain Booze Plus!
Except I didn't. I wasn't, in fact, anywhere near the border of Cheshire and Merseyside. I was in London, at Tate Britain, and Birkenhead artist Mark Leckey, in his show O' Magic Power of Bleakness, had mocked up the motorway flyover as some kind of art installation and it was that which I was under. Or, more accurately, in.
Why had Leckey converted one of the Tate's most coveted exhibition spaces as if to appear it was a motorway flyover and why had he projected a series of films (his earlier works:- Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), Dream English Kid (1964-1999), and AD (2015)) on to the surrounding concrete walls that we could sit, or stand, and watch? Why had he included the below Henry Fuseli illustration?
At first I was utterly baffled and distinctly unimpressed but the longer I spent in the 'subway' the more the show grew on me. Leckey aims to "explore the links between youth, class, memory and nostalgia" and if the blurry footage of young people getting down at Northern Soul events, Joy Division performances, old sheds, and Cinzano adverts refused to make any narrative sense whatsoever it did, for those us of a certain age, induce a pang of nostalgia for those things, those experiences, that are now so lost to the sands of time we're starting to doubt our own recollections of them.
Was this all some kind of memento mori? Was Leckey saying that what we remember of our past, the feelings we felt so earnestly at the time, have now been co-opted and sold back to us as mere nostalgia? As befits an artist, and a conceptual one at that, he was asking a lot more questions than he was giving answers.
I no longer thought that O' Magic Power of Bleakness was crap. I was simply a bit confused while, at the same time, at least occasionally, bewildered and, even more rarely, enchanted. Where should I look? Video footage would appear in dim and dark corners, in crevices, and then revert, suddenly, to a series of larger screens on the walls.
This 'son et lumiere' obviously spoke more directly to Leckey and those who grew up with and like him on the Wirral (the flyover, the real one, is where he used to play with childhood friends and, he claims, the area still haunts him) but, more generally, these spaces remind us of a time in our childhood where we didn't need to visit art exhibitions, go to the theatre, or attend gigs to amuse ourselves.
We could find magic and mystery, for want of better words, wherever we went. It was in our heads and the world, or our own very small corner of it, was our playground. Before I was even a teenager, fun could be had hiding in hedges, hanging round the back of the garages, or getting lost in the nearby Pamber Forest. Teenage years would see hours wasted wandering the streets of my home town of Tadley, disappearing into the nearby commons and woods, and, on one occasion, spending an hour or so in a concrete pipe with two close friends singing Prefab Sprout's Faron Young.
It seemed boring at the time. Like a waste of time. There was a feeling that real life, genuine excitement and opportunity, was happening elsewhere and we, of course, wanted some of it. So when we got older we gravitated to pubs, relationships, gigs, festivals, and, eventually, our own houses and our own lives.
But did we lose something on the way? Did we strike the inevitable deal with life where our youth, innocence, and sense of wonder was exchanged for cold hard reality? Did we, in the words of Pink Floyd, "exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage"?
Again, no answers. Just more food for thought. A wet shoe, an eighties haircut, a crude graphic of military aeroplanes flying over an archipelago, and child like drawings of lorries. What could it all mean? It made as much sense to me as an adult as life itself did to me as a child (though I wasn't aware of that at the time) and, in that - if nothing else, Mark Leckey had, in a very short time, taken me back to childhood and reminded me that though I view much of it through rose tinted spectacles now perhaps it wasn't quite as I remember it.
All the things of my youth that I recall were no doubt there at the time. But what they meant to me then and what I now think they meant to me are, it seems, very different things. This was both a memento mori and a genius loci but it was, intentionally, a highly unreliable one and, filtered through Leckey's vision (he's four years older than me), a partial one too. Appropriately enough it was a partial, rather than unqualified, success.
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