Credits
Models · DAMI ADERONKE and CECILIA GIGLIO TOS
Photography · NICOLÒ PARSENZIANI
Fashion · DILETTA ARIANO
Casting · MATTIA MARAZZI
Set Designer · ALICE ARIANO
Makeup · CLARISSA CARBONE
Hair · ERISSON MUSELLA
Digital Assistant · DAVIDE LIONELLO
Fashion Assistants · DILETTA RIVIERA and ANNA BIANCHI
Credits
Director · FABRIZIO NARCISI
Stylist · ENRICA MILLER
Cinematographer · ALESSIO PANZETTA
Producer · BRYANNA KELLY
Fashion Assistant · DJORDJE VELIKOVIC, IVAN OBRADOVIĆ and MICHELA MONTANDON
Gaffer · PIERPAOLO MASSAFRA
Original Music & Sound Design · GIUSEPPE MAFFEI
Recording Engineer · NICOLA RECCHIA
Editor · JADE REMOVILLE
Hair · MATTEO BARTOLINI using BALMAIN HAIR COTURE
Make-Up and Prosthetics · GRETA GIANNONE
Make-Up Assistant · CAMILLA OLDANI
Casting · MONSTER BADD
Casting · Director POLLY PAOLA RUTA
With · JEAN, SOFIA CONOCCHIARI, JATHSON, GIACOMO GORLA, ELISA CICARDINI, CLAUDIA VERONESI, LORENZO BIGI, SARIAN SESAY, MIRIOS, SAMI, EMMA, LORENZO BELLI, LORENA SANTAMARIA, GIOSUÈ UGO, TAITU, LOLITA and PEDRO DE SOUSA
Film Developing · RICCARDO PASCUCCI
Film Scan · ANTONIO D’AGOSTINO
Shot on · KODAK SHOOTFILM 16MM
Credits
Photography · RAFFO MARONE
Models · DIANA SKOWRON at NEXT MODELS and HANNA KOBIALKA at FASHION
Fashion · MIRKO DE PROPRIS and VITTORIA ROSSI PROVESI
Casting · MATTIA MARAZZI
Set Design · VERONICA FERRARI
Makeup · FRANCESCA GUERRA using LORD&BERRY
Hair · PIERA BERDICCHIA at WM MANAGEMENT using BUMBLE&BUMBLE
Fashion Assistant · PIETRO CAVALLARI, REMI VANACORE and MORGAN DILDAR
If Malerie Marder is something of a voyeur, her subjects are never unaware that they’re being viewed by the photographer, her camera and us, the audience. In fact, the subjects of Marder’s intimate work often know the photographer intimately herself. In Carnal Knowledge, a body of work published in 2011 spanning ten years, Marder photographed family, friends and herself – usually in a state of total undress, often in seedy motel rooms or within the interiors of suburban Middle America. Despite the voyeuristic quality that exudes in her work, Marder somehow pulls back from an overtly sexual image. Perhaps this is because of a mundane, yet alluring, encounter the young Marder had, as a photography student under Stephen Shore’s direction at Bard College in the early 1990s – one which would define her future practice. Marder was invited to photograph a family friend engaging in an illicit affair with a married lover in a hotel suite, using the techniques she’d just been learning at college. But if the lasting impact of that first commission speaks to the mise-en-scène of the photographer’s work now, so does the fact that the lover, after the affair ended, demanded for the negatives afterwards. “I’ve been trying to re-create those pictures ever since,” Marder told Artforum in 1999, “simply because they were worth burning.” Naturally then, some of Marder’s images verge on the erotic – capturing a moment that feels, as the viewer, like an intrusion. As the photographer tells NR, there’s always something of a mystery within her work, where it’s not always quite clear what is going on.
But Marder’s work is never accidental, and often staged. This is most obvious with pictures that seem to make direct reference to art history; take Bath House (2001), for example, in which a scene of (majority male) nude bathers are positioned in such a way to recall one of Paul Cezanne’s paintings of bathers from the late nineteenth century. More recently, Marder’s second body of work, Anatomy (2013), plays with art historical references for different effect. The series, taken over four years, sees Marder photograph sex workers in Rotterdam, positioned in different settings within the private spaces in which they work. If Anatomy captures an intimacy like Carnal Knowledge, it’s less the fact that we feel like we’re intruding on a private scene, than a behind-the-veil glimpse into the lives of these women – the spaces they occupy, the relationships they make with one another, Marder, and the camera’s lens. In one image, Marder’s subjects are positioned in a way that recalls Henri Matisse’s La Danse (1910) – but if that painting has a joyful lightness to it, Marder’s photograph, in response, is more grounded. And perhaps that’s where the essence of Marder’s work lies; between the emotion that the sight, or the thought, of the nude body evokes, and the candid nakedness that we really see.
NR: Since that first encounter, shooting a family friend and her partner, (how) has your approach to photographing changed?
MM: I think that first encounter showed me what an illicit affair actually looked like. Those are the moments I centred on – the explosion of emotions, the secrecy, the desire — the fact that I was actually able to capture that when I was in the whirlwind of what was unfolding showed me I could perform under pressure. I think my set ups have become more tactile and I can more easily identify what I’m looking for, but the more comfortable I become, the more I push myself. I try to transcend what I’ve done. There’s always resistance, both externally and internally, but this is universal. This is not just endemic to me.
NR: How do you negotiate with your subjects when taking their photograph? How much is staged by you, and by the subject themselves?
MM: I decide on the setting and then we both figure out what comes next. Some of it is more choreographed by me, but usually I end up capturing an aspect of them that is revealed.
“It’s like writing — you have a sense of what you want to say but you haven’t yet written the words.”
NR: What informs the setting in which your subjects are photographed? Do you choose a location depending on the subject, or vice versa?
MM: Both — sometimes I’ll see a place and wait for the perfect person to match that character, or I’ll meet someone and try to hone in on where I should photograph them. I find people are more fascinating than most places, so settings are harder to procure.
NR: How does ‘celebration’ tie into your work; if you were to ‘celebrate’ something, what would that be?
MM: That is a genuinely a fascinating question. I like the idea of celebrating people’s beauty. I’m a fanatic about light and I like there to be a certain mystery — I feel both create a kind of romanticism, even if it’s on the melancholy side. But that does not mean it is any less of a celebration. We only have a short time on this planet and it’s impossible for me not to be in touch with people’s pain… So maybe I’m celebrating people’s vulnerability and softness…
NR: Something that has been said of the Anatomy series is the lack of ‘you’ being in the work; how important is it to have a relationship with your subject, and is it important that there is an element of “self-portraiture” in your photography?
MM: It’s only important when I’m purposefully playing a part in the picture. Often times, I end up being in the picture and I’m just part of the shadow… helping the image along, but then there are times where it is more compelling for the viewer to know it is me.
“Self-denial plays a large part of what I do; I sincerely doubt I am in any of my pictures.”
NR: In terms of creating an image, how does colour (or its absence) play into your work?
MM: It plays a big role. For me, black and white is more like a sensual memory and colour is closer to present tense. So, when I try to create a dream-like state, I find it easier to say it in black and white. I still attempt to do this in colour as well. I group images by colour, and certain colours mean certain things — or elicit certain emotions or feelings. I try to saturate as much colour into an image as possible even if it borders on garish. A little like how Douglas Sirk filled his compositions in “Imitation of Life” with flowers — one long funeral. I am not sure what the saturation of colour means, but I think it is my attempt to overwhelm reality with as much beauty as possible — otherwise the darkness creeps in. You can still see it, of course.
Credits
Images · Malerie Marder
https://maleriemarder.com/
Credits
Models · Ara Ha (Fabbrica Milano), John Godswill (The Claw), Igor Szymanski (Why Not Models), Rashida Mamudu (Select Model Management)
Photographer · ALESSANDRO MANNELLI
Stylist · MARCO DRAMMIS
Makeup · ALESSIA STEFANO
Hair · ALESSIA BONOTTO
Casting Director · IRENE MANICONE
Stylist Assistant · ROCCO COLLAZZO
Stylist Assistant · GIULIA BASILE
For the artist Laila Majid, exploring the relationship between materials and the body is a recurring theme. Her artwork, Rosie (2019), for instance, is a close-up shot of the imprint of a trainer on the calf of a friend’s leg having been sat cross-legged for a period of time. The markings of the shoe and stitching of the fabric are punctured by the ever-so-slight presence of hair regrowth – the effect is an almost surreal investigation of the similarities between the two surfaces (the now-absent trainer; the skin after wear). Rosie was exhibited as part of the Nude show at Fotografiskia, Stockholm, as well as being selected for the prestigious Bloomberg New Contemporaries show in 2021, with Majid explaining in an interview for the exhibition’s platform that, by “morphing [the body] into a new and unfamiliar form” what we think of as being real is destabilised. That much is apparent in Crease (2021), exhibited at the Slade School of Fine Art MA degree show, in which a black and white photograph of what appears to be a fairly innocuous antique chair, on closer inspection, features erotic mouldings.
The artist is now studying Film Aesthetics at the University of Oxford. It’s a logical step for Majid, who often turns to video and film in her practice – “I’ve never studied film in such a focused way before,” she tells NR over email, “so it’s also helped me to dig deeper into current interests.” In particular, the artist has been “looking into the close-up shot, and the relationship that this sort of shot has to both intimacy and abjection (as facilitated by the camera’s proximity to that which is being filmed).” In previous video works such Macro (2020) and concave/convex (2018), Majid furthers her investigation of the body – animal and human, respectively. In both pieces, the natural surfaces of Majid’s surface (fur, saliva, tongues) take on an almost unnatural quality, creating an interesting counterpoint to the way in which the artist grants synthetic fabrics, by contrast, an organic quality. By turning to a range of materials, mediums and methods throughout her practice, Majid’s work challenges, or distorts, the boundaries of that which we might think of as being diametrically opposed: to that end, how concrete, and how different, are what we think of, or see, as being ‘real’ or ‘alien’?
NR: Am I correct in thinking that Rosie is printed on latex, which makes me wonder how the layering of material features in your work?
LM: Rosie is actually printed directly to vinyl, the printer however uses latex inks (commonly used to produce banners, outdoor signage, etc.) Although the work isn’t printed onto latex, this is a material which I frequently use in my work, and one that I always seem to come back to. I’m interested in the close relationship between latex and the body. It is a stretchy, skin-like material that, in its use as a material of fetishwear, sits directly on the surface of the body, fusing to the form of the wearer in a moment of sweaty skin-on-skin contact. I think this speaks to a layering of surfaces that you bring up. Latex definitely operates in this way; as a non-porous material often used to craft tightly fitting garments, it effectively sticks to and becomes an extension of the body of the wearer, and an extension of the skin itself. Layering, in this case, works to facilitate transformation through dress (change in appearance and physique/sexual release/role play etc.)
NR: What is your process of working with, and sourcing, different materials? And how do you navigate working in different mediums?
LM: Sometimes this is quite an intuitive process, of feeling seduced by the physical properties of a given surface. I also think that it’s important to pay attention to what an image or object may need, be it a specific surface or printing ink. With Rosie, for example, I knew that the image needed to be printed on vinyl given the connection that this material has to window displays and advertising.
“I’ve always felt it important to approach image and surface in such a way whereby they feel bonded or dependent on one another.”
NR: You recently had a joint exhibition, not yet, with your on-going collaborator, Louis Newby at the San Mei Gallery – what does the process of collaboration, more generally, look like for you?
LM: I’ve always been drawn to collaboration given the potential to enrich one’s work through the inclusion of new voices. This was much the case with the video piece in not yet, where we worked with different collaborators who were able to contribute to and elevate the work in various ways, through animation, sound design and AI programming.
NR: And, in terms of your work with Louis Newby, how do you navigate your separate artistic practices to create collaborative work, and a joint show?
LM: Our collaborative practice truly sits in the space between our separate practices. Louis and I have spoken before about the idea that our collaborative work depends on our own practices/individual interests to take shape in the way that it does, and yet does something different to each of our practices as it sits between the two.
NR: Found objects (film, comics, journals) feature in not yet, whilst your Instagram account combines your work, personal photography and other imagery – does the concept of the archive, and the act of archiving, feature in your work?
LM: Instagram is tricky, I can never really figure out how to use it. For now, it exists as a combination of different sorts of images, as you’ve described. I also struggle with the app given its harsh terms and conditions and censorship rules. Instagram aside, images have always been important to me. They feed directly into the work I make and are an invaluable source of research (found images, pixelated screenshots, scans of images from magazines, my own photographs). I enjoy the process of collecting images, perhaps this act of collecting can be thought of as archival. Louis and I also have a shared archive of found images pulled from a vast array of sources which we use to generate print works.
NR: How do you negotiate the human body and other animal forms (real, imagined) in your work?
LM: One thing that immediately comes to mind is the undifferentiated body – a form that points to a potential growth/change/development. I find it interesting to think about how one could present a moment of transformation— how a still image, for example, could hold this moment.
“When does one body morph into another, or suggest a form exterior to its appearance?”
This is something that you often see in science fiction/supernatural horror – for example, at which point does the arching of the spine/contorting of the body tip into an anatomical language that suddenly becomes unfamiliar? I’ve been thinking a lot about [Soviet film director and theorist, Sergei] Eisenstein’s idea of ekstasis in this way, which he explores as a transition ‘to something else’, from one state to another (‘to be beside oneself’).
NR: You’ve spoken previously about seduction and repulsion in relation to beauty – how do these two, supposedly opposing, concepts feature in your work more generally?
LM: I think I focus more on how the two come together, in such a way that they rely on one another to produce a specific effect/affect. I suppose that seduction and repulsion go well together in that their marriage can be used as a tool to reconsider beauty. Pushing oppositional forces together within the same pictorial space also creates tension; it’s a combination which unsettles. I don’t think this is necessarily specific to the seduction/repulsion relationship, but in broader terms I’m reminded of the movement of the body during pleasure- contorted, arched, muscles clenched on the one hand, and giving into total pleasure and bodily sensation in a moment of release on the other. I’d like to situate my work within a moment like that, one which teeters on an edge between oppositions.
Credits
Images · LAILA MAJID
https://lailamajid.net/
The construction of a new system, a new process, and a new language marks the beginning of Juan Carlos Sancho and Sol Madridejos’ work at their Madrid-based practice Sancho-Madridejos Architecture Office, established in 1982. Gazing upon their architecture and design, the structure bends and folds, an inquiry on the limits of the materials. The flexibility of the duo’s minds materializes into products of architecture and designs that they have developed, a signature that now lines their ethos: the concept of fold.
The analysis of each item starts with what they call a base-fold – the foundation that contains all of a project’s required DNA – that generates a process tailored to the work, defining a line, an identity, and a language of its own. The spatial quality becomes elevated, enhanced by the structure’s relationship with light, orientation, or location that swings from one criterion to another. “From this starting point, many of the pieces are prone to a specific location or a specific time, bringing out variables from the context which we sometimes only discover later on. These processes are not linear since each step has a permanent effect on the rest,” the duo states. For NR Magazine, the concept of fold coincides with the concept of celebration.
NR: I would love to start with the idea you developed and grew: the concept of fold. How did it happen, and what kind of research did you have to go through to materialize this?
SM: We have worked with the concept of fold for the past 20 years. It all began with an interview with the sculptor Eduardo Chillida, during a walk in Chillida Leku, where his works are exhibited. He told us that ‘the fold creates a spatial, formal and structural unity’ and that ‘the fold creates spaces.’ This encouraged us to investigate the role it had to play in the field of architecture.
In this part, could you guide us on how the concept of fold works?
A fold works as a formal-spatial unit. This is the core concept of a fold. Not everything that folds is a fold; it can also be a pleat.
The process reminds me of origami. Are there cultures that influence your work ethics and design flows? How do you infuse them into your projects?
A fold is not origami. It can seem like it, but it is basically the opposite. To fold is to generate a strain, an action, a cut on a plane, and study how it transforms topologically because of this action. It is easy to confuse them, but they are nothing alike.
You mentioned that your process touches upon a unique spatial quality that is enhanced by its relationship with light, orientation, or location. Without one or two of these elements, would you say your space would be incomplete? How essential is it to form these three elements into a single force?
“Form, space, and structure along with light, location, scale (the human being), and material, form the single conjunction of a fold.”
If any of these variables are missing, a fold is incomplete and does not work. They all carry the same weight and deliver specific qualities.
Could you elaborate on this statement of yours: These processes are not linear, since each step has a permanent effect on the rest.
These processes are laborious and take up a lot of time. In our office, we have around 500 different fold models with some of them very alluring, but not all of them are folds; some are pleats.
“A fold has, in the first place, to answer to mechanical behavior. It has to be structural and coherent by itself. Once this is the case, work can continue.”
As we focus on Celebration, I’d love to know how you celebrate creativity and architecture outside of your office?
There are several levels of celebration. First, seeing a finished work moves us, and that is the first celebration. This is best enjoyed among the people that have taken part in the design and the construction processes.
Taking photos of a finished building and participating in the photo essay also stimulate us as we get to see the project from other positions and points of view.
Friends and architects visiting a building enriches the perception of the project.
Finally, its use by the client is also a celebration, seeing a building in use complements its own meaning.
Credits
Images · Sanchos Madridejos
https://www.sancho-madridejos.com/
Last year, Alain Levitt started sharing his archive of photography on a dedicated Instagram account. As a photographer in New York in the aughts, Levitt had turned his back on photography by the time the decade was out. In the intervening years, Levitt’s photographs gathered dust, whilst film photography was supplanted by the rise of social media. From the perspective of 2022, it doesn’t seem a stretch to say that, since its launch twelve years ago, Instagram has changed our relationship to photography. In its early days, the photo-sharing app was characterised by a limited choice of filters and corresponding borders to boot; the more vintage an Instagram post looked and seemed, the better it was. But what happens when photographs – real 35mm photographs – taken in the years just before Instagram’s launch reach an age where they become ‘vintage’ themselves? For something to be deemed ‘vintage’, it has to be at least twenty years old; one particularly striking photograph shared by Levitt on Instagram is of the New York blackout of 2003.
Having moved to New York in the early aughts, Levitt started photographing and documenting the people and the scene(s) around him. The city’s nightlife and streetlife, bodegas and bars, its residents – native and adopted, making it, or faking it, are captured with an energy and nonchalance that Instagram users could never. Looking at Levitt’s photographs is a who’s who of New York life, and a glance at the Instagram comments on his posts confirms as much. Director Spike Jonze is photographed simultaneously taking Levitt’s picture – does he have Jonze’s photograph of him, one commenter asks? There are shots of Chloë Sevigny, Kim Gordon, Cat Power (under a table) and Mischa Barton, as well as photographs in which the Levitt’s subjects see themselves, an old flatmate or someone who was once a familiar face around town. Recognisable faces from New York’s skate scene also appear frequently – from the late Harold Hunter, photographer Tino Razo, Fucking Awesome’s Jason Dill, filmmaker William Strobeck and artist Mark Gonzales.
Levitt’s photographs may be from an era before Instagram, but they’re as relevant as ever. Last year, Vice profiled Levitt’s photography – linking a previous feature that he had contributed to on the site. A banner at the top of the page warns: “FYI. This story is over 5 years old.” The feature is, in fact, from 2007, but it’s a curious moment when photography that was made and shared on the internet in its infancy is now old enough to be vintage. Coincidentally, the newest social media app, TikTok, recently declared the return of “Indie Sleaze”, a catch-all for the fashions and music of the aughts. Enough time has passed for the early 00’s to seem cool again (or just cool, for those too young to have been there the first time round), and Levitt’s work is (re)finding itself. Indeed, a photograph of the late artist, Dash Snow, that was taken by Levitt appears on a t-shirt for Supreme’s upcoming S/S 2022 collection. And in February this year, a book launch party for Levitt’s collaboration with Spotz Club took place at Public Access – an East Village gallery founded by Leo Fitzpatrick of Kids fame. Time passes, places change and people seemingly move on, but as Levitt’s photography shows, the energy of youth is timeless.
NR: What was it like revisiting these photographs for the first time?
AL: It wasn’t easy. For a long time, I felt like I had failed as a photographer. I took pictures every day but never got much work and certainly was never able to make it into a career. I wasn’t thinking of these pictures as what they were, documents of a beautiful moment in time, but as validation of my own inadequacies. Thankfully I got over it.
NR: And what led you to revisit these in the first place?
AL: Just prior to the pandemic a friend needed early aughts images for a potential project. I didn’t go too deep, but what I found brought back not just memories but how I felt back then. That really surprised me.
“What I thought was going to be painful ended up being more like finding the fountain of youth. After that, it was on.”
NR: Apparently ‘Indie Sleaze’ has returned; what does it feel like to see the return of this aesthetic of the aughts?
AL: I love it. For a year in high school, I dressed in nothing but thrift store bought disco era clothing. Bell bottoms, tight striped shirts with giant lapels, etc. I completely romanticized that era. I can only hope this is coming from a similar place. Luckily, I was taking the pictures. I cringe when I think of my style back then.
NR: Do you think the New York you captured on camera still exists? If not, at what point did it become “the past”?
AL: It definitely does. This city is alive right now. Everybody’s an artist, everyone’s working on a project. It’s vibrant. The energy is so similar to when I arrived in 2000. I’m very inspired by it but just a little too tired to want to participate.
NR: You’ve been sharing your photographs on Instagram, what’s it like seeing people share their stories and memories of them?
AL: It’s beautiful. I can put up an image and have twenty people comment with completely different memories. I have the picture, but collectively we tell the story.
NR: If your photographs from the aughts could be characterised as celebrating one thing, what would that be?
AL: Youth for sure. We were young enough to not give a fuck. Young enough to think that anything was possible and not deal with the repercussions of our actions. And young enough to feel like we were special.
“It was a beautiful delusional time. Real life came after.”
NR: Has sharing your work made you want to pick up a camera again?
AL: It did! I stopped carrying a camera right after my first daughter was born in 2012. I still shot photos but mostly of my kids and like almost everybody, they were taken on a phone. After going through my archive, and getting some much-welcomed attention, I realized how much more weight I give to my images when shoot them on film. It’s silly but I care more about them; they mean more to me. So out came all of my cameras from storage and I kind of felt like it was time to finish what I had started. I don’t go out much at night these days but when I walk around, I always have at least one on me. It feels right.
NR: Did you keep in touch with the people in your photographs? And has sharing your photography rekindled any lost friendships (for you, or for others in the comment section!)
AL: Luckily, I have. My wife and I have owned a restaurant on the Lower East Side for the last fourteen years. Because of it we’ve stayed connected with many of the people from my images. But it’s been sporadic. Someone comes into town and then you won’t see them again for years, sometimes. When I started posting photos on IG, it was like everybody was visiting at once; we were a group again. Sharing memories and stories from what was the most magical time in many of our lives, it was like a hipster high school reunion. No offence, everyone.
Credits
Images · Alain Levitt
https://www.instagram.com/alainlevitt/
“Ah rabbit holes, I know them” texts Mark Leckey, after I ask if we can delay our interview. I have a list of questions I could put to the artist, but I’ve lost myself in the matrix of his work. And where do you start? Perhaps with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, the 1999 video that put Leckey on the art world map. But that isn’t the beginning of the artist’s story, something the artist himself has subsequently explored. Leckey grew up in Ellesmere Port, a town used as an overspill for Liverpool in the late 1960s that looks back towards the city on the other side (the wrong side, Leckey would say) of the River Mersey. Leckey studied art in Newcastle, moved to London and, having not found success, decamped to the States for a while. Leckey has spoken previously about how, in the mid-to-late 1990s, he was interested in the music videos that were coming out at the time. But Fiorucci, the result of that intrigue, was less MTV and more ICA. And it was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London that the video was first screened. Fiorucci, with its thumping music over a montage of found footage of Northern Soul dancers and hedonistic ravers, may have since entered the domain of British art, but the artist didn’t become a household name at the time. That arguably came later in 2008, when Leckey won the Turner Prize for his exhibition Industrial Light and Magic at Le Consortium in Dijon, France – a show which concretely outlined the recurring themes that have since come to define his practice, in which the post-industrial landscape of his youth and the emergence of an alternative, quasi-digital landscape in its place, are recurring motifs.
A week later, I meet Leckey – wearing a full-length white fur coat, matching plaid shirt and bottoms, and his signature pearl earring – at a pub near the artist’s North London home. Originally, our interview was scheduled to take place on Zoom, but I have a hunch that the rabbit-hole questions I have prepared could better benefit from meeting Leckey, a self-proclaimed hermit, in person. And over a pot of tea, we begin by discussing the art world, the internet and what it means to be a working-class art student today. It’s a topic Leckey has pondered over for a long time, but now, he suggests, if he were in his early twenties, he’d be prioritising NFTs over art school. “I don’t think NFTs are just bad drawings of monkeys,” Leckey says – there might be more to it than that. And if there’s a novelty to NFTs now, the German electronic band Kraftwerk seemed novel, too, at first. “You don’t know what the tail of that is going to be, or the direction it will go.” It’s in no way surprising that Leckey is thinking about NFTs, even if he says he is sceptical because of the environmental arguments made against them; he’s been dubbed the ‘artist of the YouTube generation’, and an art career spent scouring the internet for soundbites and videoclips to use in his work means that, naturally, Leckey is all too aware of what’s happening online. But, having rewatched Fiorucci on YouTube rather than the gallery setting it was made for, I wonder if the artist now considers his work to be made for the internet, or still to be absorbed in a physical environment?
“Both, I think. I like the immediacy of putting something on Instagram.” Leckey has an upcoming show at Cabinet Gallery in South London, and so when that opens, he will also share the work on social media. But using Instagram doesn’t necessarily give Leckey a clearer indication of what people think of his output. “People can go ‘fire!’ or whatever,” he says in relation to the emoji – one of eight pre-set reaction emojis that Instagram suggests for its users in the comment section. “[But] I don’t know why they liked it. And then you can have an opening and people just sort of nod as they walk out the door – so I can’t gauge any response from that.” Fiorucci was one of the rare occasions Leckey got an immediate reaction, with people coming up to the artist and telling him what they thought of the piece. “And then, nothing happened,” he says of Fiorucci, “it slowly percolated. But it got its maximum impact twenty years later, around 2019.” The resurgence of interest in Fiorucci coincided with a huge show at Tate Britain, O’ Magic Power of Bleakness, in which the artist recreated a motorway bridge from the M53 in Merseyside to go alongside a new video work, Under Under In.
But it was also around this time that rave culture of the late 1980s and 1990s enjoyed something of a renaissance. Perhaps that yearning for anything closely resembling the rave scene could explain the sudden interest in Fiorucci, even if the other side of it – Northern Soul – remains firmly in the domain of a particular vein of Northern working-class culture. Nostalgia is something Leckey often speaks of, so I wonder if he sees the renewed interest in Fiorucci’s depiction of rave for a younger audience as (misplaced) nostalgia? “Yeah, but then, it’s not,” he says. Growing up in the eighties, he was nostalgic for the sixties, the equivalent decade for today.
“Woodstock and all the rest of it seemed impossible, and I guess that’s part of the thing with rave. It seems both exciting and intoxicating, but also depressing.”
Leckey describes modern-day nostalgia as a “contemporary condition, of technology, of capitalism.” That much is evident in the 2015 video, Dream English Kid, 1964 – 1999 AD, in which the artist used found footage to recreate his childhood, having seen a clip online of a Joy Division concert he’d also attended in his youth. By using found footage, clips from television shows and a 3D rendering of that same M53 bridge, Dream English Kid doesn’t depict Leckey’s own childhood per se, but reconstructs a kind of collective memory. In that sense, he describes nostalgia as being algorithmic in a way; “it’s like data passing through your body.” An equivalence could be gentrification, “in that, as an artist or whatever, you’re just moving into space, blithely unaware of where you’re leading society.” So when it comes to nostalgia, Leckey says, “you’ll connect with these things in a very real way, but you’re actually just at the forefront of clothes manufacturers and all the rest of it that are going to come in your wake and exploit that.”
There’s a bit in Fiorucci where a voiceover lists off clothing brands – Fiorucci, of course, but also Lee, Fila, Burberry, Slazenger, Lyle & Scott, Lacoste and Aquascutum – to name just a few. These were the brands of choice for the Casuals, a subculture of football supporters in the 1980s associated with designer gear and hooliganism (Leckey was, for lack of other entertainment, a Casual for a period in his teens). And like return of rave to popular culture, the brands that defined the Casual’s Terracewear seem to have seeped back into the collective consciousness, too. But, anyway, it takes a few listens to fully grasp the brands that are listed in quick succession in Fiorucci, the voiceover taking on a rhythm that seems to mimic the hardcore beats that Leckey samples throughout the video. Was that deliberate, on Leckey’s part? “I think when I did that, it was more out of embarrassment,” he says – “because it was me and I didn’t want my voice on it. So, I pitched it down and put loads of reverb on it.” The result was something more akin to an incantation. “And I suppose Fiorucci is about conjuring up a religious experience.”
Under Under In also plays on the idea of the almost religious dedication that is afforded to brands. Across five separate vertical videos that seem to mimic the world seen through Snapchat, we’re introduced to a group of kids at the centre of the film, their identity fixed in the brands they wear: Nike Air, Adidas, C.P. Company, North Face. “We’re Stone Islanders,” one boasts. But these kids also seem to betray their youth, drinking a £1.29 Maltesers drink, the sight of which might elicit a Proustian madeleine moment for anyone attending an English secondary school near a corner shop in the twenty-first century. The kids also recite the names of car brands they’re too young to drive, let alone own. But if Under Under In can be seen as a Fiorucci equivalent for a subsequent generation, Leckey thinks that the moment of brand affiliation as self has passed. “I read something really interesting about subcultures in the twentieth century,” he explains “and essentially how using consumption to define yourself has been wholly exhausted.” Now, it’s through opinions, not brands. “I listen to that bit in Fiorucci now and to me, it seems almost quaint.”
If the world that shaped Fiorucci and Under Under In has moved on, Leckey’s work continues to be a source of inspiration for others. There are 327 comments on the Fiorucci stream on Leckey’s YouTube channel – musings from the artist himself over the eleven years since it was first uploaded, and from viewers recalling the first time they saw the film, or the memories it evokes. In one comment, a user asks if they can sample part of Fiorucci. “It’s all part of the Creative Commons. Get in there,” Leckey responds. Soundbites from Fiorucci previously made their way into Jamie XX’s 2014 track, All Under One Roof Raving but, I wonder, so much of Leckey’s work is gleaned from what he finds online – how does he feel about others doing that with his work? “I wish they did it more!” he exclaims. “I mean, it’s just stuff really and it’s there for the taking.” Leckey describes found footage as being a surrogate that allows him to communicate something. “If someone can do that with my work in the same way, then that would delight me.”
In last year’s To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body), Leckey repeats, reconstructs and deconstructs a ten second video he found on Twitter over the course of almost nine minutes. The video clip sees a boy take a run up before jumping through the side of a bus stop, his friends, out of shot, laughing (in shock? out of amusement?) as he crashes onto the floor surrounded by glass. But what was it about that clip that was so compelling to Leckey? “I always try and avoid drawing in theory, partly because I’m going to do it really badly, but it’s that Roland Barthes book, Camera Lucida; there’s something in that image that draws you in and connects in some way.” That could be, say, “some hi-res, beautiful, well-shot image,” but in Leckey’s case, it’s “some piece of shit” that affects him so resolutely. “And it’s like, why? What the fuck? Why is this making me feel anything?” He’s been thinking a lot recently about something the sci-fi writer, Philip K Dick, said: the symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum.
“So there’s God in the midst of this shitty piece of videotape of this stupid kid.”
But that stupid clip of that stupid kid resonated more deeply with Leckey – after all, his work is usually, in some way, autobiographical. “As soon as I started watching it, it was like, I did shit like that when I was young.” But whilst Leckey’s work connects with lived experience, the process of making the video is as important. If Leckey set out with different intentions when he began making Fiorucci (it was, he says, intended as a kind of documentary), it quickly became about the medium itself. “I was looking at these VHS tapes and a strange intimacy and distance developed as I was watching. Something about the footage compelled me to look closer into the ghostliness. I’d find myself wanting to merge with it, but at the same time it’s continually pushing me out and repelling me because it’s a ghost and it’s the past – and it’s impossible.” To the Old World comes from a similar place – of simultaneous intimacy and distance. “We live in this continuously mediated space, and all I feel I can do is try and find some intimacy or immediacy in that.” It’s somewhere in this space that Leckey thinks we now reside, where memories and the present exist on the same plane. When it comes to the video clip from To the Old World, “I can be that boy jumping through the bus stop, I can one of his mates watching, and I can be me watching them, watching him. I can be all these things at the same time.”
To the Old World, which was commissioned for Art Night and toured the UK in autumn 2021, followed a period in which Leckey – like many throughout the pandemic – struggled to make anything, let alone the video. But, he says, he began to see the bus stop in the clip as a sort of portal. “I look at it now, and realise it’s made out of a kind of frustration. There’s this kind of compression in it, and then it’s looking for a release.” At the end of To the Old World, after Leckey’s stupid bus stop kid has been turned into a repetitive motif, rendered in 3D, and re-enacted by an acrobat who recreates the jump from various angles, the piece ends in song – “a song of joy” as the boy disappears into the glint of fractured glass. Artistically, it’s a kind of ultimate release, but the ending also reflects another side of Leckey’s creative output – making music and hosting a monthly show on the Hackney-based online radio station, NTS. Does he find soundbites and music in the same way he finds footage? “There’s less choice with video,” Leckey says; he has a library of footage and sound, but the latter is much vaster. The problem with video is that, sometimes, it seems out of bounds, watermarked in a way that sound isn’t. But Leckey tried to approach To the Old World in the way he would making music or putting together an NTS show – music, with a visual element.
“I want to find a way of using video how I use sound, because it involves a sort of not caring, or not caring so much.”
When Leckey explains that his work is about getting to the root of what compels him about the footage and materials that he is drawn to, he jokingly asks why he “can’t just go out into a field and enjoy nature instead?” But, it seems, that is precisely what his next work will be. He is currently working on an accompaniment to the bus stop video which he summarises as a being “about a hermit getting joyful.” Leckey’s inspiration for this work comes from Orthodox Christian iconography – paintings of religious saints that don’t adhere to a traditional, Western understanding of art history. “These icons are not images or pictures,” Leckey says, but portals;
“When you look at an icon of a saint, you’re looking into heaven.”
So the artist has set about finding his own portal (or, a ‘channel as grace’ as the act of looking into heaven through an icon is called). “I went out to Ally Pally on a really beautiful, sunny day and recorded myself getting overwhelmed by the world.” The idea stemmed from the artist’s contemplation of hope, and hopelessness, during the pandemic – and a curiosity, then, to delve more into the divine. There’s a community of people that Leckey follows on Substack and TikTok who are investigating something similar. “Like I said before, the divine shows up at the trash stratum, and maybe it is.” The trash stratum here is TikTok, where users in Leckey’s orbit are attempting to grapple with what may lie beyond, or within, the internet (comparisons are made between the structure of the world wide web, and its similarities with NASA’s images of space). “There’s a strange confluence of things,” Leckey notes. “I’ve felt this for a while about technology – that it’s inducing this strange kind of medieval state, in the sense that they cohabited two realms between the spiritual and the profane. We sort of exist in two realms now. It’s the immaterial space, like you originally asked me about the internet, and the only antecedent I can think of is the medieval.” And with that, Leckey heads off to Sainsbury’s to get some bits.
Credits
Images · Mark Leckey
https://markleckey.com/
The first three-dimensional, physical object that multidisciplinary artist Illya Goldman Gubin made comments on the everyday obstacles creatives face in a world dominated by consumerist logic. From the descriptions, several images may come up – glitching computer screens, broken doors, burned bridges, thrashed rooms, or maxed out credits cards – but Gubin built his storyline around an object famed for the hierarchy metaphor: a ladder. “The sculpture is a physical manifestation of the internalized struggle to climb the proverbial social ladder, our personal hopes, dreams, and challenges manifesting in a sculpture of rough materiality,” says the artist. Soon, viewers will find out the interconnectedness of everything Gubin works on.
An atelier and an art shop define the homes of Gubin. The first sees the continuation of his artworks, a deviation from a fashion line or merch and a journey towards works of art created from works of art. “The greed for a dialogue between clothes and artworks becomes a study. The clothes are created with the Japanese idea “Ichi-go, ichi-e”. This means ‘One Time, One Meeting’ which reminds us of the ephemeral nature of everything around us,” the brand states. It lies upon the idea that one can never dip their toes into the same lake twice as the water flows – always moving, never settling.
From this ethos, the atelier comes to life. It breaks the binary continuum of thinking and feeling, science and mysticism, tradition and innovation, handmade and luxury goods, and perfection and imperfection. Gubin’s installations underline the complexity of human consciousness to unearth the depth of self-understanding. He borrows terms from Judaism and infuses them into his words, serving as reminiscences to the cultural imprint. For the artist, the culmination of multiple perspectives, fused with self-reflection, gives birth to a realm of new sanity, a marriage between codes of the past and newly acquired knowledge.
Gubin not only explores the ambiguities of modern life, challenged by the rapidly shifting conditions of the present, but also creates multi-layered reflections of everyday perception. He transforms paradigms, materials, space, and time into works that usher the audience into a sensorial experience, an invitation to think, feel, see, hear, and meditate. From that cocoon of meditation, Gubin captures the zen and essence of perpetuity and mold them into sculptures, canvasses, furniture, bags, bowls, t-shirts, lamps, soils and so much more. His body of works remains in a constant state of flux, moving in and out of the spirit to understand the self, to open the mind and heart, and to liberate one’s spirit.
For NR, he celebrates his voice and visions as a multidisciplinary artist through a tone he knows best: poetic, philosophical, polished, and pragmatic.
NR: Where and how did your fascination with “breaking the binary continuum of thinking and feeling, science and mysticism, and blurring the line between tradition and innovation, handmade and luxury goods, perfection and imperfection” start? What personal experiences nudged you to found I G G?
IGG: It started from questioning my inner self and finding answers in different areas and philosophies. I wanted to bring ideas and questions together. I wanted to start an open dialogue.
“It is all done for energy and the closeness to the earth.”
Your atelier is divided into an art shop and a catalog. Starting with the art shop, you reiterate that “it is not a fashion line or merch, but works of art that are created from works of art.” Is there a reason you’ve stressed this?
Yes. I try to push the boundaries of a clothing piece by combining and intertwining it with my artistic practice which, as the result, becomes a significant enlargement of my work.
For instance, the surface of the Struktur shoes is ‘hand-worked’ with the same medium as the ‘Struktur’ artworks. Additionally, the shoes are physically attached to a ‘Struktur’ artwork, which has an indirect invitation to be removed by the owner by force. The end result is a state of wearable artwork.
As for your catalog, I am looking at your first project (“Ladder”) and your recent (“Karton Vase”). Between these years, what changes did you make and experience in your artistic, creative, and business style?
My mind became more balanced. My visions are clearer, and the narratives become more conscious. An artist is a student of his own studies trying to find an answer to a question of one’s personal experience.
How do you perceive timelessness during the shifting conditions of our present?
My own beliefs, interests, and paradigms are guiding my open-mindedness. Timelessness is still influenced by the Zeitgeist;
“the only difference arises from how you process the flow of information from the observation to the understanding, a contemporary way of thinking.”
Could you share a few projects that resonate well with you, projects that seem to converse with you? What are their backstories?
My latest projects cannot be really examined separately. They all share a similar spirit, a similar beginning, and a similar aim. My aim is always to heal my spectators’ precoded opinion and/or thinking which is given by their experience.
My ‘Karton’ furniture evokes a non-useable feeling, a forgotten childish dream. ‘Profil’ sculptures give spectators a distinctive look of regular fabrics hanging from the ceiling. My ‘Juxtaposition’ piece revokes a human act of protecting objects for their longevity.
All of these do not appear to be what they look like at first glance. I always encourage the spectators to interact with my work.
“I believe that only through the physical dialogue can my work achieve an ending. The idea is bigger than the outcome.”
In line with our theme Celebration, how do you celebrate yourself as an artist, a designer, and a creative? What joys outside your work do you live up?
To be honest, it feels very difficult to acknowledge the point where one can put a checkmark on the work. The work is always in the process. However, I am trying to learn to celebrate every day. The sum of the process is the outcome of the work. Living in the present can help one to realize happiness.
Is there anything that we should look forward to from you in the upcoming months?
At this time of answering the questions, I am in Los Angeles. In April, I will participate in a large group show at Side Gallery where I am excited to show my ‘Karton’ furniture series.
When I think further from here, I do not know what is coming next. Probably this is being in the now?
Credits
Images · Illya Goldman Gubin
https://www.igg-atelier.de/
