I don’t know when it started: Such is the density of Mark Leckey’s new film Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD, 2015, the thick pattern of its rhythm, that I could no more identify its first or last frame than I could the start or end of a drum loop (the film is on view at London’s Cabinet, through December 19). The exhibition’s sole work, Dream English Kid is a collage of new and found footage and sound that—along the lines of Leckey’s iconic 1999 reenvisioning of the U.K. rave scene, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore—posits the self as a matter of sampling. Thus, vintage footage of the shop front of a forgotten home-appliance retailer named Electrics cuts to a wall scrawled with the word leccy (British slang for home power meters, which, of course, also recalls the artist’s name). The film’s title (another name for Leckey himself) emerges momentarily in its soundtrack like a spell, each constituent word snatched from songs by John Lennon, Marianne Faithful, and The Pretenders, respectively. Referring in this way back to the artist’s persona, and his existing corpus (among the records seen in footage from a vinyl store is one by the English comic Kenneth Williams entitled “On Pleasure Bent,” the title of Leckey’s 2013 exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles)—Dream English Kid is also threaded with internal interconnections. Among the multiplying leitmotifs, circles, orbs, and discs phantasmagorically appear and reappear—in amateur footage of a lunar eclipse, a Frisbee, a midcentury rendering of a flying saucer, and the shape of a wall-mounted mirror in a voyeuristic midcentury vignette of a woman getting dressed, a scene that feels like the work’s libidinally charged core, its Rosebud moment. If there was a psychosexual implication to this, it’s not a new one: You could compare the fugue-like recurrence of these images to devices in the novels of Bataille or the films of David Lynch. In a way, though, this jarring feeling of familiarity, of a certain kind of inescapability, or threshold to subjective experience, is precisely the work’s compelling interest, and its real achievement. Look forward or think back, Leckey teases—you’ll end up, either way, at the same unseen place.
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