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Paris Performance Calendar

“As Above So Below”: Mark Leckey Does a Good Job [By Tracy Danison]

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“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris


These days, as, each morning, a body must crouch up and frog run from the Huey Combat Utility Copter of Personal Belief into the unending Battle of The Whips and Scorns, they need metaphysical reassurance. Not an ethical dewicate wittle kissie-wissie, but, as it were, a hearty thumbs-up from a beefy philosophical Sarge or Sarge-equivalent. Mark Leckey, whose installation As Above So Below is at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, until 20 July, is, in at least one way, that Sarge.

Leckey is an artist who knows reality and transcendence of reality are rooted in more obscure mechanisms and broader cultural beliefs as well as personal experience. So, his work may very well provide an anxious body with that hearty thumbs up. If not, a body will provide themself with a couple or three wry smiles.

 

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“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Since the late 1990s, Leckey has been exploring culture, technology, music and memory. As he sees it, the current obscure mechanisms and beliefs from above have been here-below since the Renaissance. So, for As Above So Below, thematically, Leckey seamlessly integrates the tradition of the ecstatic vision into the 21st century quotidians of psychic displacements and dissociations, unexpected plague, future shock and louring technology. Artistically, Leckey links the technology, esthetics and media of marketing and advertising with, especially, broadly Renaissance and Baroque religious symbolism.

A large gargoyle-like statue of Job – an All-powerful God’s faithful servant and a vigorous Satan’s whiny plaything – is both at the topographical center of and media command post for the installation and source for an audio feed of mutter and lament. Job’s skin is explosively torn with fist-size and larger holes up and down and back to front of his body. Seemingly from the inside.

 

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“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris


At first, I thought the wounds were versions of corrupt flesh, recalling popped buboes or boils and thought Job might be an ultra-vi or video-game version of Saint Roche, the Baroque plague saint. Radiated out from Job, what amount to “chapels”, or, considering the Job-ean lament in the air, maybe teched-up “stations of the cross”. These use graphic styles from gaming and public-messaging iconography to touch on themes such as fear or the ambiguity of reality. They contain what amount to “relics” (contemplative or holy-looking objects) that are evoked through thematic legends, video-painting, other multimedia or just or objects whose style or intent suggests a different era.

The highly contemporary mediums of the relics integrate such period- or use- symbolic materials-techniques as gold leaf or such period-themed objects as a labyrinth-map or iconography such as a recurring stylized shining sun stamp (as on Baroque-style illuminated maps).

 

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“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Though there is of course an implicit narrative in joining together old and new, Leckey’s approach is to let an on-looker’s visual, sound and tactile experience of the installation work out the sense they want to give to it. They are never pressed to understand anything. They can just have fun if that’s all they wanna do. The non-directivity is also true in terms of the approach to technology and technique: transistors, chips, VDTs, brushes, paint and canvas are used as equal tools in putting a piece together. In the end, in this very technology-intensive installation, there is very little or no accent on technology.

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Elsa Coustou is curator for Mark Leckey’s “As Above So Below” multimedia installation, which I saw at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, on 31 March 2025. “As Above So Below” runs until 20 July 2025.


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