The source material at the center of Mark Leckey’s current exhibition at Gladstone is, in his words, “some piece of shit.” This piece of shit, a clip that Leckey found on Twitter in 2021, repeats 21 times in a video that loops across two screens around 55 times per day, five days a week, for four months straight.
The ostensibly banal clip features a boy hurling himself headfirst through the glass panel of a bus station, and each variation of the clip features a distinct edit—slow-motion, freeze frame, overlaid audio. Elsewhere, complete variations—a prelude to the scene, a 3D rendering of the bus stop, a re-enactment of the jump. The nine-minute video, titled To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) (2021), is the literal and conceptual centerpiece of Leckey’s exhibition. It is literal because a built structure resembling the bus station from the video occupies the gallery’s central space. On either side of the makeshift station, two screens, and on the walls opposite those screens, two more. In a nearby corner, two benches face the bus station. Leckey closes the loop between making and viewing, situating his viewer in a quasi-public space in which such clips are produced and consumed—thereby extending his practice of making work from an engaged rather than removed relationship to culture.
Also featured in the exhibition is Carry Me into the Wilderness (2022) a six-minute video centered on footage Leckey filmed on his phone while walking through Alexandra Park in London. The artist describes the transcendence he experienced during this walk, which he attempted and failed to capture, as a sort of “tremendous muchness, an excess of everything that was almost unbearable.” The omnipresent phone in these moments—and its inevitable failure to capture their muchness—reveals how the very apparatus meant to document experience becomes the barrier to its transmission.
Unlike To The Old World, which transforms source material “shitty in its resolution” into something revelatory, Carry Me into the Wilderness reverses the process, beginning with a moment of transcendence and leaving viewers with its digital detritus. Here, the screen functions more like a blind than the well-worn window metaphor, incarnating the paradox of trying to document transcendence through devices whose standardizing interfacing inherently secularize experience. The work’s failure to convey transcendence becomes its own kind of negative theology, where the impossibility of representing muchness becomes an honest gesture toward it. In this context, the glass in To The Old World looks less like the pane of a bus station and more like the lens of the phone camera, a shattering of this realist form of digital documentation.
The exhibition’s visual references oscillate between the historical and digital throughout, staging a collision between grace and abjection, transcendence and irreverence, fantasy and elegy. A series of apertures in one gallery wall open into screens cycling through images which align to reveal Mercy I Cry City (2024). The video depicts a medieval-inspired metropolis floating in ethereal weightlessness, otherworldly in the spectral flatness of screen space. The work draws heavily from Byzantine iconography and 14th century painting, responding to the broader resurgence of medieval art. The Middle Ages were marked by aristocratic wealth and pestilence, paralleling the circulation of these works within today’s rarified art market—a trend that coincided with our contemporary plague, the pandemic.
This artistic turn toward neo-medieval aesthetics manifests in exhibitions such as Gothic Spirit: Medieval Art from Europe (Luhring Augustine, 2020), The Fantasy of the Middle Ages (the Getty, 2022), and the current show at the Met, Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350. The contemporary-antiquity crossover also extends to auction houses, where Old Masters are increasingly marketed to young collectors. At the cinema, repertory theaters across New York City embrace medieval-themed classics, evidenced by the recent spate of Lancelot du Lac (1974) screenings and an upcoming Lincoln Center series of gothic horror programmed by Robert Eggers.
Where exhibitions such as the Met’s showcase narrative altarpieces and religious art, Leckey funnels medieval aesthetics—plausibly inspired by these very shows—through the 3D graphics tool Houdini, creating an uncanny inversion where historical imagery feels more digitized than the born-digital elements. In his hands, an ancient metropolis appears more futuristic than a video filmed a few years ago. The contemporary quality of Mercy I Cry City (2024) stems not from its newness nor technical novelty, but from its temporal displacement—existing not so much in the past as outside of this moment, even outside of time itself. This suggests not a linear progression forward in time, but a spatial and technological movement between past and future—less a chronological advance than a movement from the material to the virtual.
Leckey’s explanation of the apertures in Mercy I Cry City also applies to the show’s oversized phone screens: “they are not an image, or a picture, but a window through which we can mediate between material reality and disembodied realms, and between distant persons and ourselves.” His video directly engages with the form and format of the iPhone screen as surface, object, and medium. The screens on either side of the bus stop approximate the aspect ratio of the iPhone, the device used to capture and circulate the source material. Leckey deploys the visual syntax of the iPhone, using its dimensions, interfaces, and vernacular to construct the video’s diegetic space. Captions transcribing ecstatic speech (“O MY JESUS CHRIST O MY GOD YOU DID IT O MY GOD”) trade in traditional fonts for those native to Instagram and Snapchat.
The apertures, with their hypnotic, shifting imagery, mirror the swollen phone screens—both are portals that mediate our perception of material and “immaterial” realms. 3 Songs from the Liver centers on how screens—be they physical, digital, or corporeal—distill and distort reality, visualizing the isomorphisms between these varied interfaces of reality. Distinct from much contemporary video art that retreats into phoneless fantasies, Leckey’s screen-centric work rightly deploys the visual language that dominates our interactions with screens to highlight their affective affordances and constraints. Meditating on the exhibition title, Leckey explains that “the liver was once thought to be a kind of screen for mental images, like a mirror or a pool.” His cybernetic image of the liver as a screen eschews the reductive, outdated dichotomy between the corporeal self and digital interfaces, proposing instead that screens live within us.
Mark Leckey: 3 Songs from the Liver is on view through February 15 at Gladstone Gallery.
