Interview: Mark Leckey - Four/Four Magazine

In today’s fast-paced and ever changing network of club culture, we’re over aught with symbols from the past and warnings about the future, with little time in between to think of the present. One mind that managed to do such a thing was that of Mark Leckey, albeit almost twenty years ago, when he put together the cult classic visual art piece ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’. 

The TULCA festival of Visual Arts kicked off in Galway at the end of last week and as part of the calendar of events, Electric Garden & Theatre are hosting an in-club screening of the Liverpool native’s staple piece. The 14 minute audio/visual piece focuses on the sounds and images of a spritely rave era; splicing together footage of people dancing in a range of different settings with a seamless blend of rave-inspired sounds acting as a bed to the visuals throughout.

Visitors are welcome to check out the one of the Turner Award winning-artist’s most well known pieces in the environment in which it was originally hatched, showcasing the club in a different, more conventionally creative light, a feature the West of Ireland institution has long been well known for, working closely with the Galway Arts and Jazz festivals respectively over the past number of years.

Having previously penned articles on both the aesthetic and nostalgic nature of today’s clubbing landscape, we thought it would be best to get in touch with Leckey himself on the matter. Having won the Turner Prize in 2008 for his piece ‘Industrial Light and Magic’, the Liverpudlian is widely considered as one of the leading lights of contemporary visual arts, with his work being showcased in exhibitions all over the globe. Always one to be outspoken about his pieces and never shy of an-depth interview, a 10am call to unravel the current state of nightlife and how his almost 20 year old ode to rave shapes up against it was light work for the UK creative.

You’ve stated before that you like to wallow in the mire of nostalgia and view things, club culture in this instance, from an outsider’s point of view. How does the influence of nostalgia that was present when you made ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’ match up against the presence of nostalgia in today’s clubbing environment? 

“Let me move into a different room, me thinking room. Not that I live in a massive house but I just walked across the kitchen!

“I don’t know about nostalgia in club culture at the minute as those days are gone for me, I don’t go out. A few years ago it got sampled by Jamie XX, at that moment I could tell there was a nostalgia for the 90s that was coming from people who hadn’t been born when that music was being made.

“What it feels like to me is that I made Fiorucci nearly twenty years ago and whatever nostalgia there was for Fiorucci peaked about 2 or 3 years ago. It seems like it was in a nostalgic cycle when people’s interest in it really peaked and now not so much anymore. It got a bit hot a couple of years ago [laughs] and now that’s gone.”

The whole idea of club culture is being whacked onto anything and has definitely become a ‘trendy’ thing for brands and start ups to latch on to. From the perspective of someone who has created something that’s critically recognised as an influential part of club culture, how do you view today’s trends? 

“You could look at Fiorucci and say that essentially what I’ve done is museum-ify it. I’ve taken this thing that was alive and happening, that was about this moment of being present and I’ve kind of historicised it and frozen it. With YouTube and all the other platforms that’re available, you’re kind of engulfed by these images. The thing is with Fiorucci, I made it pre-YouTube and pre-internet, so all of the footage was very rare and when I got it I really fetishised it. With the video, it was me reveling in the fetish-ness of that, like ‘Oh, look what I’ve got!’. Now all of that footage and more and better is there on YouTube you can just stick that stuff together, you could do it in a day. You could just knock up a Fiorucci in a day!

“Things change and now the sense of being historically absent and finding your sense of place historically to produce that kind of nostalgia, I feel like that’s gone. Now it feels like we’re very much in the present, and that it’s very much a luxury to wallow in the nostalgic mire anymore.

“To me, nostalgia is toxic, it’s not entirely toxic, but it’s like a drug. There’s an instant buzz but you come down hard. You’re never present when you’re in a nostalgic state.”

“Nostalgia can produce a very A-political effect; you’re not tending to the world as it is, or it can produce a kind of right wing sort of nostalgia; everything you look back on is better and the complexity of today’s world is too much, that’s the obvious side of it. I made Fiorucci as a type of exorcism. It’s not entirely celebratory, I just wanted to get rid of this shit that was suffocating me, going back to what we were talking about, nostalgia is a bit of swamp; you don’t feel like you’re moving forward with it.”

At times it seems like with the accessibility of images and content online we find ourselves as a community looking too far forward or too far back and that we take the present for granted. 

“It’s kind of a paradox for me to have backwards thinking dance music. Dance music for me has always been the future, that’s what it’s born from; a hope for the future, that we’ll see better days. That’s the engine of dance music, it’s always forward facing so as soon as it starts turning its head over its shoulder it starts losing its momentum and the thing that propels forward. Maybe then it changes from dance music into something else. A lot of stuff that I hear that’s coming out right now seems very forward facing with that being said. There’s always been a queer sensibility in dance music that still seems to be pushing forward. It depends where it’s coming from, who’s producing, why they’re producing it and what they want from it. I don’t think you can say that all of club culture is inherently nostalgic.”

With Fiorucci being shown in a multi-functional nightlife space such Electric Garden & Theatre, does the piece get to viewed in its apex setting? On top of that, does using nightclubs and nightlife spaces for more recognised cultural things such as this in turn boost the outward perception of nightlife and electronic music? 

“One of the reasons I made it is because of the celebratory side of it. I made it in the 90s and I sort of started making it during Britpop and at that time, and today, the interest in intellectual stuff was always in rock music and stuff like that, they were always the ‘clever’ ones.

“Dance music was quite dismissed as being just repetitive and dumb and all the rest of it, especially for me, old hardcore and rave stuff is apparently dumb as fuck but for me, it’s sonically and intellectually brilliant.”

I still listen to it and I’m like how the fuck did you make that stuff?! It’s so adventurous, that to me is the quintessence of looking forward; they were in the moment.

“It wasn’t made with just an individual intelligence, but a group intelligence of such, sort of like a hive mind, which I think is more interesting than what Radiohead have got to say! There was some sort of class snobbery involved as well, it was working class music so there was a snobbery attached as regards dance music. I wanted to kind of fix it. That was the fuel and energy I had behind it; nostalgia plus a sort of fuck you mentality, I don’t know who I was saying fuck you to, probably some straw men that weren’t really there but that’s what it felt like to me. But now, there are endless talking heads of people from my generation yacking on about how good it was back during the second summer of love. What I like about Fiorucci is that it’s not just an exercise of nostalgia or celebration, as I was making it, it became the recordings that were made of those moments and what they are and what they do to you. Part of the nostalgia when you’re watching Fiorucci is that it’s not just about dance culture but the fact that you’re looking back at images and sound. It’s a balance of the state between despair and ecstasy [laughs]” 

The full schedule of events at the TULCA festival is available here, with more on ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’ here. 

Coili Collins - Four/Four Magazine

08.11.2018

Exploring nostalgia and harmony through TULCA

TULCA curator Linda Shevlin on the ideas behind this year's festival of the visual arts.

SYNTONIC STATE is the title of the 16th edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts which opens tomorrow, Friday November 2, and continues to November 18, featuring work by more than 20 artists.

TULCA 2018 includes new commissions, existing works, performances, talks, and events, and among the exhibiting artists are Jesse Jones, who represented Ireland in 2017’s Venice Biennale, Cyprien Gaillard, and Turner Prize-winner Mark Leckey.

The festival takes cues from Galway’s history, and from the concept of nostalgia. The comfort we take in looking to the past – particularly during times of crisis – forms the premise for multiple artistic responses. TULCA 18 takes its title from the psychology term 'culturally syntonic', meaning to be in harmony with one’s environment. In a time of mass migration and displacement, the search for a ‘syntonic state’ prompts nostalgia in popular culture and sees its use as a political device to incite fear and anger - themes explored in various ways throughout the TULCA programme.

The programme is curated by Linda Shevlin who outlined her approach to the event. “When I started thinking about it I was very conscious of what is happening politically, socially and the state that we are in," she says. "I noticed that politically there is a return to nostalgia in things like Brexit and the Trump campaign. I was interested in how that affected us in western society and how effective nostalgia can be as a political device. I was also thinking about Galway and its associations with the historical meaning of nostalgia around its past as a merchant and marine city. I took that idea and looked at artists who deal with that subject in their work.”

Linda explains how the idea of harmony embodied in the TULCA title, Syntonic State manifests in the programme. “By its nature, curating the festival is around finding synchronicity within the works and finding their common ground where they are brought together," she says. "There are some old works such as Mark Leckey’s which dates back to 1999, so explores a different environment to what we are living in now. In pulling all these together and placing them throughout the fabric of the city it forms a syntonic state by presenting the work in this way.”

'In Nostalgic Listening Club, people are invited to bring a piece of music and play it for the group; it’s like a book club but with music'‘

Tomorrow night’s TULCA opening, at 8pm in the Festival Gallery in Fairgreen House, will be followed by a performance by Aoibheann Greenan with a historic Galway link. “Aoibheann did a residency in Mexico and came across the story of John Riley, from Clifden, who led an Irish battalion, the San Patricios, in the Mexican army during the US-Mexican war of 1846-48," says Linda. "Her performance is a commemoration procession which will move through the city and enact different stages of John’s life using prose and poetry written by Aoibheann and performed by some of Galway’s well known street performers.”

Another Galway link is present in the work of award-winning photographer Ciaran Óg Arnold. “Ciaran’s work is from a photographic series entitled I Went To The Worst of Bars Hoping to get Killed But All I Could Do Was Get Drunk Again, which won MACK Books First Book Award which is a very prestigious award within the world of photography. After spending time in America he returned home to recession-hit Ballinasloe where he documented the bars and nightclubs that would be familiar to many rural Irish towns. It’s a very cinematic series of images depicting images of rural Irish nightlife.”

Linda highlights two other events of note from the packed TULCA programme. “We have a lovely event in the Mechanics Institute, on November 10, called Nostalgic Listening Club which will be led by artist Mark Garry and people are invited to come along and bring a piece of music and play it for the group; it’s like a book club but with music and I think it will be really good fun. Then we are closing with a buffet cum art installation by the Domestic Godless collective in Sheridan’s cheesemongers where they will be using native heritage cereals and exploring ideas of sustainability.”

This year’s festival uses a lot of new venues across the city (made possible by the support of Galway’s business community ) and there will also be a bespoke publication designed by Padraig Cunningham of Pure Designs available, free of charge, at all venues. In addition to a text by Linda Shevlin, the publication will include a newly commissioned essay by Joanne Laws on rave culture.

By Charlie McBride 

Galway Advertiser, Thu, Nov 01, 2018

Nostalgia and hedonism at TULCA Festival of Visual Arts

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

More than 20 international and Irish artists are taking part in the 16th annual TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, which opens next Friday, November 2, and runs across a range of venues in Galway City until November 18.

The theme for TULCA 2018 is Syntonic State, and festival curator Linda Shevlin explains that the term, which comes from psychology, describes a situation when a person is in harmony with their environment.

Being syntonic is about being in peace with your surroundings, and this year’s TULCA “explores how, in a world filled with social and political turmoil, we can find comfort,” the Roscommon-based curator continues.

The international and Irish artists who are exploring this theme for TULCA include the 2008 Turner winner Mark Leckey and Ciarán Óg Arnold from Ballinasloe. Others taking part include performance artist Aoibheann Greenan, who is working with a range of local street performers for the opening event on Friday, November 2, and the Cork-based collective Domestic Godless, whose work centres on food and society.

Linda Shevlin, who has a BA in Fine Art and a Masters in Arts Practice was approached in early 2017 by the board of TULCA to submit a concept for the event – which has a different curator every year and her proposal Syntonic State was selected for 2018.

This theme evolved during her research when she was examining Galway, not just in terms of its heritage, but how the city has shifted and changed in terms of the many different people who’ve passed through it and through cities in general, she outlines.

“One of the themes I was trying to draw on is nostalgia and its cultural links to revelry and hedonism,” Linda explains. “How we as a society celebrate and socially interact and forget ourselves.”

Nostalgia can be good, but it can also be used as a political device to incite fear and anger, and TULCA will address that.

Judy Murphy

Shout Shout! Let It All Out!

A woman kneels on a bed, as onlookers observe. Her face is twisted, she emits a guttural bellowing, grunts, thumps herself and spouts expletive-riddled abuse. Primal Screaming doesn’t look like much of a buzz but Caitriona Devery decided to take a plunge into the strange anyway. 

Arthur Janov’s therapeutic invention was all the rage in the 1970’s and is the weird connection between John Lennon and Jenny James, founder of Primal Screaming commune Atlantis. The two were also strongly drawn to the West of Ireland.

The stories of Atlantis’ stint in Donegal and Lennon’s fascination with owning an Irish island have acquired mythical properties over the years and inspired creative expression. Kevin Barry’s 2015 book Beatlebone used Lennon’s interest in Screaming and his purchase of the uninhabited island of Dorinish in Clew Bay to create an inspired work of meta-fiction. In 2017 the TULCA contemporary art exhibition in Galway used James’ Atlantis as a point of departure to explore autonomy, community, selfhood and nature.

Arthur Janov, the founder of Primal Screaming therapy, believed that repressing traumatic experiences from childhood results in dysfunction and neurosis. Participants were encouraged to fully express themselves, physically and even violently. Janov said at the time that the treatment “is not a celebrity therapy. It’s for people who are suffering”, but his cathartic promises inevitably attracted figures in the celebrity world. One of the most famous was Lennon who had sessions with Janov at Tittenhurst Park.

A few year later, in 1974, the Atlantis commune set up shop in a dilapidated house in Burtonport, Co. Donegal. Led by the iconoclastic Jenny James, they were inspired by Janov’s teachings. James believed that society at the time put a premium on “mediocrity, niceness, and being sweet and polite”. At the commune, no emotion was disallowed, in the interests of honesty. They were encouraged to express everything, physically and even violently. 

Was it an escape or an attempt at utopia? Matt Packer, who curated TULCA last year, says “The Screamers were both a rejection of mainstream society and an attempt to create another kind of society. In her books, Jenny James is quite antagonistic about what she saw as the falsity and technocracy of modern living, and in a sense the Screamers were driven by that opposition.”

As you might imagine, the community of truth-seekers caused a ruckus in sleepy 70’s rural Donegal. There were accusations of sexual promiscuity, cultish brainwashing, even kidnapping. Their energetic, loud verbal releases led locals to call them The Screamers. They would last in Burtonport for six tumultuous years before fleeing to a more rudimentary and isolated settlement on the island of Innishfree a few years later. Another similarity with Lennon, who had purchased Dorinish in 1967.

The Screamers brought a frisson of excitement to the Irish airwaves on more than one occasion. Filmmaker Bob Quinn filmed them but RTE deemed the programme too shocking to screen. Quinn called it “the most disturbing filming experience I ever engaged in”. 

Watching now, the disarming 1970’s aesthetic of the house, Brady-bunch haircuts and hippy headbands are at odds with the exorcist like howls and animalistic screaming that were a regular feature of the therapy sessions. There were reports of bullying, even physical abuse.

In Barry’s Beatlebone the characters in the Amethyst hotel, partly based on The Screamers, show the potentially dark dynamics that can arise when conventions are disbanded. I asked Kevin Barry if he thought there was anything genuinely transformative going on during the therapy. 

He said, “I think a lot of what we see in the film is well-intentioned but it’s a pretty loose take on the techniques of Primal Screaming. I look at the footage and think – well at least people were trying things. At least there was a sense of opening up”.

Janov himself said that many interpretation of his ideas were dangerous. He did not endorse Atlantis. Ultimately the scandal around the commune became too much and it dissolved. Core members, including James, sailed off to Colombia to focus less on emotions and more on ecology. 

Barry sees the commune’s influence in the context of the narrow Irish culture of the time. “We can’t forget how fucking dreary and monolithic a place rural Ireland was in the 1970s. So anything challenging or new or downright nutty coming into the place was at a certain level definitely welcome.”

Lennon and James weren’t the only ones to project onto Ireland mystical, otherworldly and escapist properties. Since World War II in particular, Ireland has appealed to Europeans, especially Germans, seeking a pastoral, even spiritual refuge. Is there something in the landscape itself? The freaks and weirdos that were drawn, perhaps, to Ireland’s committed refusal of modernity often imbued it with mythical properties.

This chimes with the images artist Yvette Monahan made of Inishfree for TULCA. They show a landscape haunted with uncanny traces, unclear if they are human or animal. Kevin Barry sees the West’s landscape as holding a certain resonance. 

He said, “there’s a German word something like ‘weltshmerz’ which describes a feeling of homesickness for a place you’ve never been. The West of Ireland has a tendency to stir up such feelings in those who come to stay for a while. It has an odour of melancholy – in the book I called it a kind of ‘deathhauntedness’. I believe there’s something that’s soaked into the bones of the West that makes it a place for elegiacal dreaming.” 

Packer was interested in the particularity of Ireland of that time, and why it become such a focus for the projections of those seeking alternatives, both social and political. He says, “Ireland in the 70’s provided the notion of living off-grid and outside the trappings of mainstream society. That same notion is close to a colonialist viewpoint. It was additionally interesting for me that the region of Donegal where the Screamers’ found home was also a place steeped in Republican activism during a time of peak conflict”.

A steady flow of hippies of all kinds into rural parts of Ireland continued into the 1980’s and 1990’s, New Age travelers, ravers, and ruralists. But perhaps as Ireland finally joined the 20th century, its appeal to these alternative-seekers declined. What happened to the hippies? 

Packer says “I was interested in this question in my initial thinking around TULCA, but at the same time I always understood that it’s not a very exacting question. I was trying to explore the legacy of a particular kind of liberalism that existed in my parents’ generation that seemed to absent today; either absorbed into a broader mainstream culture, or discredited, or else reduced to a lifestyle anachronism”.

Packer offers one argument that pluralism and liberalism have made strides and reduced the need for struggles against a monolithic mainstream. Capitalism’s increasing sophistication since then and its ability to co-opt dropping out may be another. He says perhaps “a genuine refusal of mainstream culture now requires a more extreme approach. After all, the Screamers sailed to Colombia, where they remain today.” 

Both book and curatorial intent explore longings for escape, for truth, in the context of quixotic projections onto the Irish landscape. They show how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same. On this Packer is cautious, and careful not to fetishise the Screamers.

“It was important that the exhibition didn’t patronise the past and the efforts of people that were trying to live differently in the 1960s and 70s. I’ve always tried to resist that kind of approach, and I think it’s actually quite dangerous to imply the immutability of our present moment”.

In Rabble 15, Print Edition by Caitriona Devery. September 24, 2018

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry was published by Canongate in 2015
Image credits: Yvette Monahan

Frieze Review: They Call Us The Screamers

The Tulca Festival 2017 finds inspiration in a ragged band of ’70s counter-cultural free-thinkers known for their practice of primal therapy.

Hippie cults, it’s fair to say, are not for everyone. Fascination with their ostensibly liberated lifestyles and wild, sometimes sinister, fantasies – their preposterous escape plans from the modern maelstrom – is nonetheless entirely understandable. Who doesn’t, as the sometimes sinister Philip Larkin once wrote, feel occasional envy for the ‘audacious, purifying / Elemental move’, of those, who ‘chucked up everything / And just cleared off’? (Even, in his case, the dead.)

For the 2017 edition of the Tulca exhibition in Galway – an annual mini-festival of contemporary art, spread across multiple venues – curator Matt Packer has found inspiration in the fraught history of one such alternative scene. This is the Atlantis commune, a ragged band of counter-cultural free-thinkers who established a base in the small Donegal town of Burtonport during the 1970s and whose extreme, Wilhelm Reich-influenced practices of primal therapy earned them the tabloid nickname of ‘The Screamers’. Packer’s interest was piqued, in part, by an insider’s account of the commune written by its charismatic, disarmingly upbeat leader, Jenny James – a book published in the wake of assorted controversies that dogged the group during their time in Donegal. But at Tulca our main introduction to the Atlantis story comes with The Family, a 1979 documentary made by the revered Irish filmmaker Bob Quinn.

Quinn’s film – originally commissioned by RTE (Ireland’s national broadcaster) but quickly deemed too shocking for television – enters the intimate world of the Screamers’ house, granting us, first of all, a view of cheerful, generous communal living, before revealing the private hell of the primal therapy sessions. The participants – cooped-up and cornered in claustrophobic bedrooms — are performatively pressed, pestered and bullied into states of uncontrolled anger. The declared intent is a cathartic release of repressed anxieties, or a therapeutic exorcism of socially imposed inhibitions. The immediate effects, as we witness them, are deeply disturbing – most of all during one harrowing sequence in which a male resident of the house harasses, teases and grapples with James’s howling teenage daughter. In turn, he too is pressured and humiliated by the other observing adults – among them James herself – not for his abusive behaviour, but for failing to go further, to push harder.

In choosing to screen Quinn’s extraordinary, upsetting film, and in taking James’s book as a point of departure, Packer has not sought to create an exhibition solely focused on the phenomenon of primal therapy or even, more broadly, on the radical, questionable aspirations and lifestyles of alternative communities. Certain works do engage directly with therapeutic situations or opportunities. Liz Magic Laser’s hypnotic, depressing film Primal Speech (2016), for instance, brings a group of actors together to vent about traumatic formative experiences and present-day, post-Brexit, post-Trump worries. Voice Piece for Soprano, a 1961 work by Yoko Ono (presented on take-away cards, available at the University Hospital) invites anyone and everyone to freely scream ‘against the wind’, ‘against the wall’ or ‘against the sky’. (A work that might be usefully presented at the exit door of many international biennials.) David Beattie’s spare, elegant installation Propositional Things (2017) – a kind of post-minimalist yoga studio, combining potted plants with steel slabs – promises to harness the precious ‘orgone energy’ desired by Reich and his disciples. But beyond such specific, cathartic connections, the Screamers’ story becomes a compelling compare-and-contrast reference point for an array of other artworks that variously allude to extreme states or unorthodox communal scenarios.

Shown alongside Quinn’s The Family at the Galway Arts Centre, a purposefully squalid installation by Lucy Stein entitled Inflating the Goddess (2017) – partially comprising esoteric graffiti, grimy strung-up washing, and an inflatable swan, scrawled with shit-coloured markings – is suitably abject and unsettling in its presentation of an evocatively occultish domestic scene. And yet, the scene has a material lightness too: nothing here seems finally fixed in time, space or meaning. At the same venue, the swirling patterns in drawings by Sam Basu suggest an effort to channel weird, irrational impulses; a moodily contemplative film by Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain meditates on uneasy rural isolation; and Fabienne Audeoud’s three-hour video of vocal exercises (Practice, 1998) centres on bodily and psychological testing, exploring the limits of expressive capability. The manic, hyper-intensity of Audeoud’s arduous, eccentric performance is horribly, hysterically gripping.

We see Audeoud’s work again at Tulca: the second time as part of a beautifully arranged group show at the former Connacht Tribune Print Works. Here Audeoud shows a selection of hanging, transparent, assemblage-paintings that feature peculiar, comical faces. These grinning, gurning personalities punctuate a room scattered with other partial, implied or depicted figures: costumes for a new community by Oisin Byrne; wonderfully wonky, trashy and inchoate sculptural forms by Kian Benson Bailes; outline drawings of participants in a fantastical, carnivalesque procession by Kaspar Oppen Samuelsen and Marie-Louise Vittrup. There is an evident ebullience to all this work – and other marvelous contributions such as Ciarán Ó’Dochartaigh’s Druid Love Triangle (2017), a lurid pink contraption made from antique massage tools – that seems a long way from the determined aggression and necessary anger of the Screamers. Of course, at certain moments in Bob Quinn’s film, the group came across as innocent, hopeful and carefree too. They were shown as giddily excited about the new, alternative social world they wanted to create – while remaining willfully, perversely blind to the terrible darkness at the heart of their utopian dream.

The Tulca Festival of Visual Arts 2017 in Galway, Ireland runs until 19 November.

Main image: Lucy Stein, Inflating the Goddess, 2017, installation view, Tulca Festival of Visual Arts 2017, Galway. Courtesy: Tulca Festival of Visual Arts 2017, Galway; photograph: © Jonathan Sammon

Declan Long

Declan Long is programme director of the MA course Art in the Contemporary World at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin, Ireland.