Table Of ContentM ark Leckey
F iorucci Made Me
H ardcore
M itch Speed
A fterall Books: One Work
F irst published in 2019 Original design
by Afterall Books A2/SW/HK
Typefaces
Afterall A2/SW/HK + A2-Type
Central Saint Martins
University of the Arts London Printed and bound by
Granary Building die Keure, Belgium
1 Granary Square
London N1C 4AA The One Work series is printed
www.afterall.org on FSC-certified papers
Afterall is a Research Centre eISBN 978-1-84638-208-6
of University of the Arts London eISBN 978-1-84638-209-3
eISBN 978-1-84638-210-9
Editorial Directors
Charles Esche, Mark Lewis Distribution by the MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London
Series Editor www.mitpress.mit.edu
Mark Lewis
© 2019 Afterall, Central Saint Martins,
Editor University of the Arts London,
Caroline Woodley the artists and the authors
Assistant Editors cover: Mark Leckey,
Beth Bramich, Louis Hartnoll Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999,
still from colour video with sound, 14min 44sec
Copy Editor
Deirdre O’Dwyer All images of works by Mark Leckey © 2019
the artist and photographers, courtesy the artist
and Cabinet, London
An Afterall Book
Distributed by the MIT Press
Each book in the One Work series presents a single work of art considered
in detail by a single author. The focus of the series is on contemporary
art and its aim is to provoke debate about significant moments in art’s
recent development.
Over the course of more than one hundred books, important works
will be presented in a meticulous and generous manner by writers who
believe passionately in the originality and significance of the works about
which they have chosen to write. Each book contains a comprehensive and
detailed formal description of the work, followed by a critical mapping
of the aesthetic and cultural context in which it was made and that it has
gone on to shape. The changing presentation and reception of the work
throughout its existence is also discussed, and each writer stakes a claim on
the influence ‘their’ work has on the making and understanding of other
works of art.
The books insist that a single contemporary work of art (in all of its
different manifestations), through a unique and radical aesthetic articulation
or invention, can affect our understanding of art in general. More than that,
these books suggest that a single work of art can literally transform, however
modestly, the way we look at and understand the world. In this sense the
One Work series, while by no means exhaustive, will eventually become a
veritable library of works of art that have made a difference.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all the friends and colleagues who
read drafts of this book and generously offered their thoughts, criticisms
and encouragement. To those who talked me through the writing process
with love and curiosity. Amongst those friends, special appreciation goes
to the Brits, whose words filled paralyzing gaps in my understanding of
Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore and its specifically British
resonances. To the facilitators and staff at the Banff Centre and the Canada
Council for the Arts for making life and work easy. To the musicians and the
party throwers who make the memories, without which there would, in this
case, have been nothing to write or make art about in the first place. Maybe
most importantly, to everyone who has been vexed by the feeling of time
slip-sliding through their fingers, and to everyone who has tried and failed
and tried again to stand out or just fit in. The way I see it, these experiences
are the real content of Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, and of this book. And
of course, to Mark Leckey for making this film, which so many people
want, or need, to watch over and over. But also for placing it and others
online, available to everyone. Fiorucci’s meaningfulness is inextricable
from the spirit of this gesture.
The editors would also like to thank all at Cabinet, London for their kind
support in the preparation of this publication.
• • •
Mitch Speed is an artist and writer based in Berlin. In September 2019, his
solo exhibition ‘Permanent Head' was presented at Wil Aballe Art Projects
in Vancouver. He has written extensively on contemporary art and artists,
among them Krista Belle Stewart, and recently contributed a catalogue
essay for Liz Magor's 2019 solo exhibition ‘BLOWOUT', at the Carpenter
Center for Visual Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts and The Renaissance
Society, Chicago. His writing has also appeared in Frieze, Mousse, Momus,
Camera Austria and Canadian Art. Speed is currently working on a book-
length essay concerning the problematic and mythological relationship
between drinking and artistry. He was recently shortlisted for the inaugural
Büro Broken Dimanche Press writing prize.
For my sister, Jo
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
– Adrienne Rich1
I get high on your memory.
– Freda Payne2
There they go. Swirling, melting, rising. Dropping, strutting, laughing.
Falling, wandering. From night to dawn, for crowds of young people, these
actions are also feelings. As we watch, actual and vicarious experience merge
in an ether fog. To see Mark Leckey’s 1999 video work Fiorucci Made Me
Hardcore is to feel this intoxication.
Leckey’s montage is a makeshift daydream, constructed from purloined
video and audio clips. Over time, the content of this dream incites overlap-
ping truths. One person’s fond recollection is another’s fear. When memory
is written in borrowed images, the borderland between I and we becomes as
thrilling as it is baffling.
In many ways, the work’s reverie is conspicuously English. It begins in
the Wigan Casino, the most legendary of the Northern Soul dance clubs that
in the 1970s appeared in British towns and cities, only to be suppressed by
conservative authorities. Across fifteen minutes, two decades of British sub-
cultures merge (fig.1–32). The piece is loosely broken into five chapters. After
floating through the Jazzfunk clubs that followed Northern Soul, Fiorucci
descends into unidentified streets where young men roam like vagabonds.
Dressed in fineries of sport and leisurewear, they appear as the children of
Mods and football hooligans. When the scene changes, these young men are
replaced by the amassed bodies that, in the late 1980s and early 90s, popu-
lated Acid House and Hardcore raves. These chapters are sometimes joined
by gothic interludes. In those moments, clouds stutter through sketchy video
time. A mysterious silhouetted figure stands before them, while a collaged
soundtrack churns.
Leckey made Fiorucci just prior to the mass digitization of our lives.
This was a time when young people dubbed VHS and audio cassette tapes
to make personal documents of cultural experience. Typically composed of
TV and radio recordings, these simulated memory banks would, over time,
Mark Leckey: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore Mitch Speed | 6
accumulate snow. With that degradation came the fear that carefully stowed
moments might disappear.
Two decades later, Leckey’s film still breathes this anxiety. In a broader
sense, it stirs up all of the uneasy questions that accompany memory; ques-
tions about whether the things that happened to you really happened at all;
or even if they did, whether your experience was as real, as immanent, as
youthfully carefree as it could have been. One moment in the film operates
like a punctum for this aspect of the work. In a packed Northern Soul club,
dancers sway in delinquent waves.3 Suddenly, a photographer appears. He
scrambles away, but it’s too late. The viewer has already been reminded of
the camera’s presence – the illusion of authentic experience has been broken.
Oddly enough, this moment also affords comfort. On first glance,
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore seems like a strictly personal work. This
impression arises from its title, which Leckey came upon via a photograph,
in an exhibition about Andy Warhol, which showed those four words graf-
fitied onto the wall of Studio 54.4 Now, the phrase signals an autobiographi-
cal link between Leckey and the subcultures brought to life in his work. But
as the piece plays, the title’s Me comes to stand in for the film’s many name-
less characters, as well as each viewer who has watched the piece and expe-
rienced personal memories melding with those on screen.5
• • •
Fiorucci is embedded within British culture. But it also resonates with a
mediated, and very common, way of experiencing subcultures: a perspec-
tive driven by television, movies, radio, the internet. This is exactly how I,
like many people, have experienced so much music, and art. The fact is, with
respect to Fiorucci, I’m an interloper. I have no first-hand experience of the
film’s locales. Not thundering British clubs. Not that country’s labyrinthine
class system. Not Northern English streets, in their traumatic post-industri-
al twilight. Still, the piece moves me. And so, in writing this book, I’ve been
searching for the point of contact, where cultural specificity crackles and
sparks in contact with a broader human situation.
It was Leckey who set this course. On a gloomy day in January 2018,
in the canteen of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), where
Fiorucci first played, in 1999, he told me that Fiorucci is about ‘being
Mark Leckey: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore Mitch Speed | 7
fascinated by images to the point of obsession, and wondering, Why can’t I
be there and experience that?’6 Later he explained that although he experi-
enced all of the subcultures in Fiorucci, he felt always in some way an out-
sider to them.7 This paradox forms the work’s equivocal heart. It is rooted as
much in geography and class as it is in run-of-the-mill feelings of loneliness
and isolation. Ergo the film’s resonance, for any person who has negotiated
these feelings. Maybe you never made it to some glittering party, having only
caught wind of it after the fact. Maybe you could never afford a train ticket
out of your sleepy hometown and into big city lights. Or maybe you did get to
these places, only to find that nerves rendered your experience less real than
those around you, perfectly cool and perfectly on-beat.
This central neurosis reverberates through Fiorucci’s material and cul-
tural content. Back in 1985, the artist and writer Stuart Marshall pointed out
how video, unlike film, prohibits a direct involvement in its material.8 In con-
trast to film editing, which involves a physically palpable process of cutting
and splicing, video editing is undertaken through a digital interface, in the
form of software. To edit memories held in video, in other words, is to oper-
ate in a gap between intense emotional connection with the material, and an
unbridgeable separation from it. In this way, Fiorucci’s materiality mirrors
its human reason for being: the desire to touch memories that, by definition,
evade you the closer you get.
Echoes of this effect can be picked up in the many anecdotes which now
fringe the work. On 3 June 2011, six years after Leckey uploaded the video
to YouTube,9 a viewer named Alison Mcllroy commented: ‘I remember you
from Hope Farm disco on a Friday night, you were so cool, you made my
14-year-old heart beat faster.’ To which Leckey replied:
What!!! Hope Farm disco is where it all began for me.
Yeah me too.
It’s where I learned to dance.
I don’t ever remember you dancing!
• • •
Mark Leckey: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore Mitch Speed | 8
In planning Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Leckey scrawled a diagram onto
a scrap of paper. A dashed timeline is broken by rising and falling arrows.
The word ‘DREAM’ appears twice, once surrounded by a squiggly cloud and
once coupled with the word ‘FUTURE’. In the diagram’s centre are nota-
tions indicating subcultures that Leckey intended to include: ‘NORTHERN
[SOUL]', ‘JAZZFUNK', ‘CASUALS', ‘ACID', ‘STREET', ‘UNDERGROUND',
‘HARDCORE', ‘JUNGLE', ‘GARAGE', ‘HELL-DARKSIDE'.
The film begins at first light. Clouds stutter across the screen, mottled
blue and sun-rimmed. Their quick pace establishes a disjointed temporality.
A white triangular ‘play’ icon, its edges eroded into neon filigree, divulges
Leckey’s process; it tells us that the fast-forward effect is his own imposi-
tion on the footage. Video time-coding recurs throughout the work, stamps
applied by TV networks in order to protect their material. In Fiorucci, they
find new life. They are ‘as eloquent a memento mori’ – so the writer Charlotte
Higgins aptly puts it – ‘as the skull in the corner of a Holbein’.10
Soon dancers bleed into this morning dreamscape. Over soft synth,
a metronomic voice matches their rhythm: ‘They want, they want, they
want… sweeet… they want, they want… sweet…’ This is the Wigan Casino,
an underground world where young people would glide, twirl and kick
through endless nights. Only now, in these scenes, something’s amiss; the
soul music that impelled their movement is hard to discern. It has been dis-
placed by a field of lulling samples. It’s a dislocating effect. So, too, the sight
of so many mostly white Brits dancing in these places, to this quintessen-
tially African-American music.
One of these dancers, a young man, rises and falls. He has a bob
haircut, pencil moustache and white-collared top like a preacher’s tunic. His
arms hinge inhumanly smooth. In this, they’re aided by the slow-motion
effect inherited on Leckey’s source footage. These images come from the out-
takes of Tony Palmer’s 1977 documentary The Wigan Casino, a superlative
document of Northern Soul that originally aired during peak time on British
TV.11 Leckey’s edits impart fractious energy to Palmer’s rapt slowdowns.
Slipping between perspectival and temporal scales, the film becomes audio-
visual impressionism.
It wasn’t until 2010, when a DVD of Palmer’s documentary came out,
that Leckey discovered it. In the late 1990s, he wrote to a Northern Soul fan
in Wigan who, he’d heard, owned a tape filled with Northern Soul footage.
Mark Leckey: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore Mitch Speed | 9
When the cassette arrived, it contained only Palmer’s B-reel. For an artwork
so concerned with memory, this disappointment became a gift, an unexpect-
ed appearance of the documentary’s repressed, excised scenes. As for the fan
who sent this material, they’ve been lost to history. Leckey told me: ‘I can
never remember anything about this, I’m afraid.’ Although he’s forthcom-
ing by reputation, I've been unable to shake the suspicion that, on this point,
Leckey's keeping one secret for himself – a nugget of private memory in our
age of constant disclosure.
A few minutes into Fiorucci, Northern Soul gives way to Jazzfunk. This
subculture fused jazz, funk and R&B, also incorporating quirky elements
like roller skating and choral chanting inspired by football. An exterior shot
of four roller skaters forms a bridge into the work’s second dream sequence.
Here, that dark silhouette stands atop a high building, blocking the clouds.
In reality, this figure is performing the most ordinary task, installing a televi-
sion antenna during a documentary about radio.12 Fiorucci makes him into
something more: a doppelgänger and a late twentieth-century iteration of
the Rückenfigur (figure seen from behind) that populates so many German
romantic paintings.13
When the film moves into day-lit city streets, it also moves into the path
of the Casuals. Having inherited the Mod’s penchant for upscale dress, these
young men eschewed suits in favour of European luxury sports brands.
Fiorucci – alongside Fred Perry, Diadora and others – was such a label. The
Casuals’ taste for the rough and tumble caused them to overlap visually with
England’s notorious football firms.14 Because Leckey was once a member of
the Casuals, watching these scenes is like watching the artist strut a future
memory. In this sense, the Casuals chapters enunciate the work’s autobio-
graphical dimension. But because he doesn’t appear in person, a gap opens
between the artist and his material. It’s through this fissure that viewers’
own projections are granted admission.
Fiorucci’s final two chapters unfold in the chasmic warehouses that
hosted Acid House and Hardcore raves. It was in such places that elec-
tronic music conspired with monolithic speaker systems and party drugs –
amphetamines, then Ecstasy – to fuel long storms of rapture. There is a curi-
ous veracity to the way Fiorucci conjures these scenes. Documentary’s ethos
of distance has no jurisdiction here. It has been shunted aside by montage,
with all its purposive vagaries: slurring, staggering, quickening, distending
Mark Leckey: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore Mitch Speed | 10
