Mark Leckey, freeway overpasses, & Wagner
I took a walk around Melbourne's modernist Arts Centre after seeing a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin there in May. It was a gruelling and heavy-themed opera and a cold, stark production by theatre director Oliver Py. The set resembled a dilapidated, decaying post-war Berlin, littered with emblems of German Romanticism. Sculptures that alluded to German fairytales were designed to give a much-needed sense of hope and innocence. After almost a whole day of deep concentration, I left the burrowed theatre with a moon-blue/concrete grey coloured filter over my eyes. Suddenly, I turned a corner and bore witness to this orange light cast against a concrete beam that supports an overhead motorway. The warmth of the orange was a palette cleanser from the constant imposition of concrete.
I immediately recalled the setting of Mark Leckey's 2019 exhibition O' Magic Power of Bleakness at Tate Britain. In the gallery, Leckey had reconstructed the space underneath of a motorway bridge as a darkened, mysterious room to view a retrospective of his films and sound work. His Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore collection of footage of Northern England's 90s rave scene was intermingled with a newer work shot on an iPhone (Under Under In) that depicted a group of kids entertaining themselves under a bridge, and gradually becoming immersed in the supernatural. Utilitarian lighting bathed the gallery in various colours (such as the orange depicted in my images). It was an eerie atmosphere undergird by a sense of longing: the bridge, like raves of the 90s, being a youth's tool for high-speed escape to something greater. The dark and mysterious underneath space of the bridge, like below the Arts Centre, contains spectres of the euphoric hopes and dreams from the enlightened space above.
