What must a work of art do to make us feel something when we’ve been anesthetized by 10-second videos, marketing emails, and endless images of suffering? It can feel as though you need special training to understand a painting. Which forms best speak to a broad public? There’s a lot of money on immersive experiences as the answer to both questions. And there are plenty of spectacles these days that pander to shortened attention spans, surrounding us with motion and color, while staging great backdrops for selfies. But after viewers are wowed, then what? In recent exhibitions, Mark Leckey and Cory Arcangel have each tweaked the techniques of immersion to get at the essence of awe.
Since the late '90s, Leckey has made work that reaches beyond the rarified codes of art discourse, investigating class and memory through raves, amusement parks, and vernacular forms. In his show “3 Songs from the Liver,” now on view at Gladstone Gallery in New York, the British multimedia artist presents a sequence of video installations made since 2021, using timing, lighting, and other tricks from the arsenal of immersive experiences to guide the viewer’s attention.
The first “song” (actually a hybrid video-sculpture) in Leckey’s trio is To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body), 2021. The work begins with a clip, which Leckey found online, of a man hurling himself against a bus-stop shelter, shattering the glass and falling into a pile of shards. The alarming action repeats again and again, playing on a LED screen mounted in a bus shelter-like armature. It’s followed by a digital animation that gives us a perspective that the phone footage can’t—the man’s face from the other side of the glass, his searching gaze in the moments just before and after impact. At the piece’s end, big eyes fill the screen, and Leckey uses them as a motif in pseudo-Biblical reworkings of public safety ads: Instead of “If you see something, say something,” the artist gives us, “If I eye anything, it shall be invisible.”
