From: blp
Category: Art
Date: 05 July 2005
I haven't seen Lecky's other videos, but people say they're great. This was horrible. Lecky's band played to a video based on and named for a seventies short film starring Phil Daniels called 'Shades of Destructors'. Time code visible at top of screen throughout, lots of mucky digital mucking about. Story (of original film, based on a Graham Greene short story) was about Daniels and another lad in the fifties destroying last surviving Victorian house on a bomb site systematically from inside and seemed more than interesting enough as it was. Lecky's project was a kind of visual critical examination of its themes, didactically pointing out to all us thickies how, for whatever reason, the destruction of an old house had wider societal and psychological ramifications and dressing it all up with various goofy modern computer effects. There was a quick reference to the disappearance of houses on Mile End park where Rachel Whiteread's 'House' had stood. Lots of screaming guitars. A room, which I was told was Lecky's own, was subjected to various slashings and discolourations, all faked digitally. Alongside this, sitting not at all comfortably, a series of images of Phil Daniels from his various films over the years. How to read this? The passage of time? The ravages of time? A parallel between the changes to Phil Daniels over the years and the changes to our architectural landscape? Er...could be. Or could be Lecky just liked Daniels' face. At any race, it was all a hideous mess with very little to say said loudly, garishly and at some length with the deformations and degradations imposed by Photoshop, After Effects or whatever snazzy programmes had been employed turning the interesting source material into a particularly bloated, noisome bit of contemporary kitsch. And how to square all this with the presence of the rock band on stage? Like the Dan Graham/Sonic Youth nexus before him, it seems Lecky wants to have his academic cred cake and fuck it up, ticking boxes for both punk attitude and funding worthy furrowed brow sociological seriousness all at once. To me it's a fudge and it turns the whole shebang to sludge. There were three other sections to the performance, musical accompaniments to a section from the Hockney doc 'A Bigger Splash', a video of various public sculptures around London and a still of a Kurt Schwitters drawing. Of these, only the second really qualified as an artwork in itself, though all were discussed as such outside by the milling art trendies.
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