Mark Leckey's video work has as its subject the "tawdry but somehow romantic
elegance of certain aspects of British culture,"He likes the idea of letting
“culture use you as an instrument.”but adds that the pretentiousness that
artists sometimes fall into is destructive to the artistic process: “What
gets in the way is being too clever, or worrying about how something is
going to function, or where it's going to be. When you start thinking of
something as art, you're fucked: you're never going to advance." Matthew
Higgs has described his work as
“possess[ing] a strange nonartlike quality, operating, as it does, on the
knife's edge where art and life meet.”
He exhibited alongside Damien
Hirst in the 1990 New
Contemporaries exhibition at the ICA but
afterwards dropped from view, before making a "comeback" with Fiorucci
Made Me Hardcore in 1999.
In 2004 he participated in Manifesta 5,
The European Biennial of Contemporary Art. In
2006 he participated in the Tate
Triennial and his works are held
in the collections of the Tate and
the Centre
Pompidou.