leckey is going places with his approachable and unpretentious art

Ben Lewis13 April 2012

Britain's trendiest artist walked away with the Turner Prize.

Mark Leckey, best known for a short film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which compiles clips of several decades of footage from British dancefloors, produces a variety of informal and ironic work which ranges from posters in a faux Eighties Playboy cover style to witty videos that riff on British club culture and nostalgia for modernism's most awkward moments.

In short, it's the sardonic aesthetic of the provincial art school fashion victim. The best piece in his Turner show was an ironic homage to the great American contemporary artist of kitsch, Jeff Koons, in which he borrowed one of Koons' mirrored bunny sculptures, put it on a pedestal in the middle of his empty London studio and filmed reflections of his working space in it - a charming gag about art, admiration and ambition.

Not everything Leckey does is good enough. His biggest piece in his Turner installation was a somewhat rambling videoed lecture about cultural history, which was praised by some for "taking risks" - art world code for "less than successful" -and one gallerist, a fan, likened his victory to the Turner going to a "three-legged chair".

I doubt that in the long term an artist's lecture to students is destined to become a distinctive genre in art. Like Leckey's lecture, Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota's speech was vague and Nick Cave, who announced the winner, uttered a tokenistic two sentences before heading for the exit.

Nevertheless there are a lot of good things about this year's Turner. It was the unshowiest prize in living memory - unconsciously announcing the death of glitz and artistic bombast , and turning the page into a new post-boom era of art. Leckey's work is approachable, unpretentious, enthusiastic, anti-monumental and interested in British society.

Even if it is often too insubstantial, it seems to be going places.

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