fiorucci made me hardcore
Hi, welcome back to Press Pause. How do we access joy at times like these? My high spirits and unwavering hope faltered recently and I quickly fell back into an old pattern of forgetting to pause and losing myself in an endless stream of restless thoughts instead. What do we do when a deep sense of unease creeps in like an old unwelcome acquaintance? We do our best to hold ourselves together through it all. Today, I try to find ways of being present with myself. I make space for all these feelings and honour them. I also decide I am ready to feel happy, even for a brief moment.
I first encountered Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore in 2015. On a cold December morning I traversed the Bois de Boulogne from Porte Dauphine to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which had recently opened its Frank Gehry-designed doors. On that day, the galleries were mostly empty, I had a deserted Disneyland all to myself. I wandered through the permanent collection and the temporary exhibitions and reached the top level where I stepped outside to admire the view between the fissures of the large white sails. I still had one more artwork to see on the way out. I remember the massive room, the video projected onto a while wall accompanied by a towering sound system positioned on the right-hand side of the video frame and angled towards the audience. Cool bops, a mix of disco, acid house and northern soul, blasting through the speakers. An electrifying piece straight out of my wildest disco dreams. I must have remained there for a long time, because when I left it was dark outside.
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is one of my all-time favourite video art pieces. It’s a groovy mix of film, music and clubbing, a holy trifecta in my book. To watch it on a small laptop screen with no adequate audio support is far from the lush experience Leckey envisioned, but it is something I do fairly often and fills me with joy.
Dedicate time to finding beauty around you and cultivate the infinite possibilities of it. Summon what brings you joy and let it soothe your soul. There’s no one-size-fits-all, find your own Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, your moment of joy and hold on to it when things are difficult.
In the film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), Leckey spliced altered video footage from dance clubs with an amalgamation of sounds to examine countercultural nightlife, revealing the poignant interpersonal energy among and socio-economic aspirations of its revelers. The video is sourced from footage of British clubs that spans trends in fashion and attitude from the 1970s to the 1990s. Despite the differences among the partygoers, Leckey’s film unites the disparate cultural moments in a frenzy of youthful, euphoric ritual. Tongue in cheek, the title alludes to Italian fashion house Fiorucci, wildly popular during the artist’s youth in the late ’70s. Although dress and taste evolve through Leckey’s edited juxtapositions, brand allegiance and material symbolism are undeniable constants in an otherwise fleeting remix of three decades of dance culture. (source)
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