Fiorucci made me Hardcore

1999 Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which opened the show, is at once the crudest and the most engrossing of the four pieces. The looping video patches together documentary footage from Northern Soul parties and early raves with shots of football casuals showing their plumage on the terraces, all set to a soundtrack of battered ambiance and club anthems that sounds mixed down from a 10th-generation dub. Urban tribes are Leckey’s ostensible focus, given the way he lingers on the brand-name sportswear of the ’70s and ’80s and the implicit homoeroticism of young men’s fashion rituals. But the real fascination is in the dancers he captures: amphetamined-up Northern Soul cowboys twirling like tops, ravers whose arms seem about to fly off their bodies, drugged-up ghosts that emerge from the darkness like coelacanths. These rituals where the body is disconnected from the mind, acted out in the embrace of the crowd, come to seem as alien as any Amazonian ayahuasca ceremony broadc