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‘A Sound System, like the property of any system, is the interaction of the sum of its parts’ — Mark Leckey, ‘OdooDem’ (2012/2016)     About thirty years since the flowering of rave culture in the United Kingdom and the end of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister, the sounds and images of late 1980s pop culture — from 808 hits to mid-period Dr Who — can still be found jammed together in the interdisciplinary work of the artist Mark Leckey and music group The KLF Leckey, winner of the 2008 Turner Prize, recently made waves with his first United States retrospective, Containers and Their Drivers at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York The KLF, meanwhile, have returned in 2017 after a twenty-plus-year hiatus, having released a somewhat mysterious video in January, then announcing a forthcoming book Reared during the punk era and active participants in rave, these artists, in their work, appropriate not only the specific sounds and images of Thatcher-era English culture, but also the ritual-like energy that coursed through it Punks and ravers both resisted authority in their own ways, using and abusing their own lexicon of particular cultural symbols Can the decadent landscapes of media symbols that Leckey and The KLF assemble become sites of resistance as well?   In exhibitions like Containers and Their Drivers, which gave a wide-ranging survey of the artist’s twenty-year practice, Leckey displays appropriated images and objects drawn from disparate parts of contemporary life: refrigerators, LP covers, highway overpasses, Felix the Cat We see these images and objects in various forms on screens, as sculptural forms, and printed on posters — highlighting their ability to adapt to (and thereby saturate) different life contexts More than the sheer presence of the images, Leckey’s investigations into the histories of their consumption makes viewers renegotiate their relationship to a media-inured culture   Leckey’s interest in appropriation is rooted in the work that made his name, the 15-minute video ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’ (1999) A rhythmic splice-up of found footage, ‘Fiorucci’ documents British dance music culture from the 1970s onwards, highlighting the spaces in which various subcultures