Sampler
Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London
3 June 2025
Screening in conversation with Matt Hale
exhibited works:
gallery information:
Sampler consists of one track taken from each of the albums published to date by Mark Dean on chaplachap records, with accompanying texts adapted from their respective liner notes.
Intro (Silver Screen) (2000/2025)
from Samaritaine EP
When Greta Garbo was filming the final scene in Queen Christina, the direction given was to ‘think of nothing’ and become a tabula rasa. To appropriate such a scene could thus be seen as inscribing meaning onto emptiness, or perhaps as an emptying out of original meaning. However, I am seeking to follow the direction given to Garbo for a previous sequence: ‘This has to be sheer poetry and feeling. The moment must be like a dance… as you would do it to music’. But of course, I am not Greta Garbo.
© acknowledgements: Queen Christina (1933) | Encore Une Fois (Sash!) | The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman (Sparks)
Eyeliner (2020)
from Künstlerroman LP
The visual language of this work is taken from Kurt Kren’s 10/65 Self-Mutilation, while the film loop combines the beginning and end of Repulsion, in which one of the few lines delivered by Catherine Deneuve’s character is ‘I don’t feel… I mean… I don’t know’. We are never given a reason for this muteness, nor her eventual breakdown, but the closing image of the film points towards childhood sexual abuse. While I can now speak about such things in terms of my own life, for the many years that I could not, art was a way of remaining ‘intentionally silent’ without keeping it all in; and I thank God for that, as well as for artists such as Joseph Cornell who lit the way of expression through appropriation.
© acknowledgements: Repulsion (1965) | Joseph Cornell: Children’s Party (1938) | Summer (Mumm-ra) | Ockeghem: Deo Gratias (Huelgas Ensemble)
Idol Youth (2023)
from Pastiche Icons LP
I made this work in Athens, while I was thinking about aniconism, usually understood as the prohibition of images. The Greek Orthodox tradition is deeply engaged with icons, and thus is positively iconic. At the same time, it is grounded in apophatic, or ‘negative’ theology. This combination helped me to see aniconism as not simply a negative (proscriptive) commandment of God — ‘thou shalt not [make images]’ — but also perhaps as a negative (apophatic) expression by God — ‘I am not [an image]’. This in turn pointed me towards an understanding of kenosis as not only Christ’s self-emptying of divinity, but a deeper indwelling of the divine. Of course, for those who seek to follow Christ, self-emptying is of a different nature; but hopefully the end will be the same.
© acknowledgements: Scott Street (Phoebe Bridgers)
Apophatic Baptism (2013)
from Seven Sacraments LP
While this series is conceptually based on Poussin’s Seven Sacraments, this particular work visually references Piero’s Baptism of Christ. I shot the source footage on my phone at the South Bank, only managing to capture for a minute before I was stopped by a security guard. The land there is private property, but other visitors were taking pictures unimpeded, so the issue was clearly related to the making of images of children. I also had my clerical collar on at the time. Because of my own experience as a child, I am acutely aware of the potential for the abuse of power, and nowadays particularly so within the church — because it keeps happening, and it keeps people away from church, and thus away from the sacrament of baptism. In this work there is no baptist figured, but the waters of baptism remain.
© acknowledgements: Don’t Talk To Me About Love (Altered Images)
Waiting (2023)
from Easter Parade EP
This work stars Billie Holiday, in between songs in 1958, the year of my birth, and one year before her death from drug addiction. The music is constructed from the intro to Heroin by The Velvet Underground, while the title references their related song Waiting for the Man. This in turn relates to the subject of one of Billie Holiday’s signature songs, My Man, one who ‘isn’t true. He beats me, too. What can I do?’ In the context of the Easter Parade EP, this track represents a day of waiting, not for a drug dealer, or an untrue lover, but for the resurrection of Easter. However, on that Holy Saturday, we may see Christ as not just waiting, but active, descending into hell to free all those held captive.
© acknowledgements: Billie Holiday on Music Hall Parade, RTF (1958) | Heroin (The Velvet Underground)
Monitors (2021)
from New Album LP
According to the Book of Genesis, the light created ‘in the beginning’ was distinct from the celestial lights created ‘on the fourth day’. The first is the light that never goes out; thus the City of God in Revelation ‘has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light’. But in the meantime, ‘we see through a glass, darkly’ and rely on images of the past (Susan Sontag’s ‘inventory of mortality’) to help us imagine the things that may come. These artefacts may be magnificent or mundane, beautiful or ugly — and sometimes these come together in art.
© acknowledgements: Crt problem (Tin Barišić) | Marquee Moon (Television)
Twister (2023)
from Twister EP
My first experience of cinema was at the age of four, when I saw The Wizard of Oz projected outdoors on a portable screen under an African night sky. The image was dwarfed by the stars, but the experience was intensely powerful, and I have never forgotten it. I have remained a friend of Dorothy, and eventually became a video artist. I used to say that video was an impoverished medium, because it was not film; but it too can have a power beyond its scale, particularly when combined with music (thus it can become operatic as well as cinematic). Of course, we are now in an era of digital convergence, where such distinctions of media have become blurred. But the memory of these sources remains, and informs the content of my work to this day. A lot happened to me along the way, some of which I ‘forgot’, and the struggle to recover these memories has informed my practice also.
© acknowledgements: The Wizard of Oz (1939) | Kate (Charlotte Gainsbourg) | Into The Heart (Mirrors)
Our Moment (2024)
from Twelve Steps LP
In his photo-montage essay Enchanted Wanderer, Joseph Cornell wrote of ‘evanescent fragments unexpectedly encountered’ in the cinema. Viewing Chantal Akerman’s films in the 1970’s was like taking one of these moments and extending it for the duration… and of course I wasn’t the only one to appreciate her use of long static shots, which influenced a whole generation of moving image artists. But it was not easy to repeat the cinematic experience, especially as Akerman’s films were notoriously poorly distributed in the UK for decades. In the 90’s, I would rewatch Je Tu Il Elle via a library VHS recording, but it was so worn that it looked more like the video art it had influenced than the original film. Here I have worked with the movie as it became (unofficially) available in the 2000’s as a lo-res mpeg. I recognise that to appropriate the work of such an iconic artist in this way may be seen as sacrilegious, especially by relating her to an artist whose iconic status is based on ‘the worst video ever’. But the relationship is not binary, and this work is not about status; while it may take the form of a pastiche icon, it is more of an ex-voto, offered in gratitude for my journey so far; a journey I share with others, anonymously or otherwise, through art and through life.
© acknowledgements: Je Tu Il Elle (1974) | My Moment (Rebecca Black)
Mark Dean began looping appropriated film while studying photography and painting in the late 1970’s, and in the 1980’s extended this technique into music; these practices were eventually combined in the methodology for which Dean became recognised as a video & sound artist from the 1990’s onwards, with work held in collections including Arts Council of England, Leeds Art Gallery, MUDAM Luxembourg, and EMMA Finland. Music has remained an integral part of Dean’s art practice, with looped and layered sound samples often providing the structural basis for video works. This treatment of music as primary material is paralleled by a consistent use of film as objet trouvé; however, Dean’s use of appropriation differs, at least from some of the more reductive interpretations of such work, in that it is based not on a theory of the emptiness of images, but on a theology of kenosis, or self-emptying; a practice grounded in the lived experience of trauma.
Working via the gallery system in the 1990’s and 2000’s, Dean was ordained in 2010, and following this has produced cross-disciplinary and collaborative events. In 2021 Dean began publishing video albums on chaplachap records; while referencing vinyl LPs and EPs, they also recall a time when video artists conceptualised a future of dematerialised art, distributed outside of commodification systems. The technology to realise this eventually arrived, but along with it came both a shift in patterns of consumption and a convergence of media, such that ‘video art’ may no longer exist beyond its own history; and yet here we are…
Matt Hale regularly interviews art writers on the Art Monthly Talk Show which he has hosted for 16 years. Matt is also a contemporary visual Artist and is currently exhibiting his project Freedom Walking Sticks in the Netherlands at De Nieuwe Gang and in July as part of LAND at The Art Station.
