1. The End

2. There Is A River

3. Wings / No Wings

4. The Lyre

5. Theme From An Imaginary Western

6. Still Willing

7. Pastorale

8. Listen

9. Thought Bubble

10. Recycler

11. Research Station

12. Our Moment

Liner Notes

The Twelve Steps saved my life. I started working with video around the time I started working the Steps; I still do. This album is based on my personal experience of that process.

1. We admitted that we were powerless over addiction/compulsion/others→ that our lives had become unmanageable.

The End

This work combines ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions of the Picture of Dorian Gray, as portrayed in the eponymous 1945 film (which I first worked with in Picture In Picture). In Oscar Wilde’s story, a portrait in the attic registers the spiritual ravages of a life less than well lived, while its subject remains unmarked by age and experience. Even in our own lives, we may for a time enjoy the illusion of immortality, as maintained by artifice — and passing as something we are not, or denying who we are, may also be a means of temporary survival — but in the end the image and the actuality will meet, and we are then faced with our dilemma. What is there left to do? Either go on to the bitter end, or find a new way to live.

2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

There Is A River

According to the psalmist → there is a river by which we might find ourselves, if we can ‘be still and know that I am God’. The river into which Jean Seberg and Peter Fonda gaze, as Warren Beatty looks on from a distance, is the Potomac, by which I happened to live as a child. The first time I used this source material, in I Didn’t Invent It (Lilith – Beatty x 16 + ½), I edited Beatty’s character out; but here he remains, representing an attitude of indifference or intolerance toward spiritual principles (while in the source film, he is a trainee mental health professional who eventually seeks help for his own insanity).

3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.

Wings/No Wings

I have also used The Birds as source material before, in Goin’ Back (The Birds/The Byrds x 32 + 1) and later in My Mum (V2-Sensitive), although in those works the birds are registered by their absence. Their presence here harks back even further, to a time when I was under the influence of Carlos Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan, in which birds are psychedelic omens, and Doris Lessing’s Archives of Colonised Planet 5: Shikasta, aka Earth, where ‘the bird was the servant of the Signature, and they must do exactly what it told them’. I eventually lost faith in such New Age spirituality — which I now recognise as a form of gnosticism — as it did little to assuage my persistent state of anxiety and isolation. So when years later I took Step 3, I did so without much expectation; however, that night I slept like a baby, and woke the next morning in a state of peace that was new to me. And while my anxiety returned, since that day I have never felt completely alone. However, I have not forgotten my former state of isolation; I understand the difference, and that is how I came to understand God.

4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

The Lyre

The peace I experienced after taking Step 3 was real, and I was truly grateful for the respite, but when my anxiety returned, I had to look inward for the source of my discontent: the myriad of fears and resentments, which I imagined to be externally caused, were each traced back to a fundamental inner duplicity, which in turn had caused actual harm to myself and others. These reflections were disturbing, not least because they began to uncover the actual trauma hidden beneath my layers of self-deception. However, the process led me toward self-acceptance, and the possibility of speaking the truth. Harpo, Harpo, when you start/Tears of joy inside my heart →

5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Theme From An Imaginary Western

Orson Welles’ hall of mirrors sequence in The Lady From Shanghai has often been replicated in cinema, and even in song → yet the ‘original’ is itself a remake; while the director’s cut of the sequence lasted 20 minutes, the studio reduced it to less than 3 minutes before the film’s release, with the deleted footage apparently lost forever. Mirrors have long been a metaphor for stages of spiritual development: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known → If Step 4 is to see myself reflected in a mirror (as clearly as a dark glass allows) then Step 5 is to break through that mirror and reveal myself to others; and in the process to see through the illusion that I am isolated in perpetual opposition.

6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Still Willing

The previous five works in this series might all function as self-portaits, via appropriation, but here there is an absence of such self-representation; on the other hand, the artist is present behind the camera, and through the music. I wrote and recorded this song in 1987, before I began working the 12 Steps (although I had certainly taken the first half of Step 1). The lyrics may have been misguided in their masochism, but nevertheless they expressed a willingness to commit to a process of change through relationship; and so I have now appropriated this old song and placed it into my present context.

7. We humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

Pastorale

By the time I reached Steps 6 & 7, an acute awareness of the painful aspects of my character as identified in Steps 4 & 5 led me to feel ‘entirely ready’ to be rid of them. However, despite repeated attempts to take Step 7, nothing happened; until one day, while walking in the countryside, I suddenly found myself saying ‘I am willing to be me, here, now’, and I knew I was taking the Step at last. I was no longer trying, it was happening. Or perhaps another way of putting it is that I was no longer insisting, I was asking. And the response was not one of rejection, but acceptance. The still image in this work (and on the cover of this album) was taken in the same locale many years earlier, when I first started taking photographs as an alternative to taking drugs; and while there were to be many more attempts before I was introduced to the 12 Steps, in the meantime photography became my way into art school, which probably saved my life in the interim.

8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Listen

For many people, when they encounter the 12 Steps as written, it is the references to God that cause them to balk, but in my case it was Step 8, to which my first thought was: what about the people who had harmed me? And there were indeed multiple traumas to be uncovered in the process of working the Steps; but in the meantime, those who had harmed me had moved on, and were no longer thinking of me, if indeed they ever had, and the scenes of those traumas were left empty. I alone was living in my past, and I too needed to move on, if I was to cease being a victim. And along the way, I too had caused harm to others, and the denial of this had kept me in isolation. This all took time to understand, and was an iterative process; I had to learn to listen, to others and to myself.

9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Thought Bubble

When I began working with Yazoo’s Midnight, I wasn’t sure why; I couldn’t see that I was making anything more than a rather belated fan video. But I kept going back to it, and began to realise I was thinking about a time long ago when, like the protagonist of the song, I had cheated on someone I loved. While I had subsequently made amends, I had also sought to justify myself in terms of my own complicated situation, when quite simply ‘I should have thought of that before I did you wrong’. This realisation led me to the idea of reworking all of the 12 Steps via this album.

10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Recycler

In the UK, Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) is titled Slow Motion, after the frame-by-frame technique Godard termed ‘decomposition’, and which viscerally affected me when I first saw it in the film’s bicycle sequence. Of course, in 1980, a cinematic moment like that could not easily be repeated, and had to live in the memory, reverberating and generating inspiration; in my case, many years later, as in The Return of Jackie & Judy (+ Joey). Joseph Cornell wrote about the experience of such ‘evanescent fragments unexpectedly encountered’ in his photo-montage essay Enchanted Wanderer → which led me to seek out one particular fragment he refers to, and to recycle it for Seven Stars (Hedy Lamarr). In the present work, as well as the Godard clip, there are fragments from Soul II Soul and Lana del Rey, which are inventoried below along with all other appropriated source material used in this album, in accordance with copyright legislation. And while ideas cannot be copyrighted, I freely admit that I took the concept of film appropriation from Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart, and frame-by-frame advance from Slow Motion.

11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

Research Station

I’m recycling my own material here, as previously used in Idol Youth. I’ve always appreciated being among museum visitors; there is an open-mindedness that is rare in crowds. This footage was captured fairly recently, but I started taking such images as a youth, when I discovered that I could do so anonymously; unlike street photography, one can pass as just another visitor taking pictures. I suppose this could be considered voyeurism, but I hope it is more equal than that; everyone is looking for something, and so am I. But where might one find it? I once hoped that art might be the end of our spiritual longing, or at least the container for its advancement, but the ideals of art eventually failed me (or I them) and I had to seek another way.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Our Moment

Viewing Chantal Akerman’s films in the 1970’s was like taking one of Cornell’s ‘evanescent 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 again, 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 sacriligeous, especially by relating her to an artist whose iconic status is based on ‘the worst video ever’ → But the relationship is not binary, and the 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.

CCLP05

Twelve Steps LP

1. The End (5.00)
Portrait of Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray (Henrique Medina) →
Picture of Dorian Gray (Ivan Albright) →
To The End (La Comedie) (Blur et Françoise Hardy) →

2. There Is A River (2.17)
Lilith (1964) →
Deluxe (Immer Wieder) (Harmonia) →

3. Wings / No Wings (3.40)
The Sound of Music (1965) →
Rock Your Baby (George McCrae) →

4. The Lyre (4.55)
The Big Store (1941) →
Animal Crackers (1930) →
Love Happy (1949) →
A Night At The Opera (1935) →
At The Circus (1939) →
The Cocoanuts (1929) →
A Day At The Races (1937) →
Monkey Business (1931) →
Duck Soup (1933) →
Volti E Fantasmi (Ennio Morricone) →
Atom Heart Mother (Pink Floyd) →

5. Theme From An Imaginary Western (2.46)
The Lady From Shanghai (1947) →
No Limit (Tirzah) →

6. Still Willing (3.11)

7. Pastorale (6.44)
if…. (1968) →
Wrangham (Claire M Singer) →

8. Listen (3.15)
Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948) →
Bury A Friend (Billie Eilish) →
An Empty Space (Dustin O’Halloran) →

9. Thought Bubble (1.41)
Midnight (Yazoo) →
Yazoo live on The Tube, C4, 12/11/82

10. Recycler (2.04)
Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie), aka Slow Motion (1980) →
Keep On Movin’ (Soul II Soul) →
Off To The Races (Lana Del Rey) →

11. Research Station (5.55)
It’s Euphoric (Georgia) →

12. Our Moment (3.20)
Je Tu Il Elle (1974) →
My Moment (Rebecca Black) →

Mark Dean