{"id":2202,"date":"2011-01-01T00:40:43","date_gmt":"2010-12-31T23:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/?p=2202"},"modified":"2025-09-27T11:15:03","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T10:15:03","slug":"the-beginning-of-the-end-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/the-beginning-of-the-end-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beginning of The End"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Beginning of the End, Beaconsfield, London, 24 Nov 2010 \u2013 27 Feb 2011<\/a><\/p>\n

The texts below are reprinted with permission – all rights reserved<\/p>\n

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Rachel Withers, ‘Mark Dean, Beaconsfield’, Artforum, April 2011\u00a0\u2192<\/a><\/p>\n

The phrase \u201cChristian disco\u201d might trigger cringe-making thoughts of buttoned-up adolescent parties monitored by censorious adults and lubricated with fizzy drinks and Cliff Richard hits; but that scenario couldn\u2019t be further from Mark Dean\u2019s grimly impressive video installation Christian Disco (Terminator)<\/a>, 2010. Crafted from a three-second fragment of the 1984 film The Terminator, it shows a young man and woman dancing in a disco, but, characteristically, Dean\u2019s edit desynchronizes and loops the footage, distorting its colors and corrupting the outlines of the swaying bodies. Luridly hued skeletal afterimages trail behind the dancers, occasionally catching up with them and sketching skulls onto their youthful, unconcerned faces.<\/p>\n

The work\u2019s sound track cannibalizes the movie\u2019s theme music with its clanging bells and driving beat, and stitches onto it two voices, one male and one female, recorded from a Holocaust Memorial Day service at St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral in London. \u201cHere ends the first lesson,\u201d \u201chere ends the second lesson,\u201d they intone somberly, but Dean\u2019s piece offers no lesson. Projected onto a large screen in Beaconsfield\u2019s cavernous brick railway arch, it suggests both a gigantic danse macabre and hallucinatory video decor for a rave whose music plays on but whose celebrants have mysteriously disappeared. Hints of motifs from the Western Christian repertoire\u2014apocalypse scenes or the horror-pornography of vanitas images\u2014are grafted onto contemporary existential and political anxieties: nuclear proliferation, survivalism, or the effects of spectacular, hedonistic-escapist industrialized entertainment (such as the Christian derived Terminator narratives, or images of present-day clubbing and drug use). The viewer is left in the grip of contradictory urges: to saturate oneself in the hypnotic ambience, and to get the hell out as fast as possible.<\/p>\n

The other large video installation in this survey of two decades of Dean\u2019s work similarly attracts and repels. Love Missile (7\u2033 vs 12\u2033)<\/a>, 2010, features two recordings of manufactured punk band Sigue Sigue Sputnik\u2019s single of the same name (with its calculatedly offensive \u201cshoot it up\u201d refrain), phased so they pass in and out of sync. The audio component accompanies a ten-foot-high video projection of a human silhouette, haloed by a sparkling golden aura suggestive of rock-concert stage lighting or a rocket\u2019s tail (in fact, it shows a streetlight reflected on water). Two smaller monitors screen vinyl-recordshaped images of warships launching cruise missiles (these last are \u201cdeleted\u201d with white strips, rendering them crucifixes). On paper, this conflation of rock, religion, warfare, and phallic imagery might sound rote, but the work itself is challenging and ambivalent. The doubled musical track generates slurs and echoes that lend it a peculiar depth. And the projected figure is likewise doubled so that its outlines never coincide. Ultimately, the work seems to embody impossible desires for psychical unity or transcendence\u2014but though it signals the horror that can issue from the playing-out of such desires in real life, it doesn\u2019t trivialize them.<\/p>\n

Beaconsfield\u2019s survey\u2014timely, excellently curated by David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin, and a big achievement for a small nonprofit team\u2014 also included a \u201cvideo jukebox\u201d screening thirty-six of Dean\u2019s videos plus the artist\u2019s written commentary on each. Briefly alluded to is the artist\u2019s childhood experience of rape, a shocking detail that suggests a searing therapeutic dimension in certain works. Goin\u2019 Back (The Birds\/The Byrds x 32 + 1)<\/a>, 1997, manipulates Hitchcock footage of a bloodied, collapsed Tippi Hedren, shifting her back and forth from wide-eyed dreamy repose to terror as she fights off Hitchcock\u2019s attacking lens. On the sound track a repeated line from a pretty Byrds tune sings of \u201cgoing back,\u201d a paradoxically soothing reference to, in Dean\u2019s words, \u201cthe recovery of traumatic memory.\u201d Hedren becomes a surrogate for the artist in a nuanced and moving moment of cross-gender identification.<\/p>\n

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Eliza Williams, ‘Mark Dean: The Beginning of The End’, Art Monthly no 343, February 2011 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n

Beaconsfield\u2019s dank, voluminous lower gallery space, housed beneath a railway arch, provides the perfect setting for Christian Disco (Terminator)<\/a>, 2010, a new video installation by Mark Dean. The film takes a tiny, fairly innocuous section from the 1984 blockbuster movie Terminator<\/em> and repositions it as a scene imbued with apocalyptic fervour. It is not a recognisable moment from the film \u2013 Arnie\u2019s relentless cyborg is nowhere to be seen \u2013 but instead a largely forgettable three-second clip showing a group of men and women dancing. Dean has drenched the figures in intense reds and blues \u2013 suggestive of psychedelia as well as modern surveillance techniques such as infrared imaging \u2013 and configured the clip to endlessly repeat. It is set to a soundtrack that mixes a section of the original Terminator<\/em> score, which builds to a crushing crescendo, with two looped audio recordings snipped from the end of Bible readings on Holocaust Memorial Day. The piece is filled with a terrible foreboding, enhanced by the musty atmosphere, yet is utterly compelling.<\/p>\n

A companion piece can be found in the upstairs space. Love Missile (7\u201d vs 12\u201d)<\/a>, 2010, combines a central film of a man silhouetted in late-afternoon sunlight with still photographs of Cruise missiles in flight, displayed on small monitors. Dean has modified these photos so the rockets appear like tiny crosses being launched into the bright blue skies. The missile theme is then picked up in the work\u2019s soundtrack which, as its title suggests, is a mix of two versions of new-wave band Sigue Sigue Sputnik\u2019s first single.<\/p>\n

The exuberant music is at odds with the transcendent imagery of the central figure, giving the work a wittiness that undercuts its spiritual overtones. This playful mixing of seemingly contradictory emotions is a recurring theme in Dean\u2019s work. It can be seen in his first successful video piece, which is also on show at Beaconsfield as part of an archive of 36 earlier single-screen works by the artist, available for visitors to browse through in the gallery\u2019s caf\u00e9. Love Love Love<\/a>, 1992, launched Dean\u2019s career after it was exhibited in the Riverside Open<\/a> in 1992, and went on to be featured in the New Contemporaries exhibition of 1993. The film combines home movie footage of Dean\u2019s own childhood with occasional musical blasts of the word \u2018love\u2019. The different iterations of the word have been purloined by Dean from pop songs, though they sound eerie and strange away from their original context.<\/p>\n

Love Love Love is an early demonstration of Dean\u2019s knack of appropriating existing imagery and blending it with unexpected music or other film footage to create new works entirely separate from the origins of their component parts. These pieces are far removed from the largely humour-based mash-ups of film imagery that litter the internet, and are different too from the works of Douglas Gordon and Christian Marclay, who are also renowned for their manipulation of found imagery. The history and narratives of the original works form layers within Dean\u2019s art pieces, but then take on a new significance or energy that is often personal to the artist.<\/p>\n

The effect can be seen in another new piece<\/a> at Beaconsfield, which combines footage of Sid Vicious with a soundtrack by Syd Barrett. Vicious is sitting slumped with his eyes closed while Barrett sings the song Two of a Kind<\/em>, which features the refrain \u2018open your eyes and don\u2019t be blind, can\u2019t you see we\u2019re two of a kind\u2019. The light, hopeful tone of the song is diminished by knowledge of the musicians\u2019 tragic outcomes and the work seems a counterpoint to an earlier piece<\/a> by Dean, which features footage of Tippi Hedren returning to consciousness in the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds<\/em> while being serenaded by 1960\u2019s band the Byrds.<\/p>\n

Dean was recently ordained as a Church of England minister, and religious imagery and ideas have run through his work since the mid 1990\u2019s. As Dan Graham observed in his film work Rock My Religion<\/em>, 1982-82, the urgency of religious feeling can often be found in music, or in art, and it is tempting to assume that Dean sees a unity between his religion and his art. In the exhibition notes, though, Dean explicitly rejects this, stating that, for him, religion and contemporary art adopt different languages. And it indeed seems uncomfortable to describe his work as \u2018religious art\u2019, for while the theme is certainly present, it isn\u2019t overwhelming or in any way evangelical. Instead, religion seems but one aspect of Dean\u2019s work, albeit a dominant one, and part of a larger philosophical exploration that also draws fragments from music and film in the creation of ambiguous, poetic works.<\/p>\n

Eliza Williams is a writer and critic based in London<\/p>\n

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Artforum
\nArt Monthly
\nTime Out<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":11527,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-selected-texts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2202"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24497,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202\/revisions\/24497"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplachap.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}