London. It’s common knowledge that being blue means something different in English than it does in German. In English the term refers on the one hand to sadness, whilst in the filmgoers’ universe it also refers to pornographic movies. »Blue« is the title of Derek Jarman’s last film, which plays a central role both formally and in more general terms in »Derek Jarman: A Brutal Beauty«, the exhibition curated by British video artist Isaac Julien at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In the film, completed in 1993, Jarman talks about going blind, whilst a blue square fills the entire screen, which back then only occasionally triggered an endorphine rush amongst audiences. Shortly afterwards Jarman died. However, the only thing about the film that could be said to be pornographic is the openness with which Jarman talks about going blind and perhaps also his comments on his homosexuality. And perhaps the chaotic tumult of various content in the narration could even be said to be inebriated (in other words, echoing with the German meaning of “being blue”). However, this does not do justice to the historical political dimension that is addressed in this exhibition. The sense of mourning here relates to more than the loss of an individual: the exhibition mourns the loss of the politically committed artist, a figure no longer to be found today. Or at least not in Great Britain.
Above all however »Blue« is a moving monochrome image conceived by Jarman almost twenty years earlier in response to Yves Klein’s »International Klein Blue«. This film is not the only place where we find intense colour here. Each of the works in a collection of Super-8 films shown in parallel on screens and monitors of various sizes seems to be shaped by its own chromatic palette. These short films, made between 1970 and 1982, show private recordings and staged situations. Jarman originally studied painting and used the film camera as a kind of colouring book, as Isaac Julien writes in his essay in the catalogue. This mode of creating images, imbued with content that was very clearly revolt against the prevailing fashion for structuralism, offered a kind of liberation, to cite Julien. Actress Tilda Swinton too, who was a friend of Jarman and appeared in a number of his films, including the feature »Last of England«, and even in »Blue«, where she has a speaking part, laments the loss of the error-ridden opulence, punk and the unpretentious, uncompromising stance in filmmaking that she equates with Jarman’s oeuvre. You can read all about it in more detail in the catalogue and hear all about it in the documentary »Derek«, Isaac Julien’s contribution to the exhibition. But more on that later.
Before considering Jarman’s cinematic oeuvre, the exhibition turns its focus on his garden in Dungeness, which Isaac Julien recorded in photos shown in light-boxes, and on his painting. Here too intense coloration paired with a highly material expressive endeavour, on the one hand, connects with the content expressed, namely the publically accessible private sphere. In a work from 1988–89, aggressively tarred and feathered, three beds dotted with photos hang on the walls, demonstratively highlighting homosexuality vis-à-vis the hypocritical society of the Thatcher years (1979–1990). Later, on canvases from 1993, gutter press articles against Aids sufferers form the background onto which thick layers of paint are applied, with furious words scratched into them: »Fuck me blind«. The texts in the catalogue also remind us about public discussions on the marginalisation of people living with HIV. Jarman went public with his illness in 1986, partly too in response to the vicious conservatism of the government of the day. Perhaps people outside the UK aren’t particularly aware any more of the degree of venom that Margaret Thatcher could trigger: lyrics from pop singer Morrissey’s pen in 1988 assert »the kind people have a wonderful dream, Margaret on the guillotine «. Tilda Swinton sees Jarman as a »Thatcherite artist« – not in the sense that he supported her politics but meaning instead that he personified the rage directed against her in those days. The black canvases are bursting with content: the focus is not on painting or pictorial composition but instead on expressing fury at the politics shaping life in society. A politics that proclaimed that society does not exist.
Interestingly there is no »society« in Great Britain today either, despite the political changes after 1997. Instead there are »communities«, a term used to refer to groups, defined primarily in terms of their ethnic and religious affiliations, as well as to people living in a particular area. Politicians use the emotive notion of community to promote social cohesion. One consequence is that there are high expectations in the United Kingdom that artists and others creating culture will serve the common good. In their essays in the exhibition catalogue Julien and Swinton oppose this kind of state-sanctioned social arts scene – and in their film too.
»Derek« is a documentary made for the exhibition. The film is based on screenwriter Colin McCabe’s unpublished interview with Jarman in the early nineties, as well as on a letter Tilda Swinton wrote in 2002 in memory of Jarman. Isaac Julien for his part wanted to link his own form of documentary film work, which owes a considerable debt to Jarman, to this father figure by commemorating him and his role. »Derek« explains the exhibition, taking the place of conventional exhibition texts, though it does so without deploying explanatory documentary devices. Tilda Swinton speaks the words she wrote in her letter to Jarman against a backdrop of images from his films and snippets of news footage, interspersed with excerpts from the films of Colin McCabe’s interview: an associative linkage of the visual material set in conjunction to explicit statements by Jarman and Swinton. In this respect, »Derek« once again reveals close formal ties to Jarman’s films, which are just as personal – and often also described as poetic – in tone, moving closer to his style on the one hand to pay tribute to Jarman as an artist whilst at the same time levelling broadsides at insipid contemporary art.
There are subliminal echoes of the current fashionable interest in the Eighties. Jarman shot videos for The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys; Toyah Willcox and Adam Ant acted in his films. However, whilst current retrogressive fashion and pop music contents themselves with the superficial appearances of an eccentric decade, the exhibition seeks to go further; reminding us of the spirit of resistance in artistic expression, or indeed even reinvigorating it.
Kunsthalle Wien, 27th June to 5th October 2008
Translated by Helen Ferguson