Blue

Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993) is the result of a series of improvised experiments, culminating in a film comprised entirely of a single shot of the saturated colour blue.

Symphonie Monotone was a performance as part of the development phase of the film. It featured close friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton, a dancer and a young boy, who skipped down the theatre aisles handing out blue and gold painted stones to the audience. Jarman and Swinton narrated the performance with improvised lists of anything and everything blue, set to a live musical score led by the constant ringing sound made by fingers traced around the rim of a wine glass. Images of the French artist Yves Klein’s trademark International Klein Blue (IKB) monochrome paintings were projected onto the stage. The initial project was intended to be a biography of Klein, whose single-coloured canvases had rounded edges and hung away from the wall, emphasising his paintings as objects, rather than an illusory space. 

After Jarman was diagnosed with AIDS and complications caused his vision to disintegrate, the film became autobiographical. The audience is taken on an ostensibly sonic journey, with a script that draws from the early performances and a musical score composed by Simon Fisher Turner. Blue’s narration slips between first-person accounts of Jarman’s day-to-day life as an AIDS-positive gay man living in 1990s London and the accounts of Blue, a fictional character and colour. Blue is a triumph of writing, evidenced by its run as an audio broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and how well the script reads as an entire chapter in Jarman’s Chroma: A Book of Colour (1994). Nonetheless, Jarman’s insistence on the blue image, even across audio-centric presentation formats – in the form of projections during live performances, fold-out IKB monochrome posters accompanying the CD release or IKB postcards sent to radio listeners on request – stresses the importance of colour to the experience of the work.

The dream-like quality of the film’s script and score is perpetuated by the singular monochrome colour field of IKB that lingers for the entire 74-minute duration of the film. The image facilitates a void in which time and space are no longer structured by life’s familiar rhythms. We experience an asynchronous movement across time, arranged by repetition, substitution and metaphor. The monochrome complicates the relationship of the film to representation, disrupting the promise of autobiographical works in feeding the audience’s desire to know as much as possible about the subject. Blue becomes a crisis of vision for the body of the viewer, as we inhabit a body with a vision crisis. Jarman refuses to depict people in the film with AIDS as a singular, morbid image of a ‘victim’. The monochrome veils these figures from earlier, demeaning iconographies of emaciated bodies that represented AIDS as a punitive spectacle to be consumed by the normatively healthy spectator.¹ Jarman rejects this crisis of representation, of phobic, inherently violent pictorial depictions often proliferated throughout mainstream media at the time by engaging the formal language of modernist abstraction. 

Since 2010 there has been a significant wave of creative engagement with the history of HIV/AIDS from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, stretching across a range of media including film, TV and contemporary art. Activist and writer Ted Kerr has defined this revitalisation of HIV/AIDS related cultural production as “the AIDS Crisis Re-visitation”.²  This revival has been met with both enthusiasm and critique. These critiques come in two phases: firstly, because memorialisation risks “canonizing the epidemic” and marginalising certain AIDS histories – particularly those of women, people of colour and intravenous drug users – while predominantly privileging middle-class gay men who live in major capital cities. By primarily constructing AIDS as a historical phenomenon, the abundance of recent cultural production often fails to engage with the reality of people living with HIV and AIDS today.³ In an art context, museums across the world have held major solo and group exhibitions dedicated to, or prominently featuring artists associated with the epidemic. These exhibitions tend to feature portraits of people with AIDS, or activist imagery. At the same time, there has been a rise in contemporary queer artists working with processes of abstraction, where physical bodies are rendered elusive and intangible, yet in their absence are gestured to through formal qualities and spatial relations.⁴ These concerns are shared with Jarman, because queer visibility is paradoxical in that it is simultaneously liberating and yet susceptible to manipulation by both the market and the state, of which AIDS and gay activist history has been particularly prone (think rainbow capitalism and police at Pride). ⁵

Blue operates around a central paradox, one that combines the history of non-objective art with the often identity-focused tendencies of lens-based media. The film code-switches by utilising both strategies of abstraction and narrative, adapting to the particularities of each form – text, audio broadcast, or film shown across TV, gallery and cinema contexts – without compromising the integrity of the work. I do not want to undermine the importance or weight of AIDS to gay history, having made many works in relation to it myself, but instead to suggest that the film has a mutability that offers possibilities for many other aesthetic, social and political readings. 

Distinct from the gallery or museum context, where one might stumble across Blue at any point during its playtime, the cinema draws us tonight to the same place at the same time. Before any mention of hospital waiting rooms or the virus, Jarman contextualises the everydayness of sitting at a café drinking coffee with news of the war in Sarajevo. Blue challenges us with the finitude posed by critical illness, yet Jarman persistently struggles “not to fall out of time,” to be present and aware of the world outside his own.⁶ Situated in Federation Square, a place of regular collective social and political activation, I can’t help but think about how this might position us tonight. As I’m writing this, images of bodies engulfed in orange flames from al-Asqa Hospital circulate the internet. Their deadly violence depicts another crisis of representation and galvanises bodies across time and space, who regularly congregate just outside these very walls in protest.

In 1987 Douglas Crimp defined the art world’s response to AIDS through a series of rhetorical manoeuvres to establish a near-total binary separation between aesthetic practices as either ‘personal’ or ‘political’, a distinction he made between mourning and militancy.⁷ This initial strategy does not stand up to sustained analysis, nor does it encapsulate the breadth of Blue as a work that is simultaneously deeply personal and politically engaged. Unlike Yves Klein’s paintings that have a clear boundary framed by the white wall, Jarman’s blue disperses across the screen and seeps off the projection surface, casting the entire room and all our bodies in light. This collective bathing facilitates a hyperawareness of our physicality in space. It gives shape to an aesthetic mode that, in the words of psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, attunes the audience to the ways in which we are in-formed, that is, “how we emerge amidst the world’s forms, in the movements and rhythms that we share with our others.”⁸ To think through formalism in this way is not to refuse content or context but rather as a queer inquiry into how content is shaped, transmitted, coded, patterned, undermined, and invested by means of form.⁹ Blue produces relational and material modes that remain explicitly social, networked, and ongoing. The self-portrait reaches out and touches us, entangled in a fleeting arrangement of queer tactics of disruption, infiltration, concealment, or the declaration of unauthorised allegiances. In its refusal of singularity, Blue raises fundamental questions about how we exist with each other and the world around us, because one cannot be queer alone.   

Blue (1993 United Kingdon 79 mins)

Prod Co: Basilisk Communications, Uplink, Arts Council of Great Britain, Opal, BBC Radio 3 Prod: James Mackay, Takashi Asai Dir, Scr: Derek Jarman Mus: Simon Fisher Turner

Cast: John Quentin, Nigel Terry, Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton

Endnotes