April 6, 2004
Peter Wollen on Derek Jarman
On my way home from dinner last night, I picked up a copy of Peter Wollen's Paris Manhattan, his just-published collection of essays on art and film. The four essays I read before bed--on Richter's October 18, 1977 cycle of paintings, Conceptual Art, the Situationists' relationship to architecture, and Derek Jarman's Blue--were of varying quality, the last being the best. There could be several reasons for this: the author has a personal connection to Jarman and is himself a specialist in film/t.v./digital media, subjects he teaches at UCLA; the Richter essay was written for the LRB, a publication to which he frequently contributes, and is therefore necessarily long on the history and sociology of that date and short on Richter's presentation of images from it; I was half asleep while reading the Situationist essay. Either way, the second of three sections in the essay "Blue" is beautiful and worth archiving here. So, the copyright for this extended quote belongs to Peter Wollen. To my mind, this is strong, engaging art history.
THE MONOCHROME ADVENTURE
Yves Klein started painting blue monochrome works in 1955. He had started talking about International Klein Blue (IKB) around 1957 or early 1958 and patented the actual process of making the paint itself in 1960. In essence, IKB is a slab of ultramarine pigment suspended in a clear commercial binder, Rhodopas. The effect is to preserve the granularity of the pigment and to seal it so that a thickness of pure pigment can be hung vertically on the wall, like an upended tray. The origins of IKB, according to Klein himself, are twofold, and both significant for Jarman's re-use of this particular medium. First, the idea of monochrome came to Klein while he was playing a jazz improvisation based on the thought of Max Heindel, a Rosicrucian philosopher, or cosmogonist, who profoundly influenced Klein. Heindel, in his exposition of Rosicrucian beliefs, claimed that blue was the highest of the colours, that of spirit freed from material form. Klein believed that his IKB monochromes symbolically presented the prospect of release from materiality and entry into a world of pure spirit. In art-theoretic terms, Klein considered that art should consist simply of pure colour and that the invention of drawing and image-making, the rival tradition to that of pure colour, represented, in effect, a fall from paradise. Historically, painting had begun with pure pigment. Others, like Malevich, had shown the way back to colour, but were still bedevilled by the idea of composition. Only Klein himself, however, fully understood the true meaning and role of monochrome.
In conjunction with his mystical belief in the spiritual power of monochrome, Klein also derived his insistence on pure pigment from his intense personal experience of the materiality of paint. In 1949, aged 21, he had worked for about a year in London, in the Old Brompton Road frame-shop of Robert Savage, a friend of his father. There he experienced w hat he called 'the illumination of matter'. As he wroter later,
I disliked colours ground in oil. They seemed dead to me; what pleased me above all were pure pigments, in powder, such as I saw them in the windows of retail paint-sellers. They had brightness and extraordinary, autonomous lives of their own. This was essential colour. Living tangible colourmatter. It was depressing to see such glowing powder, once mixed in a distemper, or whatever medium intended as a fixative, lose its value, tarnish, become dull. One might obtain effects of paste but after drying it wasn't the same; the effective colour magic had vanished.
Traditionally, ultramarine was the most precious of pigments, which for centuries could be obtained only from lapis lazuli quarried at a single mine in Afghanistan, shipped to Europe via Venice or Aleppo. The mine was first described in the west in 1837, by which time it was exhausted. To IKB Klein later added gold leaf, which he had worked with in the same frame-shop, when gilding frams for Savage, and then rose, to complete his colour repertoire, as a tribute to the Rose Cross. Klein's approach to colour and pigment combined many elements: an obsession with its spiritual meaning, an optical delight in its intensity and granularity, an occult interest in its symbolic interpretation, a fascination with the precious and the antique. I think that all these approaches were congenial to Jarman in one way or another. His own work is full of references to magic, alchemy and occult lore; it is also intensely sensual and, as we see from his film Wittgenstein, concerned with pure chromatic effect; there is an aspect which we might almost call 'precious'--for example, in the way Jarman carefully chose the opulent, encrusted colours for the covers of his notebooks and the use of gold and glass in his own paintings. (Wittgenstein, I should add, was himself the author of a book on colour, his Notes on Colour--in fact, his last book--written in manuscript in 1950 and 1951, immediately before his death.)
However, there were more specific reasons for Jarman's growing fascination with Klein. Jarman always had an ambivalent relationship with film and particularly, as we have seen, with television. Towards the end of his life he made it clear that he was only interested in films which were deeply personal, which were about the film-maker's own life. Blue is just such an autobiographical film, dealing with Aids directly as an experience lived by its maker. Blue was the colour Jarman saw when eye-drops were put in his eyes in the hope of alleviating his blindness. Paradoxically, blindness allowed Jarman to see, beyond the distraction of images, directly into the realm of colour, as Yves Klein had wished. Aids was too important to Jarman for it to be represented by images.
It was always going to have to be the best film I had ever made. And to make matters even more complicated, there was never a situation that presented itself as the obvious scenario. I was always stuck with images. I could have made the film with actors, I suppose, but there's always the question of whether the audience will identify with them. You'd have to get past that hurdle before you ever got close to the experience. And, at this late stage in the game, I simply wasn't preprared to short-change myself. The key to Blue was to do away with the images altogether, and to integrate the personal by integrating diary entries into the script.
In this emergency situation, Jarman turned to Yves Klein as Klein had turned to Saint Rita, 'saint of impossible and hopeless causes', to show the way forward, beyond images, beyond representation. There is a tendency to see monochrome, as Soviet critic Tarabukin saw the red, blue and yellow works of Rodchenko (shown in 1921) as signalling 'the end of painting'. It would be easy to make a connection to Jarman's impending death, and, in general, to post-modern ideas about the end of history. But Klein saw monochrome as a return to a lost origin and an embarcation on a new adventure. He talked of 'infinite possibility' and his wish to overcome 'fear of the void'. 'for me a painting must create around itself, permanently, a deep, immense joy, a great illuminating, delirious, and especially immaterial happiness on the surface of the canvas.' Jarman was always opposed to facile optimism about Aids, preferring to talk about dying with Aids, rather than living with Aids, admitting the experience of physical and mental breakdown, his thoughts of suicide, his weariness with it all. At the same time, he saw Blue as a way of 'keeping the illness at bay', reasserting an immense joy in the face of dreadful disaster, an illumination in thet face of death.
It goes on from there. The essay has rekindled my interest in learning more about Jarman's oeuvre.