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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com and his anger and frustration seep through the canvas. Their uncompromising nature was matched by his last film Blue. This film, with the screen saturated with an unchanging blue, was his most lyrical. It would be foolhardy to try capture the power and poignancy of this film in words. With the eyes confounded with nothing but an infinite blue, you are left to the voice-over to lead you through Jarman’s imagination and your own in a way that has never been attempted before. Jarman’s home and garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, figure frequently in his last works, be it writing or film, and some attempt to address this has been attempted at the Barbican. Outside the gallery local children have made their own gardens à la Jarman to quite good effect. However, nothing can recreate the sense of isolation and strange other-worldliness present at Dungeness. It is as if here everything, including time itself will dissolve at moment into the vast swathes of shingle. His home and the others around it stand stranded in this stark landscape, now dominated and threatened by the vast nuclear reactor behind them. A posthumous book, Derek Jarman’s Garden (1995), with splendid photographs by Howard Sooley, captures the beauty of the place that meant so much to Jarman. I personally had never considered that gardening could ever be considered an art form, but what Jarman created here is nothing but art, albeit more challenging to construct and maintain as it is an art that continually BUY Derek Jarman books online from and changes and grows. Innumerable plants provide islands of colour that sit in the sea of shingle which flows through the garden. Driftwood and flotsam punctuate the garden in the form of sculpture and ultimately serve to unify it with the area surrounding it. The result is a bounty of visual delights, made more powerful by the improbability of their setting. It is characteristic that Jarman’s writing, even when discussing the creation of his garden in this book, soon breaks down, and becomes a discussion of so much more. Surely there is no better example than Derek Jarman of an artist whose work is entwined with their life. How, then, are we to remember this man? Should he be placed in the shrivelled canon of British 20thcentury art, filed under ‘minor artist’, or should he be cast in the limiting role of ‘queer director’, or just dismissed as loud, over-opinionated, English eccentric? It is symptomatic of artists who work in several media to be dismissed as a jack of all trades but master of none. However, this would clearly not be a worthy epitaph for a man who obviously excelled in nearly every art form he chose to turn his hand to. Jarman was also much more, being not only a very political man, but whose work also had a great feeling for the decline of all the positive elements of British culture that have been stifled and repressed since the start of the Thatcher years. Whatever his agenda, Jarman always made himself heard and it’s a voice that painful not to hear now. I feel, 286 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com then, that all us can claim a part of Derek Jarman – he was an important film-maker, and an undervalued and little discussed artist, and wrote books that will surely stand the test of time. And yes, he was a consummate gardener. To lose an artist at the height of their powers is hard to live with, but to neglect what they left us is criminal. What is important now is that no matter how fragmented he may become in our minds, this man of BUY Derek Jarman books online from and rare vision must be preserved in a unified form in drafty corridors of history. Jarman, with all his divergent skill and charm, was surely more than just the sum of his parts, and that is how he should be remembered. Go and see this retrospective, watch one of the films, or even read the books, but do try and take the time to enter into Jarman’s world. I can assure you, it’s quite an amazing place to be. � 287 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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