Derek Jarman, B2 Movie, 1980. Courtesy James Mackay

Review: Derek Jarman curated by Isaac Julien at the Serpentine Gallery, London, until April 13 2008.

‘Things have got awfully tidy recently,’ remarked actress Tilda Swinton in a letter to artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, written eight years after his death.

Curator Isaac Julien seems to single out this wry comment to drive his presentation of Jarman’s works at the Serpentine. The creative mess linked with Jarman echoes not in the curating, which is considered and crisp, but in the necessity that as the spectator you must discover. You must uncover the process piece by piece, helped of course by the content and self explanation of Jarman’s work.

Gone are the traditional placards of written information which lead you from one room to the next. Instead you are informed of your chosen path by your senses. Glowing lightboxes documenting Jarman’s home and its artsy paraphernalia draw you through from the initial starting point, as does the pieced together acoustic jumble of film snippets, interviews and music which filters from Isaac Julien’s film, Derek, which acts as the centrepiece of the exhibition.

Jubilee, 1978. 16mm and Super-8mm film transferred to 35mm film. Courtesy of Whaley-Malin Productions

Lastly, the eerie light which emanates from Blue (1993), takes you to the further parts of the exhibition and, indeed, the further parts of Jarman’s mind. This sensory journey from start to finish seems to be very much representative of what Julien describes as ‘his complicated legacy’ and exemplifies Jarman’s complex and evolving world of mixed media, experimentation and shock.

Derek Jarman was born in Northwood, Middlesex, and educated at Canford boarding school in Dorset. He later studied art at the Slade School of Art and throughout his life produced a diversity of self-expressive work using the various mediums which seemingly spoke the loudest against the ‘formula’ of culture. His films are his most recognised pieces.

His work is unavoidably biographical, not simply in content, but also in feeling and drive. Either it is the sumptuous colour and backdrops of films such as Caravaggio (1986) or the It’s a Sin video for the Pet Shop Boys (1987), which reflect his time as a set and production designer; or the dark fearful tar paintings which are brimming with hatred and doom, and show how much Jarman was haunted by his sexuality.

Caravaggio, 1986. Courtesy BFI

During the central film Derek, the artist discusses his work, his life and his place within British culture. It was shot in 1990 in a day-long interview with the film’s producer, Colin McCabe. Something that predominantly haunted Jarman and his art was the disapproval he experienced in his life – he cites that everything that was told to him and about him was negative. This is clear in the response to his development of Aids – an illness that was feared and deemed to be evil at that time during the 1980s.

The media-hype bred homophobia as did the spokespeople for society. The then Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, James Anderton, referred to people (specifically homosexuals and drug users who contracted the disease) as “swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making”. There is an unavoidable link between comments such as this and Jarman’s tar paintings, which not only filter religious messages and notes of punishment but create a visual document of this ‘human cesspit’. These, however, are not simply issues of the society that surrounded him but issues that are Jarman’s own.

The Last of England, 1987. Super-8mm film transferred to video transferred to 35mm film. Courtesy of Euro London Films

Because Jarman’s work is so steeped in his own biography and is so confrontational, there is no way one can leave this exhibition wondering what it was all about. However, what is left on departing, is a sense of where is the rest? In answer to this, the rest is spread across events and cinemas in London as part of the Derek Jarman season. The Serpentine is hosting various talks and Picturehouse cinemas will be screening a selection of his films.

The exhibition acts as a taster to a banquet of other events and showings which herald the importance of Derek Jarman in British art and film. As Tilda Swinton says at the end of her letter to Jarman: ‘Bohemianism alone leads to a mad jumble of beautiful scraps….bourgeois convention alone to large unfeeling corpses.’

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