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

Isaac Julien, the curator of the Brutal Beauty exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery (23rd February -13th April 2008), stated that Jarman rightfully deserves a place alongside Richard Hamilton, Gilbert & George and the late Ian Hamilton Finlay as one of the key British artists of the late-twentieth century.

His work opened up the interdisciplinary possibilities that were so instrumental to a new generation of artists; there are links between his 1988-9 bed paintings and Tracy Emin’s Tate installation a decade later, between the central place of religious imagery in both his and Damien Hirst’s work, and between Blue and so many of today’s moving-image works.

In an excellent essay by Chrissie Iles on the currents running through his work, she points out that the importance of interdisciplinary, and of the refusal to adhere to any kind of hierarchical model of the arts, could not be overstated in his work. The rejection of hierarchy equated to the rejection of patriarchal authority, mirroring Jarman’s own turbulent relationship with his father, a soldier; it is telling that military figures came to represent for him the violence of the state towards its citizens - a theme that he explored in films such as Sebastiane.

Similarly, Julien also talks about how pioneering and anti-authoritarian Jarman’s Super-8 films were to young filmmakers like himself in the 80s. They effectively ‘spearheaded’ the New Romantic film movement, which cut through the binary division that had existed between pleasure and politics; they encouraged a punk, ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude, the swapping of paintbrushes for cameras and using them in a similar way.

Thus, it is appropriate that Brutal Beauty aimed to place Jarman’s experimental films, like Blue, and James Mackay’s collection of the Super-8 films, next to and alongside paintings and wall-hung sculptures. The first room houses Jarman’s black-tar smothered bed-like wall hangings, a reminder that he had not initially trained as a film-maker, but as a painter. However, despite Julien’s description of them as “amongst the finest examples of memento mori in the modern age,” it is nevertheless clear that Jarman will always be known first and foremost as a filmmaker.

Derek Jarman, B2 Movie, 1980. Courtesy James Mackay

The wall sculptures’ allusion to Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed is unmistakable, but the respective reference to homosexual encounters is less subtle; most are pasted with charred photographs of male genitalia, and pages from Plato’s Symposium, where Aristophanes lauds same-sex love as love of the highest form. The hangings radiate with a no-nonsense rebellious energy, described by the critic Stuart Morgan as ‘Artaudian’.

One barrier towards appreciation lies in the fact that in the twenty-first century, there no longer subsists any shock value in their sexual references. Yet their evidently direct quality is undoubtedly intended to be best suited to the bold and to the confrontational. Consequently, it is not too hard to see why some critics have taken issue with what they have deemed to be a tedious and relentless focus on the issue of homosexuality in his work, considering it perhaps to be somewhat self-indulgent.

But it would be wrong to say that Jarman’s wall-hangings, and even many of his films, are diminished for us today by a persistent and doggedly angry one-dimensional engagement with marginalisation, wrong firstly because such an accusation would fail to recognise how intrinsic the concept of sexuality itself was to the entirety of Jarmanite iconography.

His aforementioned disruption of patriarchal logic, and of the absence of the paternal figure in his films, is aligned with the return of the feminine repressed in English Romanticism and the Gothic novel, in which mystical (homo-erotic) effeminising forces, take possession of the male body and impugns its masculine identity.

It also resonates with the alchemical: the alchemical fusion of male and female becoming hermaphrodite, a theme that ran all the way from his thick-impasto black paintings to his famous installation at the Third Eye Centre.

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

The criticism would, in addition, be extremely insensitive to the time in which he lived. The majority of the exhibition is given over to films, one of which is Isaac Julien’s own contribution, Derek. Starting from Jarman’s childhood, and of his growing up in a Catholic school where sexual repression was enforced, the film opens up into a poignant illustration of the atmosphere of hysteria - much forgotten today - surrounding the reaction to the Aids outbreak in the 80s, made all the more alarming by virtue of its following on the heels of supposedly permanent liberal advances made in the 60s and 70s.

It was a period of civil unrest; there was talk of island communities, the use of the term ‘gay plague’, and it was nothing less than social and career suicide to come out as gay and as positive.

In a particularly touching section, Tilda Swinton talks poetically about Jarman’s decision to do so: “Your gesture of public confessional, both within and without your work – at a time when people talked fairly openly about setting up ostracised HIV island communities and others feared, not only for their lives, but believe it or not, also for their jobs, their insurance policies, their friendships, their civil rights – was made with such particular and characteristically inclusive generosity, that it was at that point that you made an impact far out-spanning the influence of your work…you made your spirit, your nature, known to us – and the possibility of an artist’s fearlessness, a reality.”

Derek Jarman died in 1994, one year after his film Blue was first shown. It is a vividly personal 74-minute intonation on the subject of life following the onset of Aids, made against the unchanging backdrop of nothing more than an undifferentiated blue field.

By forcing the viewer to see the persistent expanse of blue, we are brought into the world he inhabited following the loss of his sight to the illness. For Jarman, his life was always undoubtedly part of his work, and it is fitting that one of his last works was centred unapologetically on its maker.