JAAH 3 (3) pp.

295–307 Intellect Limited 2012

Journal of Applied Arts & Health

Volume 3 Number 3
© 2012 Intellect Ltd Major Papers. English language. doi: 10.1386/jaah.3.3.295_1

Jenna Carine Ashton

The University of Manchester

Derek Jarman’s Blue:

Negating the Visual

Abstract Keywords
Responding to Derek Jarman’s (1942–1994) film Blue (1994) and written text colour
Chroma: A Book of Colour – June ’93 (1994), this article argues that colour blue
serves as the subject through which notions of visual perception are interrogated and AIDS
reconsidered. Diagnosed as HIV positive in December 1986, Jarman’s encroaching sensory perception
blindness from retinal disease and eventual death in 1994 frames such discourse memory
on the visual within the political and social landscape of the AIDS epidemic of the Derek Jarman
1980s and 1990s. For Jarman, his sight literally failed him; but sensory impairment Joseph Grigely
also comes to mirror that cultural ‘blindness’ surrounding the (desired) closeting of Neil Harbisson
gay sexuality and the suffering of those caught up within the epidemic. In particular,
Jarman’s film Blue reveals the limitations of language – both spoken and visual – to
effectively articulate suffering and pain. Art, too, has its limits when attempting to
deal with such concerns. Jarman turns to the complexities of colour in an attempt
express, and to make sense of, the senseless loss and tumultuous emotions that punc-
tuated these decades.

How can colour pose a challenge to the visual, to suggest that vision has,
and can, fail us? Experimental film Blue, created by Derek Jarman a year prior
to his death from AIDS-related complications, plays with the expectations
of the visual and its supposed revelations and ‘truths’, and its role within
language communication, and memory. Colour carries the weight, the load,
of these issues. Colour comes to serve as the metaphor through which Jarman

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guides his viewers through the minefield of the visual, the non-visual, and
discourse surrounding AIDS and death. He does so from the position of an
ill, dying man fighting with his disease, and most specifically, fighting with his
encroaching blindness. For an artist so engaged with performative visualiza-
tion though film and painting, Blue was his last filmic salute to the sense that
previously offered him so much.
With Blue Jarman abandons his previously spiky, collage-esque, and
exuberant film-making style to embrace an unchanging single screen of blue.
The auditory comes to replace the visual; with Blue there is a sensory tussle as
we are forced to listen. Our eyes swim through a pool searching out sound.
Although music and voice have always been crucial to Jarman’s films, Blue
is a project that dramatically shifts from the prominence of the visual to the
evocation of the visual in the mind through ‘sonic fragments’ and ‘acoustic
bricolage’ (Khalip 2010: 81); a ‘reorganization of the senses by amplifying
aural perception’ (Khalip 2010: 81). In contrast to Blue, for example, Jarman’s
The Garden (1990) offers little in the way of the auditory, instead relying upon
a wholly visual narrative.
Blue opens with a black screen that slowly progresses to blue. A bell tolls,
nothing changes visually. All remains a solid blue. We listen to blue hues:
mechanical metallic sounds; a mournful trumpet; a crying oboe; the arpeg-
gios of a harp; screeching cars; a coffee maker; whispers and aggressive angry
taunts. Sounds of the sea and howling gale rip through the stasis of the blue
screen. Sound and music act as a lingering, floating shadow to colour. Names
of those who make Jarman feel ‘blue’ are reiterated over and over; the human
voice intermingles with rasping electronic noises. Sound is disconnected from
its visual origins; a twinkling music box plays off-key, and death lingers on
the edges of the screen. We are presented with a nightmarish scenario of
being trapped in blue, where all other colours are banished to a wasteland of
perpetual darkness.
Blue offers an overwhelming and invasive soundtrack of everyday noises,
musical interludes, haunting voices and mechanical clunks and clinks. A collage
of vision is replaced by a collage of sound, full and thick, which melts into the
ear or violently stings, pricks and slices. ‘Blue flashes in my eyes […] the retina
is destroyed, though when the bleeding stops what is left of my sight might
improve. I have to come to terms with sightlessness’ (Jarman 1994: 4, 7); in
coming to terms with ‘sightlessness’, Jarman turns to the sonic. Or, rather, he
is forced into turning to the sonic, due to failing sight. Jarman’s film is seem-
ingly empty of visual stimuli and yet it is emphatically visual. In not using his
trademark film collages, leaving the screen a persistently unchanging blue, he
actually draws attention to the problems of a cultural language that is directed
by the visual. Disease; pain; suffering is not always visually apparent. More to
the point, many young men caught in the HIV and AIDS crisis knew better
than to make their illnesses, and sexuality, visually noticeable or expressed;
concealment is part of the social landscape. A lifetime, for some, of keeping
sexuality closeted was continued through and into death (Jarman 1993). The
visual comes to take on a literal and heavily metaphorical meaning. In 2006
deaf artist Joseph Grigely collated a lengthy anthological essay ‘Blindness and
Deafness as Metaphors’ drawing together the various uses of blindness and
deafness within written and spoken language. Grigely comments:

The essay consists of 52 quotations from contemporary writers who

use variations of the words ‘blindness’ and ‘deafness’ as pejorative

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metaphors […] A sense of the status quo concerning the disabled in

Western society might be gleaned from metaphors of disablement like
these, and the unseemly ease with which they are written, printed, and
disseminated in culture today.
(2006: 227)

Likewise, both Naomi Schor (1999) and James Elkins (1996) have examined
metaphors of blindness. In 1978, Susan Sontag discussed metaphors of the ill
body. Significantly, in 1989 Sontag contributed a sequel text to her Illness as
Metaphor entitled AIDS and Its Metaphors (Sontag 2002). Sontag says of AIDS:

It seems that societies need to have one illness which becomes identi-
fied with evil, and attaches ‘blame’ to its victims (Sontag 2002: 101).
Strictly speaking, AIDS – acquired immune deficiency syndrome – is
not the name of an illness at all. It is the name of a medical condition,
whose consequences are a spectrum of illnesses […] But though not
in that sense a single disease, AIDS lends itself to being regarded as
one – in part because […] it is thought to have a single cause (Sontag
2002: 101). Pollution and invasion are invoked: […] In the description
of AIDS the enemy is what causes the disease, an infectious agent that
comes from the outside […] this is the language of political paranoia
[with a] science fiction flavour.
(Sontag 2002: 102–03)

Jarman’s Blue can thus be read in light of these later analyses on disability,
illness and sensory impairment. This is not to conflate the two – blindness
and AIDS are not one and the same – but Blue does concern the politics of
vision, as well as actual physical blindness. Simon Watney comments that the
discourse surrounding AIDS is also one of perception and representation: ‘In
such circumstances representation plays a special and significant role in defin-
ing the ‘look’ of people living with HIV or AIDS. This epidemic is uniquely
mediated by the mass media, who carefully select and calibrate how AIDS is
depicted, and hence how it is seen, thought about, taken seriously, or ignored’
(Watney 1992).
Likewise, Sontag’s text Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) poses significant
problems for Jarman’s film and our consideration of its contents. How are
we, the viewers, supposed to regard pain and suffering when it is not overtly
(visually) rendered in Blue? Photographs of suffering, as analysed by Sontag,
are a means of making ‘real’ or (more ‘real’) matters that the privileged and
the merely safe might prefer to ignore (Sontag 2003: 6). But with Blue there
is nothing visual to respond to; no scars or mutilations; no horrific injuries or
tortured expressions. AIDS was (is) a war of its own, but its victims and casu-
alties are not so easily categorized within such a defined image of ‘suffering’.
How does one present a disease that mutilates from the inside-out, the body
that attacks itself? And how does one present an experience of blindness in an
image? Jarman himself commented that:

[n]o ninety minutes could deal with the eight years HIV takes to get its
host. Hollywood can only sentimentalise it […] the reality would drive
the audience out of the cinema and no one viewpoint could mirror the
10,000 lives lost in San Francisco to date.
(Jarman 2000: 290)

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What, then, is the aim of Blue, in its lack of the visually filmic or photo-
graphic; in its negation of the visual? The photograph, ‘in an era of informa-
tion overload’, says Sontag, ‘provides a quick way of apprehending something
and a compact form for memorizing it. The photograph is like a quotation,
or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundred of photographs,
subject to instant recall’ (Sontag 2003: 19). The essence of quickness or of easy
apprehension and instant recall is lacking with Blue – quite deliberately. There
can be no easy apprehension of the topic on which Jarman speaks; no single
shot, or collage of moving images that can fully convey the diseased body in
absolute decline. Does Blue aim to shock and arrest, as with the photographs
discussed by Sontag? If the visual image disturbs, Blue emphasizes that the
absence of the visual is as equally powerful in its ability to trouble us. Blue,
then, does not aim to simply recall or represent a scene of pain and suffering,
it aims to recreate a sensory experience within the viewer. Empathy, which
may be felt on the viewing of an image is a passive response; we look, engage,
but ultimately we are safe in the knowledge that the image is just an image.
The horrors are contained within the frame of the photograph. Jarman’s still
blue screen, behind which unexpected sounds and voices emerge, offers no
reassurance. Our sensory expectations have already been disturbed by the
lack of visual narrative we are accustomed to see with a Jarman film. There
is no predictable way through this experience lasting 75 minutes. When will
it stop? Is the screen to be a constant blue throughout? How will I know
when the narrative ends without the visual clues to tell me so? ‘Violence turns
anybody subjected to it into a thing’, argues Sontag (2003: 11). The blue screen
is violent – it is an unrelenting attack upon the visual sense; as the viewer is
subjected to a visually unchanging situation which begins to feel claustropho-
bic, suffocating. It is all encompassing, like the internal violence of HIV and
AIDS – a lengthy wounding and mutilation of the body from the inside out.
As viewers of Blue we are in a constant state of hesitant agitation. The unpre-
dictability that accompanies sensory impairment, as experienced by Jarman,
also accompanies our experience of the film. A photograph of pain and
suffering makes clear what it wants us to perceive; interpretation may still
open-ended (only just), but its aims are set. The lack of clarity with Blue mirrors
Jarman’s situation as a gay man dying from AIDS (the circulating misinforma-
tion and moral panic). Blue does not offer an unproblematic way through to
the film’s closing credits; things are not made ‘easy’ for the viewer, but real-
istic in that disease, and death, and pain, and suffering cannot be understood
from a single photographic shot – it can only attempt to summarize it (which
does it little justice).
‘What pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown [?]’,
queries Sontag (2003: 12). Jarman’s blue screen excludes images, and in doing
so draws attention to those AIDS deaths and narratives not being shown
or discussed (or cared about?) by society at large. (Put up a blue screen and
pretend the issue, the suffering, does not exist. If we cannot see it then surely
it cannot actually be happening.) As Sontag comments, photography makes
the events of war ‘real’ to people: if the suffering and pain of others can be
seen, then it must be happening. AIDS, comments Watney:

[was] often presented as a form of didactic spectacle, supposedly illus-

trating the ‘dangers’ of homosexuality, ‘promiscuity,’ prostitution and so
on. At the same time, anxieties are aroused concerning the look of these
‘dangerous’ people, who must be unmasked and clearly identified. Hence

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the widespread tendency of photographers and others to depict AIDS at

its most visible, either through symptoms of extreme physical wasting
and emaciation, or in external cancers and other visible conditions.
(Watney 1992)

We place a great deal of faith in the visual in its ability to offer proof and
evidence. What then of the blue screen? What ‘truth’ can we find in that?
None, essentially; none of the kind of ‘truths’ we seek in the visual – those
‘truths’ that may actually be falsehoods; those failings of the visual in its inabil-
ity to move away from perspective and censorship (all images are cropped,
altered in some way). All images exclude; something is always left out of the
picture. The blue screen offers a statement: there are no images, no falsehoods,
no limited perspectives to be found here. I have excluded all; and in doing so, I offer
the possibility of all to be considered, remembered.
Here, colour is put to its best use, in that it too cannot be easily summa-
rized. Colour, like pain or suffering, can affect in various ways; it is perceived
differently depending on the situation or place of reception; it is subjective and
constructed and communicated through language. Colour, and our response
to it, is unpredictable, with the story of colour ‘located as much in the condi-
tions under which colours are imagined and made – including the challenge
of producing art while sick – as in finished artifacts’ (Irving 2009: 313). Colour
itself has fallen in and out of favour with philosophical thinkers:

For several centuries, science and mainstream philosophy regarded

colour as irrelevant or at best marginal to our understanding and expe-
rience of the world because of its instability, its evanescence and its
mobile identity. For thinkers like Descartes and Locke, colour, because
it was bound up with the unreliability of the human senses, could tell
us little or nothing about what they believed to be the most important
‘permanent’ truths about reality. Beginning in the nineteenth century,
however, that generalized suspicion of colour became obsolete, and
philosophical concern with the unreliability of the human senses was
expendable as the eye was supplanted by increasingly sophisticated
perceptual technologies that had access to events, forces, wavelengths
far beyond the limits of our sensory capacities.
(Crary 2004: 2)

It’s precisely this ‘unpredictability’ that enables colour, blue, to carry the
weight of illness and disease. Colour and AIDS make for interesting bedfel-
lows. Andrew Irving offers a sensitive and revealing study of the role of colour
within the work of specific artists living with AIDS. Colour comes to express
pain and the struggle with a changing, exhausted and weakened body. But as
Irving comments, colours are ‘lifeless explanations until the person’s expe-
rience’s and bodily circumstances shed light on them. Colours do not exist
independently […]’ (Irving 2009: 310).
Jarman’s film is not an attempted expression of blindness in general, but of
his experience of blindness. A deeply personal account, the autobiographic is
an imperative ingredient within his oeuvre and politics. The blue screen seem-
ingly presents something static, homogenous, but the reverse is actually true.
The blue will be experienced differently by each individual; likewise, sexual-
ity, pain, suffering, impairment are entirely subjective – ‘No “we” should be
taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain’, argues

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Sontag (2003: 6). Blue, then, is not a gesture of unification but emphasizes
the fragmentation and dislocation (and difference) of human experience; the
negation of the visual – as deployed via the blue screen – forces the viewer
into considering such fragmentation and dislocation. The visual no longer
offers any safe reassurance of bodily stability. However, this interpretation
presumes that the visual initially offers that sense of comfort; that it is only
through a connection to the visual that any sensory unease can be placated –
that other sensory receptors and experiences are secondary to the visual. For
a viewer/listener to be disturbed by Blue, one could argue that a negative
stance has to be taken with any form of visual limitation. However, that
would be to simplify the affect of Blue; after all, Jarman’s narrative is also one
of remembering pleasure, as well as pain. The visual, then, can also be read
as a distraction from other sensory experiences; a diversion away from other
forms of materiality or interaction. Blue may be embraced and enjoyed for its
refusal to offer any other visual stimuli; yet it may also be disliked by some
for that very same reason. (I have heard accounts where audience members
have ‘bored’ of waiting for visuals to appear, and have left a screening of Blue
halfway through.) This tension between rejecting and desiring the visual is
at the core of the film; reflecting Jarman’s own struggle to understand, and
adapt to, his illness and loss of vision.
Blue can also be read in the abstract – a projection of a coloured screen
that exists independently of the layered voices and sound interludes. It is
not just a backdrop to all else, but is a thick, deep layer of pigment, a mono-
chrome – reminiscent of Jarman’s own canvas works. ‘Colour is not intel-
lectual’ argues colourist and artist Winifred Nicholson; it is ‘one of the three
great abstract arts’, along with mathematics and music (Nicholson 1937).
But colour (like music) – although Nicholson is tentative about this point –
concerns the abstract quality of human emotion, which cannot always be
articulated by words. Colour moves us, somehow. Colour can have an imme-
diate effect upon the viewer perceiving it. Jarman’s Blue thus works on two
levels – that of language, speech and discourse, which is the realm of sound,
and the other being that of abstract, emotive response that cannot always
be ‘rationally’ or intellectually understood or justified. However, this is to
suggest that colour belongs to the realm of the so-called ‘irrational’, along
with feminine, the primitive, the childlike – a cultural attitude that is thor-
oughly deconstructed by David Batchelor (2000). But Blue does not concern
the ‘irrational’ and purely emotive, but the cold hard facts of medical treat-
ments, hospital surroundings, the complications of navigating the body with-
out the use of sight, the numerous deaths of close friends, the ill-informed
men and women who continue to put themselves at risk from a lack of open
discourse – the failures of ‘intellectual’ language to communicate the issues
surrounding HIV and AIDS. So-called ‘rational’ language also refuses and
denies; it suppresses. As Jarman comments, so many men were put at risk
due to the political denial of non-‘heternormative’ sexuality; a refusal to
discuss gayness, and yet still blame it for the resulting epidemic. Politicians
had to be seen to be doing something, but their actions were either unhelpful
or misguided, or plain dangerous.
And why, specifically, the colour blue? Blue is perhaps best appre-
ciated (and apprehended) in conjunction with Jarman’s text Chroma:
A Book of Colour – June ’93 (1994), given that the material on blue and yellow
is taken from this collection. The text interweaves memory, science, philos-
ophy, psychology, religion and history; a narrative of colour emerges in

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which ‘Blue is engaged in a death struggle with his mortal foe, Yellowbelly’
(Wollen 2000: 120). I first encountered Jarman’s text when searching for
Michel Pastoureau’s Black: The History of a Colour (2008); I was writing on
the Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture Closet (1988) – a work equally loaded with
concepts of vision and non-vision. A solid-looking, rectangular shadow
mass; Closet is a cast of a wardrobe covered in black felt, with geometri-
cal wooden strips inserted into the crevices and indents of the structure. Its
darkness is overwhelming. Jarman’s Chroma was hiding on the shelf next to
Pastoureau’s Black – all the more relevant given Jarman’s near-blindness.
With Chroma the reader is forced to turn to the ‘mind’s eye’ and inner imag-
ination, reliant as he or she is upon Jarman’s beautifully crafted written
descriptions and storytelling.
Michel Pastoureau’s beautiful book on blue is possibly the most compre-
hensive historical study of the colour (Pastoureau 2001), outlining its religious
and sacred uses; its place within myth and magic. So many names for the
varying shades of blue: Indigo, Cobalt, Egyptian Blue, Prussian, Cerulean,
Sapphire Springs, Atlantic Surf, Amazon Beat, Luna Landscape, Venetian
Crystal, Azure Fusion, Summer Medley, Holiday Blues, Blue Seduction. The
semi-precious stone Lapis Lazuli is the jewel in blue’s crown. The blue of
Vermeer’s Girl’s turban was painted with natural ultramarine, an extremely
costly pigment made of crushed Lapis Lazuli that Vermeer’s contemporaries
rarely used. Commenting on the transition from mineral pigments to synthetic
chemicals, anthropologist Michael Taussing notes:

Like fast food’s effect on food, nineteenth-century colour technology

killed off the body of colour and, as regards with fine arts practiced
by the like of Jan Van Eyck and Vermeer, choked off centuries of craft,
notably the tremendous work of preparing pigments, fresh, each day.
(Taussig 2009: 42)

He continues:

Yet the very same chemical revolution of the nineteenth century

that emerges from the search for colour and drugs from coal tar […]
polluted those broad strokes of remaining nature with new texture.
The sunsets never looked so stunning as they did through the haze of
factory smoke and soot.
(Taussig 2009: 43)

The fake names of synthetic colours reference the world of plants, minerals,
animals, food and frequently (as Taussig notes) the colonial exotic. The writer,
photographer and painter, Roland Barthes commented that when he bought
colours he did so according to ‘the mere sight of their name’ that promises a
certain pleasure (Barthes [1975] 1977: 129). This profusion of blues suggests
pleasure in variety.
Jarman uses Yves Klein’s artificial ultramarine, IKB, International Klein
Blue – a daringly ‘camp and modern’ colour, according to Taussig (2009: 42).
This is certainly not a shy colour, it is not closeted but definitely a colour
unapologetically brash and ‘out’ (a most appropriate tone for Jarman). It is a
colour that cannot be ignored, but screams for attention through the cinema
screen. For Klein pure colour was a return to absolute materiality (draw-
ing and image-making simply being a distraction from the spiritual and

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alchemically qualities of monochromes). Peter Wollen, in his reflections upon

Blue, comments that the film started life as a documentary project on Yves
Klein, which then evolved into a gallery installation-room, ‘including a mono-
chromatic painting alluding to the AIDS epidemic and to Thatcher’s proposed
anti-gay legislation, Clause 28. Thus IKB was now linked to AIDS’ (Wollen
2000: 121). Most poignantly,

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 all-encompassing,
for Jarman, to be represented by images.
(Wollen 2000: 125)

Blue thus rejects, negates the spectacle of images, and the spectacle of suffer-
ing, as offered by the photographs discussed by Sontag. But, of course, Blue is
not just a political statement by Jarman; it is an expression of anger from an
artist who so feared losing his sight, his primary sense (Jarman 1993: 113).
And in contrast to a notion of a static, unchanging (and ‘boring’) blue
screen, Jarman’s choice of IK Blue situates his colour choice within the
contemporary, the daring, the expressive and performative (who can forget
Yves Klein’s staged performances of bodies dipped in his blue paint, mark-
ing canvases with their limbs and skin like human paint brushes). Jarman
chooses a colour specifically connected to corporeal and sensual art-per-
formances. As Jacques Khalip argues, Blue is ‘a deeply autobiographical self-
conscious reflection on queer life in the time of AIDS’ (Khalip 2010: 76).
Such expression of queerness can be found in the colour Jarman chooses.
He rejects any notion of the ‘natural’ pigment, such as he rejects any argu-
ment of naturalized heteronormativity. The synthetic, chemical-based qual-
ity of IKB also mirrors his increasing reliance upon the medicinal chemicals
attempting to cure and stabilize his condition. The screen of IKB stands for
much more than ‘just’ a colour.
I thus return to colour as language, language as colour – a notion
embraced by Marcel Proust in his À la recherche du temps perdu (written
between 1909 and 1922) – both the writer and the painter working ‘through
layers of colour and light’ to excavate that which is lost to the present
(Taussig 2009: 45). In trying to recall the past, we access memories as if
looking through Proust’s magic lantern; colours opaque and transparent in
an alchemical cloud, bathing us in the glow of golden recollection. Colour
touches our most intimate thoughts. We think of a place, an object, of a past
lover, we think of colour. The colours of my memory are sometimes vivid, or
definition is lost in a hazy fog; sometimes jagged strands appearing left and
right, always moving and swirling, never static. But I am being romantic.
Jarman’s film Blue is neither cloudy nor opaque; its glow is a cold, solid and
unyielding block, like thick frozen ice. Jarman plays upon the West’s nostal-
gic mourning of blue; blue is the colour of heartache, of broken promises,
of loss. No singer mourns by singing the ‘yellows’ or the ‘oranges’; only by
singing the blues. Oxygen, the giver and taker of life, is blue. Blue, in this
sense, embodies grief.

How did my friends cross the cobalt river, with what did they pay the
ferryman? As they set out for the indigo shore under this jet-black

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sky – some died on their feet with a backward glance. Did they see Death
with the hell hounds pulling a dark chariot, bruised blue-black, growing
dark in the absence of light, did they hear the blast of trumpets?
(Jarman 1994: 16)

When we are bruised, our skin turns ‘blue-black’. A mind in mourning,

emotionally bruised, may also turn ‘blue-black’ (or it thinks in blue and
black). Jarman’s film opens with black, changes to blue, and fades back to
black once more. Taussing comments that ‘slides and cinema project the spirit
of colour’s dying corpse, as when the glittering firmament of lapis lazuli slides
off the painter’s palette, to be reborn in coloured air of magic polymorphous
substance’ (Taussig 2009: 46). Cinema, in its magic fakery, replaces the body
of the pigment. Jarman’s film leaves the disembodied voices and ghosts of
sound to narrate; the hero – blue – swims, floats and finally drowns under the
weight of the vile virus that clings, stabs and throttles: ‘We all contemplated
suicide. We hoped for euthanasia. We were lulled into believing Morphine
dispelled the pain’ (Jarman 1994: 17). The colour blue is that queer subject,
queer hero, of suffering.

Colour Conversations

Voice is the sonic instrument with which we begin as humans –

beginning as an intricate enfolding of inner and outer, ear, lungs, throat,
skull and mouth, abstract thought and physical projection, biology and
consciousness, breath and listening and which develops as the articula-
tion of impulsion, feeling, word, speech.
(Toop 2005: 29)

With his vision failing him, Jarman uses the verbal and the written word to
perform the self and the absent body one last time. The adjective or noun
‘blue’ becomes a verb; no longer passively soaking up associations, but
actively projecting a final struggle with the sensory, (and if communicated
through sign language, ‘blue’ would become a physical manifestation, not
simply a verbal, filmic or painterly expression). Sound, however abstract, is
always materially fixed; it is generated by something somewhere. It is through
the listener’s reinterpretation of sound that the transformation of mere ‘noise’
into ‘sound’ takes place – it then becoming something meaningful or relevant
to our lives. Our understanding and perception of sound, like colour, is not
predetermined, but is reliant upon a cultural framework that informs every
seeing and hearing body. It could be argued that sight masks the sonic for
the non-visually impaired body. In removing full vision we (Jarman and the
viewers/ listeners of Blue) are forced into an encounter with the materiality of
everyday living through other sensory receptors.
The artist and writer Joseph Grigely makes for an interesting ‘conversation’
partner for Jarman. Deaf from the age of ten, Grigely’s ‘White Noise’ archive
consists of approximately 8000 sheets of paper containing conversations; the
artist relies upon writing as a surrogate for speech. During the early 1990s
Grigely produced a series of works entitled Conversations with the Hearing.
Grigely has thus created an archive of noise that is silent; likewise, in Blue
Jarman creates an archive of vision through sound. Significantly, both
artists project conversations regarding the impairment of the senses, and

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they encourage conversations to take place between their viewers, their

listeners – conversations about that which is often ignored or suppressed:
conversations about AIDS, conversations about disability.
Just as Jarman and Grigely explore the failures, idiosyncrasies and ruptures
of language and communication, Jean-Luc Nancy in his text Listening (2007)
interrogates the complex relationship between the visual and the auditory:
‘With the ear there is a withdrawal and turning inward, a making resonant,
but with the eye, there is a manifestation and display, making evident’(Nancy
2007: 3). Nancy poses the question: ‘Can one talk about a visual sound?’
(Nancy 2007: 3). In combining the visual with the auditory Jarman produces
something that is both resonant and evident. Khalip asks, ‘How do the lost
voices of the dead contribute to the time of the present?’ (Khalip 2010: 76).
It is often said that when we lose a loved one, the first thing we forget is the
voice. Sound memories are difficult to retain, thus Jarman collates his own
sound archive; an attempt to create something of permanence that defies his
loss of vision, and his eventual loss of life. ‘Music floats around painting’, says
Nancy (Nancy 2007: 10); it is no coincidence that Jarman was a painter. With
Blue, we are immersed in listening to the sound of colour, its texture and taste,
as we gaze at a hypnotically unchanging screen of thick Yves Klein Blue. With
vision restricted, Jarman’s soundtrack of music, voices and everyday noises
stimulates our memories of the visual.
‘Sense opens up in silence’ says Nancy (Nancy 2007: 26), ‘we listen to what
can arise from silence’ (Nancy 2007: 6). Joseph Grigely’s world is silent, but his
works are about conversations: the paths they take, their shapes and colours,
and the stories they tell in the process of being retold. He uses the scraps of
paper on which hearing people have written notes, names or phrases in order
to converse with him when he cannot read their lips; he uses these scraps to
build wall pieces and tableaus that interrogate the boundaries between speech
and writing, and looking and listening. Nancy argues that:

Sense , if there is any, when there is any, is never a neutral, colourless

or aphonic sense: even when written, it has a voice – and that is also the
most contemporary meaning of the word ecrire [“to write”] … Writing
is […] a voice that resounds.
(Nancy 2007: 34–36)

Both Jarman and Grigely offer their fragile bodies; their wounds; their
disabilities and impairments to those who do not suffer. They force us to
confront not only our own sensorial weaknesses, but they also encourage us
to listen outside ourselves. Thus, with Jarman’s Blue and Grigely’s ‘White’,
the visual and the auditory rub against each other; the poetics of blindness
and the invisibility of sound collide. The speaking voice projects narratives
of the visual; the written contains bodily actions that initiate speech: we
listen to the colours of experience.
To this ‘colour conversation’ we can add a third artist who works in that
in-between space of vision and sound; an artist who attempts to articu-
late the variations of colour through the equivalent musical notes. Neil
Harbisson is a British-Catalan cyborg artist, musician and performer best
known for his self-extended ability to hear colours. Harbisson was born
with achromatopsia, a condition that only allows him to see in black and
white. In 2004 he was fitted with an eyeborg (a technological camera/sound
device attached to Harbisson, which ‘listens’ to colour as the artist scans

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 Derek Jarman’s Blue

objects. The artist has memorized over 360 sonic fragments that correlate
to 360 shades of colour). Harbisson is the first person in the world to be
officially recognized as a cyborg by a government. His work significantly
complicates the easy categories of ‘visual’ and ‘sonic’, or how a viewer/
listener is expected to respond to a film such as Blue. Harbisson’s impair-
ment, like Grigely’s, is not life threatening, but his condition eradicates
set notions of sensory experience – particularly concerning those of colour
perception – and in turn further widens the debates around concepts of the
sensory within contemporary art (in particular see Jones 2003).
So with Grigely’s ‘White Noise’ archive we finish at the opposite end of
the spectrum to where we started – from darkness and black to light and
white. Blindness occurs when we lose the ability to receive white light, which
gives us our colour – so it is a scientifically reasonable place to finish, as well
as an artistically symbolic one. Perhaps, as David Batchelor says in his text
Chromophobia (2000), we are actually afraid of colour, so white is a safe place
to hide. But all colour in its radical, beautiful, extravagant vividness is noth-
ing without white light. And although we think of it in purely visual terms,
colour remembrance is actually at the command of other sensory perceptions:
of touch, taste, smell, voice.
The visual eventually begins to fail Jarman, but this does not mean colour
has failed him. The threat of blindness, of eternal darkness, serves to illumi-
nate the significance of colour in the construction of his identity. Blue seem-
ingly departs from the richness of the visual; but Jarman does not abandon
the visual in art and film altogether, instead highlighting its inconsistencies
and inability to fully convey suffering. In response to his AIDS and visual
impairment Jarman made a film, wrote a book, and continued to plant his
garden at his cottage in Dungeness, possibly the most sensual, sensory crea-
tion by the artist – and most importantly, one that is a living and growing
creation. Jarman’s garden – more so than Blue – is a performance of struggle;
the plants fight against the sharp coastal winds, and suck up the radiation of
nuclear activity on the site. The garden is a beautiful, non-static, unframed
canvas upon which he splashed his adored colours. Discussion of the visual
and vision in relation to the space of Dungeness is wholly relevant. Radiation,
like a disease spreading through the body, begins life in the invisible; the
consequences of it thriving threaten to scar and mutilate, and destroy the
body and the landscape. Body and earth as one, ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
all things living must eventually find their place back in soil, as they become
invisible once again.

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Suggested citation
Ashton, J. C. (2012), ‘Derek Jarman’s Blue: Negating the Visual’, Journal of
Applied Arts & Health 3: 3, pp. 295–307, doi: 10.1386/jaah.3.3.295_1

Contributor details
Jenna Carine Ashton is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Visual Studies (The
University of Manchester). Her thesis argues for a reinterpretation of Rachel
Whiteread’s work in relation to theories of the child and childhood. In addition
to her Ph.D. research, Colour/‘Chroma’ is an ongoing project inspired by Derek

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 Derek Jarman’s Blue

Jarman’s text Chroma: A Book of Colour – June ’93, and his film Blue (1993),
which seeks to work with arts and science practitioners to explore the role of
colour in sensory experience and sensory impairment. http://colourchroma.
wordpress.com, http://manchesterarthistory.wordpress.com/.
Contact: The University of Manchester, Art History and Visual Studies,
Mansfield Cooper Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
E-mail: jenna.ashton@manchester.ac.uk

Jenna Carine Ashton has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

307
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