Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature review

More than 30 years since his death, Derek Jarman still feels extremely contemporary, writes Susan Mansfield

Nightlife - the archaeology of soul, by Derek Jarman | Courtesy of The Hunterian, Glasgow

Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, Hunterian Art Gallery ★★★★

Blue Now, Tramway, Glasgow ★★★★

Outside the Circle, Cooper Gallery, Dundee ★★★★★

Derek Jarman is now something of a hallowed figure in British cultural life thanks to his groundbreaking films, his visual art and writing, his gay rights activism and brave decision to go public about his HIV status and his “garden against the odds” at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, which is now a site of pilgrimage for his fans. 

In Digging in Another Time, the first Jarman exhibition in Scotland for more than 30 years, the Hunterian’s contemporary art curator Dominic Paterson has brought together works mainly from the last five years of his life, along with quotations from Modern Nature, his 1989-91 journal, which was also the period in which he made a show for Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre.

With Jarman’s work is a group of works by contemporary artists, most of them at least a generation younger, who are responding to elements of his legacy. Once again, Paterson has managed to use the awkward spaces of the contemporary gallery at Hunterian to create a much bigger and richer exhibition that it should by rights be able to contain. 

The starting point, perhaps, is the large Jarman painting Landscape with Sandbars (1967), recently acquired for the Hunterian collection. While its flat expanses of coastline evoke the place Jarman would later inhabit at Dungeness, this work is also a marked contrast to the later paintings. Generally smaller, these are characterised by thick impasto paint, often black, sometimes with collage elements - driftwood, broken glass, a crucifix - wedged into the tarry surfaces. Many have words scratched in too.

They are intense, passionate, angry pieces, even before one gets to the three which explicitly reference Aids. Here, the words “Positive” and “Aids blood” appear scrawled, graffiti-like, on thickly painted surfaces. There is also an early short film from 1974, My Very Beautiful Movie, in which Jarman experimentally adds colours to black and white Super8 footage, so the landscapes of Fire Island, New York, pulsate with the colours of fire.

Detail from Dead Souls Whisper, by Derek Jarman | Courtesy of The Hunterian, Glasgow

Jarman’s work still holds such force that it’s not easy to set work by other artists alongside it. The most successful of the other pieces in this show are those which approach Jarman directly and pay him tribute.

Luke Fowler’s new film, Being Blue, made on a residency at Prospect Cottage in 2023, is superb. Gorgeously shot on 16mm, it explores the landscape and light, the threatening bulk of the nuclear power station, and the lingering presence of Jarman in the cottage itself: his books, a neat row of gardening tools, a chair placed by long windows. The soundtrack weaves Jarman’s voice with the voices of others, including his muse, Tilda Swinton.

Thomas J Walker has re-edited shaky video footage of an artist’s talk given by Jarman in the Third Eye Centre in 1989 for his film, You’re saying exactly how I feel. He focusses on the audience, so Jarman himself appears only as an occasional shadow; his voice - alive, direct, vulnerable - endures. Sarah Wood’s film Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them also references Prospect Cottage, collaging found footage with rushes from Jarman’s 1990 film The Garden. Her thoughtful voiceover addresses him directly, seeking (among other things) to situate him in a contemporary landscape, a place of new plagues and new kinds of intolerance.

The staging of Blue Now - a reimagining for live perfomance of Jarman’s final film, Blue - comes out of a similar spirit of tribute. Made in the last year of his life when Jarman was losing his sight to Aids-related illness, Blue is a singular work in which a voiceover (much of it spoken by Jarman himself) and a musical soundscape overlay a single static shot of the colour blue. 

Directed by Neil Bartlett, and voiced by Russell Tovey, Joelle Taylor, Jay Bernard and Travis Alabanza, with music by Jarman’s long term collaborator Simon Fisher-Turner and cellist Lucy Railton, the performance brings the film’s elegant stream-of-consciousness text into three dimensions. It’s a meditation on mortality, the loss of friends to Aids, the day to day drug treatments and hospital waiting rooms, and the colour blue - standing for love, heaven, the void, death, life.

It’s an intense and moving experience which feels as though it exists entirely in the present. More than 30 years since his death, Jarman feels extremely contemporary, an artist with a multidisciplinary practice of which his activism was a seamless part. Like his paintings, the recreation of Blue could feel like a relic from the past addressing events which happened more than 30 years ago. But both are vividly, insistently alive.

Installation view of Outside the Circle at the Cooper Gallery, Dundee | Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee

Jarman also appears in Outside the Circle, the latest installment of Cooper Gallery’s The Ignorant Art School programme, with a painting, Act Up (1992), made during the campaign against Section 28 and contemporaneous with several of the works in the Hunterian. Here, it’s a signal of the calibre of the material which curator Sophia Hao and her team have brought together in this hugely impressive show about stories of resistance and emancipation.

A mix of archives, manifestos, ephemera and artworks, the show begins in the Lower Gallery with Dundee Suffragettes, documentation of 1980s feminist performance works and the placards made in 2016 by young women attending Suzanne Lacy and Nicola Goode’s School for Revolutionary Girls at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

Upstairs, on the stairwell, there’s rare film of Audre Lorde (one of the guiding spirits of the show) and of artist Georgina Starr, smashing her statues of traditional idealised womanhood in full view of astonished guests at the Royal Academy. Then, on a remarkably clear journey through the main gallery, we encounter lesbian and gay rights, Outrage! and Section 28, the battle against racism, women’s movements in India and Thailand, Greenham Common and the Castlemilk Womanhouse.

As well as Jarman, there’s art by Maud Sulter, Sam Ainsley, Jo Spence and Ajamu X, and from Griselda Pollock’s groundbreaking MA in Feminism and the Visual Arts, and “cyberfeminist” collective the Old Boys Network. The enduring image, for me, is a photograph of Audre Lord kayaking in Germany in 1984, wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” and laughing like a drain.

Throughout, the show manages to balance meaningful stories from a wider world with others which are specific either to Scotland or to other (not always western) countries. And, though archives are prominent, it’s always clear that this work connects to live issues, related things happening right now.

How the team at Cooper Gallery have achieved a show of such ambition and scale that it can be compared to Tate’s Women in Revolt (at National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two until January) is beyond me. Like Paterson at Hunterian, Hao makes her gallery’s square footage contain so much more than one would think possible, and in an ordered, thoughtful way. It’s a triumph, and I hope the students of Duncan of Jordanstone have even half an idea what riches are on their doorstep.

Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature until 4 May; Blue Now, run ended; Outside the Circle until 1 February