Dreaming Angelic Conversations: Imagining Jarman and Klein in Phantom Dialogue

"IKB 3, Monochrome bleu" by Yves Klein (Photo: Kenneth Lu, CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr)

I watch Derek Jarman’s film Blue and dream of an angelic conversation, of two artists whose lives never intersected joined in a silent dialogue. The film, admittedly, is the apotheosis of arthouse, seventy-nine minutes containing only one shot – a still of Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue (IKB) – over which a haunting soundtrack wails and drones as Jarman narrates his life, oscillating gently between poetry and prose. This totalising abstraction, the effacement of the visual from a form (the film) that innately relies on the visual, nonetheless had purpose, a limerent resonance that owes much, if not everything, to Klein and his IKB. And so, in Blue I hear these two speaking, murmuring perhaps. “In the [blue] waves I hear the voices of dead friends,” Jarman at one point in the film confides, and as we dissolve into its ultramarine mise-en-abyse with him, we begin to hear the voices of Jarman and Klein too.

Jarman birthed Blue from a sort of earthly limbo. Diagnosed with HIV in 1986, Jarman became thus trapped in a period of morbid waiting – waiting to die of an illness that he knew had no cure, and that nobody really cared to cure, while he watched his friends wither and wane around him, “all the brightest and the best trampled to death”. One of the consequences of Jarman’s HIV was the loss of his eyesight, a blindness which meant he saw the world only as a blue fog. The anti-mimetic extremism of Blue’s monochromacy then transforms into a lurid mimesis, plunging the viewer into that same monochrome abyss in which Jarman had been encaged by encroaching death. “I wanted to convey some of what I’d seen,” he said of the film in one of his final interviews, “[…] the disaster of which I’ve been living through of the last few years […and make] people think about that just for a moment.”

There is therefore something apocalyptic to Blue, a sort of cosmic terror we feel as we listen to Jarman’s words echo across Klein’s monochrome. This is certainly part of the film’s visual design, Klein’s ultramarine having been inspired by the deep blues of Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel frescoes that imbued in the pious a hyperawareness of the deep blue heavens above and God’s careful watch over their mortal actions. And so the blue becomes a world beyond space and time: “Ages and Aeons quit the room / Exploding into timelessness,” Jarman narrates, “No entrances or exits now / […] We knew that time would end.”

But this is where I envisage an angelic conversation come through, Klein’s voice emerging out of this timelessness to speak with Jarman. Because Blue is a film about hope against this hopelessness too, and it’s Klein’s voice that tells us this. Klein debuted his monochromes in 1957 in an exhibition titled ‘Proposte Monocrome, Epoca Blu.’ Here, eleven identical blue monochromes were displayed and sold at differing prices, each according to the painting’s alleged unique spiritual qualities. “Chaque monde bleu de tableau, bien que du même bleu et traité de la même manière, se révélait d’être d’une toute autre essence et atmosphere ; aucun ne ressemblait.” [1] This art mysticism dovetailed into Klein’s 1958 exhibition, ‘La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisé, Le Vide,’[2] in which all on display was an empty glass cabinet, Klein’s ‘Art’ being the emptiness within the gallery walls. “My paintings are now invisible,” he claimed.

It was certainly pretentious, a reformulation of the Dadaist mantra that anything can be art to suggest that nothing can be art too. But I also find something hopeful to Klein’s commitment to the immaterial, that beauty can be contained within the ephemeral and intangible, that which cannot simply be thrown onto canvas or silver screen. Underlying Klein’s projects was a mission to finding ‘the void’ (le vide), his conviction that a new reality existed within the self, a reality that could offer us tranquil stillness in an always-moving world. And by gazing into his blue monochromes, Klein believed, one could find such moments for self-reflection, moments to cross into the void.

I’m personally ambivalent to Klein and his shamanistic self-mythology, his appropriation of Eastern spiritual wisdom repackaged as a young white artist’s prodigious wisdom. Yet I can’t help but hear his voice while watching Blue and finding in it a kernel of something beyond despair. Because Jarman was never a hopeless artist – an angry one, definitely, but never hopeless – as this passage inscribed at the end of his 1993 autobiography, At Your Own Risk, further testifies:

“I am tired tonight. My eyes are out of focus, my body droops under the weight of the day, but as I leave you Queer lads let me leave you singing. […] May you dream of a better future, love without a care and remember we loved too. As the shadows came in, the stars came out. I am in love.”

In Klein’s void, Jarman dissolves his body, “the weight of the day”, and enters something beyond corporeality and beyond time. And through this timelessness he can speak backwards to Klein, enter angelic conversation. But Jarman speaks forwards too, speaks to us. Us “of a better future”, a queer generation beyond himself able to once again love free from HIV’s oppressive spectre, us who Jarman too speaks to in angelic conversation. So go out and love, he says, or else become lost to a void of life unlived. “Lost boys sleep forever.” As the shadows come in, the stars come out.

[1] ‘Each canvas’s blue world, despite being the same blue and having been applied in the same way, would reveal itself as having a completely different essence and atmosphere; none of them looked the same.’ (translation mine)

[2] ‘The Specialisation of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility, The Void.’