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Shooting the Hunter: a tribute to Derek Jarman

A short film by Mark French and Richard Heslop, Shooting the Hunter was made last year to honour the 20th anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death in February, 1994. The film intercuts shots of Jarman’s gravestone and Prospect Cottage at Dungeness with footage of the same cottage when it was being used as a setting for Jarman’s The Garden in 1990. The sound design is by Fritz Catlin of 23 Skidoo, with the words of John Donne being read by Amina Bastante Pain.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Derek Jarman’s landscapes
• Derek Jarman album covers
• Ostia, a film by Julian Cole
• Derek Jarman In The Key Of Blue
• The Dream Machine
• Jarman (all this maddening beauty)
• Sebastiane by Derek Jarman
• A Journey to Avebury by Derek Jarman
• Derek Jarman’s music videos
• Derek Jarman’s Neutron
• Mister Jarman, Mister Moore and Doctor Dee
• The Tempest illustrated
• In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman
• Derek Jarman at the Serpentine
• The Angelic Conversation
• The life and work of Derek Jarman

London: Signs and Signifiers

By coincidence, two of the projects I was working on in the summer are released this week. First up is London: Signs and Signifiers, a collection of Nico Hogg’s photographs of the streets and architecture of London’s East End. I’ve mentioned Nico’s photography before as his pictures have been used on several of the albums and singles I’ve designed for Keysound Recordings, some of which are featured in the book. This is being published as part of the Keysound catalogue, with a launch event taking place today (the 8th) at the Doomed Gallery, London. See this post for details, and a link to download a free chapter.

Nico’s work is notable for the way it avoids the stereotype of the style of urban photography that presents deprived or run-down areas in grim monochrome. Nico doesn’t avoid the decay—there are shots of burned-out flat-blocks, and a chapter devoted to the recent Tottenham riots—but the colour in his pictures shows a different side to these areas of the city.

My design for the book follows the minimal approach I’ve used on the Keysound albums, organising the information clearly and giving the photos as much room as possible. The font used for the titles and chapter headings is Transport, the typeface designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert used on roads signs throughout the UK.

Continue reading “London: Signs and Signifiers”

Fat of the Land: selected British short films, 1984–1987

Here’s another of those film/video anthologies released on VHS in the UK in the 1980s that I never got to see at the time. Fat of the Land is a collection of student films, short video experiments and two video pieces related to the early Industrial music scene featuring 23 Skidoo and Last Few Days. The anthology appeared in 1988 as Ikon 25 on Factory Records’ video label packaged with an approving quote by Derek Jarman. Two Jarman collaborators appear within—Cerith Wyn Evans and Tilda Swinton—while director Richard Heslop (who hosts this at Vimeo) is featured in front and behind the camera in many of the pieces. Heslop is responsible for Language, the 23 Skidoo video, and dons angel wings for Maggie Jailler’s A Nosegay, a homoerotic homage to Genet and Lautréamont. Jailler’s film is my favourite but then I’m biased towards the content.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Dream Machine
• Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo

Weekend links 287

Cover by Valentine Hugo for Contes Bizarres (1933) by Achim d’Arnim. See Hugo’s interior illustrations here.

• “In spite of the blood-drinking pursuits of Rollin’s protagonists, there’s very little in the way of body horror to be found. His undead are sensual, romantic creatures that are frequently delicate of mind and body. These movies attempt to evoke nuanced emotional responses with their mixture of romance, loss, eroticism, and tragedy.” Tenebrous Kate on Sex, Death, and the Psychedelic Madness of Jean Rollin.

• “Late at night, [Melville] ‘turned flukes’ down Oxford Street as if he were being followed by a great whale, and thought he saw ‘blubber rooms’ in the butcheries of the Fleet Market.” Philip Hoare on Herman Melville’s time in London.

• Haunted by Books, a new collection of writings by Mark Valentine, “explores the more curious byways of literature.” Full details at the home of the esoteric, Tartarus Press.

I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails, or someone tying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip.

Art critic Robert Hughes quoted in a review by Siri Hustvedt of The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings of Robert Hughes

• “Art, art – I couldn’t give a crap about art.” Oscar Wilde’s nephew, Arthur Cravan, puts in another appearance at Strange Flowers.

• “The Tarot is utterly fascinating,” says Evan J. Peterson discussing his Tarot-inspired writing with Tarot Poetry.

• Manuel Göttsching: “A lot of crazy music happened at the end of the ’60s, very strange, and very curious…”

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 169 by Chra, and 28th November 2015 by The Séance.

• Czech Artists’ Radical Book Designs of the Early 20th Century

• Ten things you might not know about Yayoi Kusama.

• More megaliths: Francis Pryor on ritual landscapes.

• Peaches gets wild in the desert: Rub (uncensored).

• Irmin Schmidt‘s favourite records (this week)

• Mount Etna erupts

• Rituals (1981) by Bush Tetras | Ballet For A Blue Whale (1983) by Adrian Belew | Etna (2006) by Boris & Sunn O)))

Derek Jarman’s landscapes

Landscape with Marble Mountain (1967).

1968 – The Lisson Gallery

I have been painting landscapes fairly consistently since I left school, and during that time they’ve changed a great deal. At first they were sparked off by holidays with Aunt Isobel at Kilve in North Somerset. I painted the red-brown earth and dark green of the Quantock Hills, which are at their brightest under the stormy grey skies which blow up over the Bristol Channel. In these paintings there are megaliths and standing stones and clumps of beech trees. By 1965 this has all changed. Oil paint is out. Aquatec, the new acrylic paint, in. The canvas is no longer rough brown flax, but a smooth white cotton duck. The use of rulers and masking tape produces a metrical precision, and replaces improvisation.

I began a series of landscapes which were larger—you have to paint large at the Slade or nobody notices. They have flat red grounds, blue skies, above eye-tricking imagery: Trompe l’oeil water, real taps, classical statues. The largest of these canvases, nine feet by seven, wins the Peter Stuyvesant award for painting at the Young Contemporaries show at the Tate in May 1967.

Since then things have changed again, and at my one-man show, my first one-man show at the Lisson, the canvases have become linear and perfectly balanced. There are no longer any figures or objects, and definitely no jokes. The canvases which are left raw resemble marble through which a grid of lines has been scored.

Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (1991)

I don’t have a book of Derek Jarman’s paintings so the pictures featured here—taken from the BBC’s collection of public artworks in Britain—are the only examples I’ve seen of his landscapes. These are surprisingly minimal compared to the richly textured Super-8 films he started making in the early 1970s, but then his painting—which is only one facet of his artistic output—went through several distinct periods. It’s notable that he mentions painting standing stones from an early age given their presence in the Avebury series below, and in his beguiling short, A Journey to Avebury (1971).

(Note: Landscape with Marble Mountain is shown on the BBC site as a portrait picture which would appear to be an error. I’ve taken the liberty of rotating the image anti-clockwise.)

Landscape with a Blue Pool (1967).

Landscape (no date).

Landscape II (no date).

Avebury Series No.2 (1973).

Avebury Series No.4 (1973).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Derek Jarman album covers
• Ostia, a film by Julian Cole
• Derek Jarman In The Key Of Blue
• The Dream Machine
• Jarman (all this maddening beauty)
• Sebastiane by Derek Jarman
• A Journey to Avebury by Derek Jarman
• Derek Jarman’s music videos
• Derek Jarman’s Neutron
• Mister Jarman, Mister Moore and Doctor Dee
• The Tempest illustrated
• In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman
• Derek Jarman at the Serpentine
• The Angelic Conversation
• The life and work of Derek Jarman