Yesterday’s Present and Today’s Past

By Michele Robecchi

Twenty years ago this coming February, Derek Jarman succumbed to a fatal illness he bravely fought for almost a decade. Unlike many of his peers, Jarman never refrained from telling the world what got to him until the very last minute, and neither did he rely on the palliative of swapping the real name of his disease for a related affliction. As soon as he tested positive during a checkup in the winter of 1986, while busy with the sound editing sessions of his film The Last of England, Jarman, true to the principles that animated his work, didn’t wait a split second to publicly share that he had contracted what was known as Human Immunodeficiency Virus-HIV.

Once he overcame the initial shock, his subsequent years were predictably lived to the fullest, introducing an even greater sense of urgency to his practice. Amongst the multitude of projects he undertook were his second biography Kicking the Pricks (published posthumously in 1997), seminal films like War Requiem (1989) and The Garden (1990), theater design work, and the long-overdue biopic on the life of Caravaggio. Still, there was room for reflections of a more melancholic nature, as his passion for creative gardening and the series of black paintings he conceived over the course of six years. Some of those paintings have been recently exhibited at the Wilkinson Gallery in London during Frieze week, and in tune with the spirit behind their conception, constituted a welcoming oasis for deeper thoughts within the frenzy atmosphere that dominated the event. (Or, for that matter, Isaac Julien’s bombastic tribute to Jarman at the Serpentine Gallery five years ago).

The first thing to note is that Jarman started working on these paintings in 1982, four years before he discovered he was ill. Yet, the dramatic circumstances that changed his life forever don’t seem to affect the series in the slightest. Extraordinarily cohesive, small sized and predictably somber in tone, they are far from being a mere exercise of self-pity. Defined by a dark sense of humor and a feel for polymaterism that would have made Picasso and Prampolini proud, they feature shattered glasses, brushes, rusty chain rings, smashed tin cans, toys and even actual teeth, oscillating from the shamanic to the outright camp. One painting in particular, the highly controversial I.N.R.I. (1988), reprises the classic theme of crucifixion with a set of characters from the Mattel franchise Masters of the Universe in the unlikely part of the Roman guards. The hunky He-Man and the evil Skeletors’ presence in the composition is particularly significant, not only for their addressing issues such as sex, death and blasphemy, but also for their 1980s-signature role, when the MOTU action figures were at the peak of their popularity and the duality between hedonism and desperation was rampant.

Surprising as it might sound now, the 1980s were also the days when HIV was considered in many quarters as a ‘gay disease,’ pushing early celebrity and non-celebrity victims to come out and confess their sexual orientation, while the most conservative factions of society were entirely comfortable in using words such as ‘divine retribution’ when called to give a moral justification to the masses of what was going on. It was also the time, as Jarman’s paintings poignantly express, when being diagnosed with HIV literally meant receiving a death sentence, and proper medications, along with designated facilities and educational and supportive programs, were ostensibly scarce. Sarah Schulman reminds in her book The Gentrification of the Mind (2012) how, unlike the way many historians would assert, the shift from prejudice and indifference to sympathy and care in America has been far from smooth. Entire communities were decimated in total isolation before governmental institutions really bothered to do something about it, and it was only in the early 1990s, when the disease spread to All-American heroes like Magic Johnson, that the mainstream media finally came around to the idea that HIV wasn’t a class-sentient disease. Hailed as a groundbreaking moment, Jonathan Demme’s sugar-coated tale Philadelphia (1993) is depressing evidence of how even those working in creative environments, who are prone to see themselves ahead of the rest of the planet in terms of social sensibility, when confronted with the threat of HIV, didn’t actually do any better. Indifference permeated the financially florid art world of the mid-1980s just as any other industry, and it was only when the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring and Tseng Kwong Chi passed away that the realization started creeping in that the party had finally hit the wall.

Twenty years on from those occurrences, many things have changed. HIV is still not curable, but at least it is controllable. It is possible to plan a life and even a future without the anxiety and fear experienced by Jarman and many other men and women. Ignorance and discrimination, however, are a different matter. HIV is very much part of the present, and as such, it is still important to talk about it.

* Special thanks to all the people at the T1 Coleridge Unit at North Middlesex University Hospital, London.