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The Mediatization of the Artist pp 147–163Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Art and Aisthesis in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio

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Abstract

“It is evident that the arts have been ossified into respective spheres unnaturally. Dancing, the opera house, the theatre, architecture, the concert hall, etc. Probably the least effective the art gallery, a structure perfected in the [nineteenth century].”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jarman’s manuscript is reproduced in Roger Wollen, ed., Derek Jarman : A Portrait (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 1.

  2. 2.

    Jacques Rancière , The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 44. The ideal of art and life becoming “synonymous” is expressed in these terms in Jarman’s shooting script for Jubilee, reproduced in Stephen Farthing and Ed Webb-Ingall, eds., Derek Jarman ’s Sketchbooks (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013), 79.

  3. 3.

    Derek Jarman , quoted from his notebooks, in Peter Wollen, “Blue,” New Left Review 6 (November–December 2000): 126.

  4. 4.

    Derek Jarman , Derek Jarman ’s Caravaggio : The Complete Film Script and Commentaries, with photographs by Gerald Incandela (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 133; hereafter abbreviated as DJC.

  5. 5.

    Tony Peake, Derek Jarman : A Biography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 304–07.

  6. 6.

    Derek Jarman in Dancing Ledge, ed. Shaun Allen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 [1984]), 20.

  7. 7.

    Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13.

  8. 8.

    On the pathologizing myth of the artist-genius perpetuated by many (popular, traditional) artist biopics, see Griselda Pollock, “Artists, Mythologies and Media: Genius , Madness and Art History,” Screen 21, no. 3 (1980): 57–96. For a recent discussion of Caravaggio that places it in closer proximity to the prototypical artist biopic than the present essay does see Julie F. Codell, “Gender, Genius , and Abjection in Artist Biopics,” in Tom Brown and Belén Vidal, eds., The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture (New York : Routledge, 2014), 159–75.

  9. 9.

    In his book of this title, Rancière glosses aisthesis as “the mode of experience according to which, for two centuries [i.e., in the aesthetic regime], we perceive very diverse things, whether in their techniques of production or their destination, as all belonging to art” (x). As aisthesis works in relative independence from common regimes of identification of art, the history of aisthesis can be written as a history of contingent, contextually embedded “displacements in the perception of what art signifies” (xiii); quotes from Jacques Rancière , Aisthesis : Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013).

  10. 10.

    David Robinson, visiting Jarman’s set for The Times, quoted in Pascale Aebischer, Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 29.

  11. 11.

    Cf. Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 96–117, whose elaborate discussion of the tableaux vivants in La Ricotta and Passion invites a comparison with Caravaggio .

  12. 12.

    Pasolini, quoted in Patrick Rumble, Allegories of Contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini ’s Trilogy of Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 14.

  13. 13.

    Jarman, quoted in Michael O’Pray, Derek Jarman : Dreams of England (London: BFI Publishing, 1996), 155.

  14. 14.

    Jarman in 1985, quoted in Aebischer, Screening Early Modern Drama, 29.

  15. 15.

    Jarman in an interview with Simon Field in 1989 (see the BFI’s DVD edition of The Angelic Conversation, which includes it in full).

  16. 16.

    Cf. Steven Dillon, The Mirror and the Sea: Derek Jarman and Lyric Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), 132–61, who approaches Caravaggio in light of Pasolini’s theory. Pasolini’s theorization of the “cinema of poetry” as a form of image- as opposed to narrative-based cinema has been extensively discussed in the film-theoretical literature; John David Rhodes highlights its “free indirect discourse” approach to character and subjectivity in “Pasolini’s Exquisite Flowers: The ‘Cinema of Poetry’ as a Theory of Art Cinema,” in Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (New York : Oxford University Press, 2010), 142–63.

  17. 17.

    Jarman, DJC, 6.

  18. 18.

    Hobbs in Derek Jarman ’s Sketchbooks, 96.

  19. 19.

    Jarman, DJC, 22.

  20. 20.

    Beristain, commentary track, Caravaggio (Moskwood Media’s DVD release).

  21. 21.

    See note 19 above.

  22. 22.

    This “thwarting” should be seen as productive; it is a principle or logic by which the film inhabits the tensions between the representational and the aesthetic modes of art in the aesthetic regime, neither of which exists in something like pure form. On the principle of “thwarting” (contrarier) and film itself as a “thwarted fable,” see Jacques Rancière , Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford and New York : Berg, 2006), 1–20.

  23. 23.

    Brigitte Peucker , The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 30–31; cf. Jacobs, Framing Pictures, 88–96.

  24. 24.

    James Tweedie, “The Suspended Spectacle of History: The Tableau Vivant in Derek Jarman ’s Caravaggio ,” Screen 44, no. 4 (2003): 379–403, 381. My argument about Jarman’s use of tableaux vivants dovetails with this article, but also extends and complicates it in reference to the Deposition scene, about which, remarkably, Tweedie remains silent.

  25. 25.

    I use the term mediation here in the sense so influentially delineated by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their seminal work Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

  26. 26.

    Hobbs in Derek Jarman ’s Sketchbooks, 96.

  27. 27.

    Jarman, DJC, 44.

  28. 28.

    I borrow this phrase from Oliver Davis, “The Politics of Art: Aesthetic Contingency and the Aesthetic Affect,” in Oliver Davis, ed., Rancière Now: Current Perspectives on Jacques Rancière (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 155–168, see 165–66.

  29. 29.

    Rancière, Film Fables, 8, 15.

  30. 30.

    Cf. Jacobs, Framing Pictures, 117, paraphrasing Fredric Jameson on Passion.

  31. 31.

    Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit , Caravaggio (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 46.

  32. 32.

    Bersani and Dutoit , Caravaggio , 45.

  33. 33.

    The text follows the script here; see Jarman, DJC, 60.

  34. 34.

    Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio , 48.

  35. 35.

    See especially Isaac Julien’s documentary film Derek (2008, BFI’s DVD release).

  36. 36.

    Rancière, Aisthesis , x.

  37. 37.

    Jarman, quoted in Wollen, “Blue,” 126.

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  1. Amsterdam University College (AUC), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Marco de Waard

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  1. Marco de Waard
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Correspondence to Marco de Waard .

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  1. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Rachel Esner

  2. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Sandra Kisters

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de Waard, M. (2018). Art and Aisthesis in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio . In: Esner, R., Kisters, S. (eds) The Mediatization of the Artist. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66230-5_10

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