On Derek Jarman: Matthew Arthur Williams & Gavin Mitchell
Recorded at the Kelvin Hall, Glasgow
We’re in Glasgow for the terrific exhibition, Digging In Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature.
It’s inspired by the visionary English film-maker, writer, artist and gay rights activist’s diary entries of the same name – which detail his 1989 performance-installation at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre, now the CCA – replete with two men in a bed, caged in by barbed-wire – and the planting of his radical, beautiful garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, established in the aftermath of his HIV diagnosis. He died in 1994.
Alongside the artist’s own visceral paintings, and photos, and audio-visual wonder – and walls of homophobic tabloid coverage – the exhibition also features responses from contemporary artists, including a film by Tom Walker that digs into footage of Jarman talking at the Third Eye Centre, alongside thrilling work by Sarah Wood, Luke Fowler, Andrew Black – and a forthcoming live performance from Jade De Montserrat…
It’s curated by Dominic Paterson, it runs until Sunday the 4th of May, and it’s free…
There’s also a fab-looking programme at the city’s GFT over the coming weeks, including screenings of extraordinary Jarman films like The Garden, starring Tilda Swinton; Caravaggio – with Robbie Coltrane and Dexter Fletcher – and the stunning, revolutionary Blue, which features a Q&A with Derek Jarman’s long-term friend and collaborator, Neil Bartlett…
I’ve been to the exhibition three times now – I love it – and last time, I was joined by actor Gavin Mitchell – who worked closely with John Byrne, is a household favourite as Still Game’s Boabby The Barman, and who spent time with Derek Jarman in Glasgow in the 1980s.
We were also joined by the brilliant Glasgow-based artist photographer and DJ Matthew Arthur Williams, whose own response in the exhibition – a house with no walls – reverberates with the life, and death, of buildings, and people, and histories, and their connections…
It enlivens a line between Derek Jarman and the queer American avant-garde composer Julius Eastman, who worked with Arthur Russell, and Meredith Monk, and whose recorded concert from the Third Eye Centre in the 1970s – the only one of its kind – was only discovered recently within the archive.
We had a wander round the show – at the Hunterian Art Gallery – then sat down for coffee and a chat at the nearby Kelvin Hall…
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