Sunday, July 17, 2022
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Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
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Work by Derek Jarman
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Images Festival, Toronto
Co-presented with The Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film
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This film was presented in-cinema with open captions.

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A consideration of one’s historical tethers, whether sexual, personal, biological, or aesthetic, alongside Derek Jarmam’s final film, Blue. This screening is accompanied by a text that is grounded by a mineral exploration of the various pigments of that same colour.

Blue poison,
or my blue heaven,
or maybe blueprints for bliss…

1.
They say the colour blue is running out. It’s in short
supply. As it runs out there, it keeps popping up here
in stores wherever raw blues are bought and sold.

2.
In May of 2020, just a little over two years ago, a new
blue was ok’d by the EPA. There was a sort of soft
launch for this new blue, this punchier-than-cobalt
blue, in 2017. Crayola even responded with a new
crayon, Bluetiful, inspired by it. This bluetiful blue is
actually called YInMn, after its chemical foundations
yttrium, indium, and manganese. It’s said to be the
middle ground between Cobalt and Ultramarine.
According to mountsinai.org, manganese helps the
body form connective tissue, bones, blood, clotting
factors, and sex hormones. It also plays a role in fat
and carbohydrate regulation. Manganese is necessary
for normal brain and nerve function. It helps to
fight free radicals.

3.
It’s not that blue is in short supply. It is that the supply
chains have been negatively affected during the pandemic.
I am struck just now by a blue squiggly line
appearing under “effected”, effecting it to change to
“affected.” As if the supply chain itself could feel the
changes, and these feelings were perhaps of hurt
or maybe even of relief. Really, what this means is that
labour was in short supply, not minerals, not toxic
conditions, not machines to do digging. It was the
human resources that were lacking, because they were
ill and dying or caring for themselves and others. How
far do we go for blue?

4.
In 2008 the ancient application of Maya Blue was
demystified in the academic world of antiquities.
Through a combination of happenstance, observation,
funding from universities, mining of local knowledges,
technological probing of stolen loot, and a lot of
inference, it was concluded that this blue, named
for a contemporary people and their deep culture,
is a ceremonial colour. This most stable of blues is
impervious to the negative effects of “diluted mineral
acids, alkalis, solvents, oxidants, reducing agents,
moderate heat, and biocorrosion, and shows little
evidence of colour deterioration.” Born of tree sap,
clay, and indigo, this blue outlasts time. This is a slow
blue of resistance. But it is also the blue of pleas, of
calls for help, or reverence. It is a blue of sacrifice, of
potential honour, of penitence.

5.
Maggie Nelson writes about blue, and she writes about
Yves Klein’s blue, and then Sasha Frere-Jones writes
about Yves and Maggie and about Yves really only making
ultramarine covetable by binding it to other things
through a process he developed with a guy whose last
name is Adam. Yves didn’t actually make a new colour.
Sasha says it’s the process that makes Yves Klein Blue
what it is. He reminds me that it’s otherwise purchasable
as Medium Adam 25. If one placed Yves Klein Blue,
Medium Adam 25, and Ultramarine side-by-each, would
they be indistinguishable?

6.
What if the supply chains are never repaired? Their links
broken or uncoupled forever? What if YInMn and Cobalt
and Bluetiful and Maya Blue and Indigo and Yves Klein
Blue or rather Medium Adam 25 or more succinctly
Ultramarine can never be made again? What if the only
blues we have left to see are no longer CMYK or oil-
based or acrylic or wax or powdered but the configured
simulacrum RGB on our devices or unmediated AFK?

7.
Blue is both rare and ubiquitous in the environment.
There’s the clear sky blue and the turquoise of tropical
seas. But blueberries, bluebells, cornflowers, blue morpho
butterflies, aquamarine, jeremejevite: These are
rare. There is much more red, yellow, brown, and green.
According to Dr. James Fox, blue eyes aren’t even really
blue. They contain no blue pigment. They are an optical
illusion. Just like the sky and the sea, they reflect something
that was never there to begin with.

8.
Maya Blue lasts and outlasts bodies, clay, water, and
time. Can a relationship, whatever that means, do the
same? Does Maggie still think about blue, or being blue,
or whatever that book was about?

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List of Works

Blue
Derek Jarman
UK | 1993 | DIGITAL | 76 MIN | ENGLISH
In his final—and most daring—cinematic statement,
Jarman the romantic meets Jarman the
iconoclast in a lush soundscape pulsing against
a purely blue screen. Laying bare his physical
and spiritual state in a narration about his life,
his struggle with AIDS and his encroaching
blindness, Blue is by turns poignant, amusing,
poetic and philosophical.