7 week /Watch the excerpt of Derek Jarman’s Blue. Write a short text (c. 250 words)

1/n her article, “Derek Jarman’s Blue: Negating the Visual”, Jenna Carine Ashton states “The auditory comes to replace the visual; with Blue there is a sensory tussle as we are forced to listen.” Reflecting on your own experience of watching Blue, do you agree? Why/why not?

2/Consider this work in relation to González-Torres’ Untitled (A portrait of Ross in L.A.). How do these works engage the senses of the viewer to create a relationship with the subject of the work?

I think the director chose to use the color blue in addition to the visual to convey his painful emotions a year before he died of AIDS. The blue color itself is the color of melancholy, expressing his loss. In my undergraduate studies in Color Science, it was said that when blue appears, sadness appears, and melancholy is the tone of the picture. The most distressing thing is that blue is the color that Jarman can see when he drops eye drops in his eyes. The director skips the visual distraction and enters the realm of color directly, a brutal treatment of the image similar to the Yves Klein documentary. AIDS is too complex to be presented in a single image. The director chooses a color that combines the sensory art with the blue. As Jacques Khali says, “Blue is a profoundly autobiographical, self-conscious reflection on life with AIDS”. This brutal way of exploring the director’s psyche in blue, a sad but still visual expectation, conveys the “truth” he has set out to tell

Standing on the verge of his death, he struggles with the growing blindness. The minimal use of visual narrative relies entirely on the sense of hearing, with the initial flash of black into blue and the final flash of black foreshadowing the end of the creator’s illness, not the replacement of sight by hearing. Rather, the blue color highlights his desire for vision.

As the bell rings, the visual changes become sound changes, with a collage of sounds entering the frame, multiple rich sounds. Though the image remains the same the visual excitement never fades! And his iconic film collage shifts from visual to sound at this point, also a shift in his mood.

The blue replaces the screen and the picture projects his inner spirit, as if reborn in the air of color.

I don’t think it’s a sensory struggle, not so paranoid, but a full and rich expression of the world with all five senses. With the rapid development of technology, “immersive” and “digital interactive art” has become an important means of art in recent years.

Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA / Portrait of Ross in LA) American contemporary artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Felix Gonzalez-Torres) stacked various colors of candy in the corner, the total weight of the candy is 175 pounds, roughly the same as the weight of his lover. Visitors can take away the candy. The pile of candy is gradually getting smaller, just like Rose who is rapidly losing weight after getting AIDS. Each candy is a former sweetness, and each candy taken away is also a lover’s death under the disease.

As the candy melts in the visitor’s mouth, the participant will also experience the shocking reality that Ross is dying.

The work shares with visitors the sweetness of his love for his lover, while the pile of candy in the corner and the dwindling number of candies represent the gradual disappearance of the gay community if society does not take AIDS seriously. This “portrait” without any face expresses love and nostalgia in a simple and poetic way. The subtleties of the eye can only be seen when viewed with deep love and profound pain, ties and departures, recognition and desire.

The connection between the creator and the viewer is to face together the fact that the candy is being taken away and slowly becoming less, and that the disappearance of the candy is also a shift in the mood of the artwork.

The connection between “Felix Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA)” and “blue” is not only a surface view of the psychology of AIDS patients and the emotions of their surroundings.

It is the transformation of the five senses, blue conveys the desire to live even if the emotions are low. And felix is creating a picture of the unknown with a scene of mutual collaboration with the audience.

More perspective is needed to present the work, even though the picture is colorful candy but the emotion is going out from sadness to accept the reality of the departure of the lover, not the disappearance of sadness but a different way to miss. The blue color in the retina is not always sad, but the change of music conveys the change of emotion of the creator.

Both artists are very good at using sensory emotions, and the narrative mode also resonates with the audience in the same way, it is necessary to have a strong visual or auditory sense to give a sense of the situation