At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament

Description

Derek Jarman is known as a painter, theatre designer and maker of films such as "Jubilee", "Caravaggio", "The Garden" and "Edward II". This book consists of a series of autobiographical fragments, interviews and newspapers extracts in which he celebrates homosexuality, articulating the pain, anxiety and rage which many homosexuals have felt under the physical, legal and cultural attacks of recent years. Jarman also wrote "Modern Nature".

Derek Jarman's creativity spanned decades and genres - painter, theatre designer, director, film maker, writer and gardener. From his first one-man show at the Lisson Gallery in 1969; set designs and costumes for the theatre and ballet (Jazz Calendar with Frederick Ashton at Covent Garden, Don Giovanni with John Gielgud at the London Coliseum, The Rake's Progress with Ken Russell at Teatro Communale, Florence); production design for Ken Russell's films The Devils and Savage Messiah; through his own films in super-8 before working on features: Sebastine (1976), Jubilee (1978), The Tempest (1979), The Angelic Conversation (1985), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), War Requiem (1989), The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), Wittgenstein (1993), and Blue (1993); to directing pop-videos and live performances for Pet Shop Boys and Suede. His paintings - for which he was a Turner Prize nominee in 1986 - have been exhibited world-wide. His publications include: Dancing Ledge (1984), Kicking the Pricks (1987), Modern Nature (1991), At Your Own Risk (1992), Chroma (1994), Derek Jarman's Garden (1995). Jarman died in 1994 of an AIDS-related illness, aged 52. His garden surrounding the fisherman's cottage in Dungeness where he spent the last years of his life remains a site of awe and pilgrimage for fans and newcomers to Jarman's singular vision.

If there is any such thing as the literary equivalent of an incendiary bomb, then this is it... His semtex-packed sentences are welcome thunderflashes of dissent in the grey drizzle of a dispirited political climate * New Statesman * At Your Own Risk gives the reader access to something that is hard to articulate, the near asphyxiating pain, anxiety and rage which many gay people have felt living under the physical, legal and cultural attacks of the last few years * Observer * For all his anger, Jarman never seems brutalised. He retains his humanity and good humour. His is a wonderfully garrulous, mercurial, polymathic daemon * Literary Review *