Art, Leigh Bowery and the weaponisation of embarrassment

The Guardian

09-03-2025

Halfway around the Tate's new Leigh Bowery show, my friend, Sophie, said to me, 'Wait, why does this look like history when it feels like only 10 minutes ago?' We were admiring photos taken at nightclubs and while we were very much not there, in the backgrounds squinting awkwardly at the flash with backcombed hair, it felt as if we could have been.
This was the – I suppose – narcissism I brought to the exhibition with me, riding on my shoulder like a chip or a parrot. Maybe it's always there when looking at art – the connection and liberation that comes from seeing parts of yourself reflected. But this time, marvelling at Bowery's performances and otherness, I was acutely aware of searching for myself in this story about a time that, despite being more than 30 years ago, seems so close. Perhaps because it represents, for me, the first dangerous feelings of freedom. This was what I was thinking about – freedom and also embarrassment, a tool that Bowery sharpened and used as a poker.
On the other side of the river, the National Portrait Gallery has an exhibition of The Face magazine from 1980 to 2004. Again, the realisation that my coming-of-age has become art history causes some light distress and a sort of flickering. The DJ Jodie Harsh, who interned under me at The Face in maybe 2003, recently messaged to check they'd got my job title right in her new memoir. I don't think I had a job title, I told her, I was paid solely in expense receipts and was responsible mainly for going to parties. It was a period of time when you could still get a job, perhaps, by simply hanging around somewhere for long enough.
I'd recently returned to London from Brighton to find the landscape of its nights completely different and, newly heartbroken, was determined to understand and conquer it all over again. It was almost a mistake when, at another nightclub a year into my time at The Face, I fell into a relationship, like tripping over something sweet – and last week we went to Lisbon to celebrate our 21st anniversary. And this is where the embarrassment comes in.
Because there is no embarrassment quite like that of being a tourist. At every bar, or crossroads, or café, I was reminded of an exquisite photograph of Leigh Bowery waiting for the lift up to his council flat in Mile End. There he stands, majestic in the concrete gloom beside two raincoated residents, wearing a chest corset and a huge frilly pompom covering his head. That's me now, out of place in any place not precisely home.
My daughter is at an age where she is regularly bent double and migrainous with cringe, and I pride myself in showing her how little shame I carry, how hard it is to embarrass me today, it's like a great game. I won't tell her that it turns out all it takes is a two-hour Ryanair flight to a perfect city. My attempts at saying thank you in Portuguese climbed out between gritted teeth, I was suddenly aware, crossing the road, of the unnatural alien looseness of my limbs – working out whether to go left or right felt like being burned alive. The embarrassment of being a tourist pierced the freedom of a holiday, or at least, reminded me dully that wherever I go, there I am.
Walking through the Tate show I remembered my first times out alone at night in the early 90s and was bloated suddenly with memories. I had fought loudly and filthily with my parents to be allowed to go to clubs so young. I was desperate to find myself, my place, and assumed it would be in a dark room underneath Tottenham Court Road. The fights culminated in a polite but firm letter I delivered to their bedroom, explaining that I'd be going out regardless of what they said, so wouldn't they prefer to know where I was going, and with whom? Wouldn't they prefer me to be honest? Ha, what an absolute cow I was, but it worked, and off I went with Katie to watch Bowery's art-pop band Minty at a club with a light-up dancefloor, free, sort of.
It wasn't until I was a little older that I realised: everybody feels like an outsider. Even the most elegant of us, the most poised – everybody, some of the time anyway, feels as if they're being looked at and poorly judged, and speaking weird and dressing wrong. Going out at night allows some cover of darkness, some drunkenness, and some expectation of performance that can help us navigate that. As do the rare people like Bowery, who embody and manipulate and perform ideas of embarrassment and otherness, and eventually emerged from nightclubs into the bright light of day(time television).
There are videos of Bowery on The Clothes Show in the 80s, sitting down to tea in Harrods Tea Rooms wearing, for example, a floral balaclava that descended into a wide sequined gown and parading through gaping groups of, oh, I suppose tourists. His friend, Sue Tilley, told the Observer about the time Bowery got bored once at the cinema and trotted naked up and down the aisle. And the rest of the audience, 'just sat there quietly, ignoring him'. Imagine the freedom that comes from harnessing your own brief embarrassment or even your own ground-in shame? Every day must feel like a holiday.