Leigh Bowery!: Invigorating celebration of a provocative, larger-than-life figure

Telegraph

25-02-2025

'Hello! Remember me? Leigh Bowery. Would you like to come into my dressing room?' With these words, the avant-garde fashion designer and performance artist introduced an item on The Clothes Show in 1986. What BBC One's audience made of the plus-size extrovert's outlandish get-up – spiky white headpiece, a pair of cheap sunglasses with eyes painted on using Tippex, outsized black lipstick forming a gigantic smile like a crow flattened against a windscreen – isn't recorded in Tate Modern's new exhibition about Bowery's life and legacy. But many viewers would have been, I suspect, both shocked and amused.
Shock was Bowery's metier. Having grown up in a suburb of Melbourne, he arrived in London in 1980, and proceeded to electrify first the capital's nightclubbing scene, then contemporary British culture more widely, before his early death in 1994, at the age of 33, from an Aids-related illness.
He collaborated with the Scottish dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, as well as Lucian Freud, who completed 13 portraits of him. Several appear towards the end of this show, which alludes to Bowery's irrepressible life-force with that unorthodox exclamation mark in its title.
Bowery's surrealist, often-sequinned costumes melded a punk aesthetic with elements drawn from sci-fi and Soho's S&M subculture (such as alien-like hoods and polka-dotted gimp masks); unsettling and outrageous, they suggested that little about human sexuality or identity was stable.
A mask in the form of a vulva appears at Tate Modern, in the same gallery as a white Lycra bodysuit emblazoned with the phrase 'A C---'. In 1990, Bowery accidentally sprayed the front row of an audience in Brixton with, as a label puts it, 'water from his anus'. He subsequently described the occasion as a 'real stinker of a show'.
In another notorious performance, he appeared to give birth on-stage to his collaborator (and this show's co-curator) Nicola Rainbird, who, naked and painted red, burst through an opening in the crotch of his unitard, with an 'umbilical cord' of sausages around her neck.
Yet, Bowery was witty and charismatic, and his provocations were mostly tolerated. Tate situates him within 'a long tradition of British eccentrics', from Quentin Crisp to Lily Savage. Grayson Perry, who appears in a film excerpt in the fourth room, owes him a debt.
Some people might resist the exhibition's Gen-Z-courting agenda, and object that, despite his outsize personality, Bowery doesn't deserve to be on Tate Modern's biggest stage. My beef is different.
While I relished many aspects of the fresh, invigorating curation – the show begins in a mock-up of Bowery's east London living room, complete with Star Trek wallpaper and a rack of his designs, before plunging us into a quasi-nightclub, with a central 'dancefloor' and coloured disco lights – the exhibition feels by the end repetitive and thin. There's an over-reliance on ephemera (flyers, brochures, postcards), as well as scrappy and dingy, second-tier artworks by Bowery's less-talented contemporaries.
One room contains a few photographs, a screen playing another clip from The Clothes Show, and a Levi's denim jacket embellished by Bowery with hundreds of gold-coloured hair grips. And that's it. Even those pieces by Freud, with their old-fashioned gilded frames, feel out of place amid so much look-at-me, outré spectacle.
Bowery's taboo-smashing, tolerance-advocating message of nonconformist freedom is intoxicating. But, ironically, given his uncontainable exuberance, the show could have been tighter, and presented in half the space.
From Feb 27; information: tate.org.uk