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The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Art, Leigh Bowery and the weaponisation of embarrassment
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.
The Guardian
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on 1980s counterculture: back to the future
In 1980, 19-year-old Leigh Bowery arrived in London from the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine. He found a bedsit and a job in Burger King, while waiting to take on the capital's club and fashion scenes. That same year, the former New Musical Express and Smash Hits editor Nick Logan launched the magazine the Face on a shoestring from a basement on Carnaby Street. Bowery became one of the most influential avant garde figures of the era, the Face the 'style bible' for a generation. Now these countercultural icons are being celebrated in shows at Tate Modern and the National Portrait Gallery. It doesn't get more mainstream. Over at Tate Britain, meanwhile, there is a sombre, largely black and white photographic retrospective of the decade. Outlaws, focusing on Bowery and his circle, is currently at London's Fashion and Textile Museum; later this year the Design Museum will showcase the pop culture magazine Blitz, also founded in 1980. The 80s are having a moment. Documenting the decade's collisions of fashion, art and music, Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern and The Face Magazine: Culture Shift at the NPG are luridly colourful explosions set against a bleak backdrop of Thatcherite austerity, racism and homophobia. One film montage shows Bowery and friends doing poppers superimposed on footage of the Brixton and Toxteth riots and headlines about Aids. They are partying while the world burns. Post-punk and before the Young British Artists of the 1990s, Bowery and the Face were in opposition to the conservatism – and Conservatism – then dominating the country. Both set up their own clubs: Bowery literally with Taboo in the West End of London in 1985, the Face in its pages. Anyone could belong, regardless of class, race or sexuality, so long as they looked awesome. Taboo's mantra was 'dress as though your life depends on it, or don't bother'. A photograph of Bowery – painted blue – appears in the exhibition about the Face. Constantly shapeshifting, Bowery strode through artistic milieux in sparkly platform boots. 'If you label me, you negate me,' he liked to say. In 1988 he put on a five-day solo performance, spotlit behind a two-way mirror, striking poses in a variety of his signature 'looks'. Later, he became a muse to Lucian Freud. Bowery's reinvention and exhibitionism anticipates the narcissism and voyeurism of social media. His whole life was a selfie. In some ways, it was a better time to be young and an artist. Squats, council flats and even Margaret Thatcher's Enterprise Allowance Scheme (everyone at the Face in its early days was on it, apparently) meant vibrant artistic communities could flourish in the capital. Despite the debauchery, there was an innocence and spontaneity to this underground scene and its make-do-and-mend aesthetic – although some of their most provocative stunts now seem dated at best. As the critic Adrian Searle puts it: 'Wherever Bowery went, he went too far.' Bowery died of an Aids-related illness in 1994 and, although the Face would continue for another decade, it was the last hurrah for British youth magazines. Pop culture was about to become globally homogenised by the internet. The party had to end. There are economic, political and social parallels between the 1980s and today. Bowery and the Face showed that creativity could grow out of grim times. With their emphasis on gender fluidity, diversity and experimentalism, they were trailblazers. They deserve entry to the UK's most prestigious galleries – and they still look awesome.
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Leigh Bowery! review – a colossal display of shapeshifting outrageousness and originality
Life was a guise to the performance artist Leigh Bowery (1961-94). His looks were so outlandish, his costumes so teemingly various, they jam every inch of this huge retrospective. He is a gilded boy-god, a Christmas pudding on legs, a prosthetised Venus of Willendorf. He is a leather-clad dame in a zipped-up mask or a Regency dandy in pistachio pantaloons, their orange polka dots spreading upwards all over his face. He fills the frame every time, in period photographs and videos, an enormous Australian with a shaved head and powerful calves, standing 6ft 3in and higher in towering platform soles painted scarlet or silver. Even though he is long gone, a sense of his colossal presence is apparent from the opening gallery, where a rack of Bowery's earliest costumes gives an immediate sense of his size. He had left a quiet Melbourne suburb for London in 1980, and was wearing patchwork coats and tweed jackets with hillbilly hats. The first of many portraits in this show, a tentative drawing by the fashion designer Rachel Auburn, shows him in a baseball cap before he has shorn off his hair. For a moment, it seems as if this going to be a V&A show, gorgeously fashion-conscious, one costume after another in elegant vitrines. But playing alongside is a hilarious film of Bowery and his pals, already post-punk, getting into frocks and police hats in the Stepney flat where he lived for the rest of his life, lined with kitsch Star Trek wallpaper. Waiting for the dancer Michael Clark to arrive, they turn gossipy and fractious. It is like a souped-up scene from EastEnders. Soon we are at Taboo, the nightclub Bowery hosted in a Leicester Square basement on Thursdays, and Clark is flat on the floor with a half-clad lover. Snapshots cover the walls, music booms out. A beautiful monochrome photograph by David Gwinutt shows Bowery and his unrequited love, Trojan, in Picasso-inspired makeup and glittery hats outside the club. Trojan will die at 21 of an overdose. An early diary, Bowery's handwriting cast on a large scale, like everything about him, ponders the question of whether to change image. It is almost poignant, when you consider what is to come. He will burst through drag and bondage, couture, carnival and masquerade to create personae without parallel. Here is his famous dalmatian dress and mask, the vast pinstripe suit caked with sequins he wore to Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World, the unitard he used to conceal his wife, Nicola, during the 'birthing performances', when she would emerge from between his legs. Headpieces with glowing lightbulb ears, lace neck corsets, thick facial makeup that conceals him entirely, the trademark egg splat dripping down over his skull in every colour of latex and paint. His shapeshifting is sometimes reminiscent of the French artist Claude Cahun, especially the sunburst masks, padded skirts and goggle eyes. But Bowery's body is not just a complex instrument of self-portraiture; it becomes a living sculpture: a majestic column, a strutting vector with a pompom for a head, at one point so completely concealed in white Lycra that the spreadeagled form no longer appears human at all. The whole show is evocative not just of another era in music, dance and performance art, but also the media. There are vividly inventive magazine shoots here for i-D, Blitz and the Face – currently having its own celebratory exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery – as well as for the press. And in a droll sequence for BBC One's The Clothes Show, Bowery spends a day at Harrods in spangled hoods and sequined trapeze dresses, parodying the stunned punters. Auntie would never broadcast such programmes today. Bowery went on to design costumes for Clark's dancers, who perform on pointe in massive platforms and tights with the bum missing to music by the Fall in American video artist Charles Atlas's jump-cutting film. Bowery toured with the troupe, bringing back wild variations on Noh costumes, plus an extra layer of couture cutting from Japan. (It is a pity this show makes nothing at all of his ability to stitch staggering get-ups from old curtains.) And then he becomes an artwork in himself, posing daily in front of a two-way mirror in Anthony d'Offay's gallery in 1988. Cerith Wyn Evans's contemporary video records every kind of vox pop response, from the baffled to the liberated, at the spectacle of the great exhibitionist as installation. There are many portraits in this show, climaxing, inevitably, with Lucian Freud's nude studies of Bowery lolling, sleeping, or splayed on the ground with one leg cocked, lending a monumental defiance to both his own nakedness and Freud's heavily worked painting. Bowery is said to have nicked an unfinished work from Freud. What is missing from this show is any hint of his wilful grotesquerie, either, pissing and defecating in small clubs onstage. Grimy footage of Bowery laboriously giving birth to his wife gives an inkling of his later performances, however, in stark contrast to Fergus Greer's stylish photograph of the couple bound together. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion But there are words as well as images at Tate Modern. And perhaps this is where Bowery's feelings emerge, in postcards to friends, all exuberant emotion and explicit humour, and in his A3 diaries. An entry from 1990, after a high hit of a show, reads: 'Hungover, depressed, full of regrets, no money.' Bowery already knows he is going to die. He kept his illness secret, telling his sole confidant to explain his final absences as a trip abroad. Tell Them I've Gone to Papua New Guinea was the title of Fitzrovia Chapel's Bowery show in 2022, on the site of the Middlesex hospital, where he died of an Aids-related illness in 1994. This retrospective grows harsher, darker. The shapes become more bulbous, the forms more exaggerated. Some of the images are sinister as well as ugly. Even in his civvies, Bowery liked to wear wigs, ill-fitting jumpers and a strip of tape to yank one eyebrow awry. He wanted, he said, to be like that 'weirdo in the street that you tell your mum about'. But look at his denim jacket fluttering with gold feathers, which turn out to be nothing more than thousands of blond hairpins, or his beard of bristling pegs. Or the multicoloured ribbons wound around his naked body like shining reels at John Lewis. Make yourself new every day. This is what stuns, in the end – this extreme originality. No matter what body you were born with, or how shocking you might appear to others, Bowery's work is a lesson in looking – and living – like nobody else. Leigh Bowery! is at Tate Modern, London, until 31 August
The Guardian
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Leigh Bowery! review – the sex, scandal and sprayed enemas of the ultimate exhibitionist
What a strange show this is. It's a throwback to post-punk, post-New Romantic London; the Tory years of boom and bust;the era of Aids crisis, the years of 'yoof' culture on TV and of the underground coming up for air; years of art going hip and mainstream; of innocence and rage and provocation. Leigh Bowery may seem to have emerged from some hidden reach of London's subculture, but he was twice interviewed for the BBC's Clothes Show, and sped around his environs, and club Taboo, for London Weekend Television, in the company of Hugh Laurie. It is a pity this last hilarious and at times revealing film is not in Tate Modern's Leigh Bowery retrospective. Just about everything else Bowery did, as well as everyone he met, danced and drank with, everyone he hung out with, insulted and argued with, is. Club queen Princess Julia, the late singer Poly Styrene, Peter Doig and the Neo Naturists, Al 'Lanah' Pillay, Lucian Freud and Mark E Smith, as well as the closer world of Bowery's friends and entourage, are all here. Here comes everybody, in a popper-fuelled, coke-addled, smoke-wreathed show, filled with the noise of hi-NRG disco beats, bagpipes, the music of the Fall and sampled drones from the Velvet Underground, undercut by snatches of bitchy repartee and laughter. And here come mannequins striding in Bowery's extreme get-ups, and Bowery's clothes fastidiously remade for the Tate (the originals got trashed, and soiled by what's called 'disco dirt'), a pair of boots jammed into clogs, neck-corsets designed by Mr Pearl, the annotated guest lists to Taboo, catwalk photos and tawdry red-top headlines, pop videos and excerpts from collaborations with dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, holiday snaps and postcards detailing Bowery's sexual exploits, a one-piece outfit with the words A CUNT emblazoned where the head might be, and just about everything else you might, or might not, want to linger over. Phew. Born in 1961, Bowery escaped the town of Sunshine, a Melbourne suburb, and moved to London in 1980, where he lived until his death from an Aids-related illness in 1994. We plot the trajectory in sometimes excessive detail. Bowery's Australian Music Examination Board piano certificate, his Transport for London Photocard and a pair of voluminous silver lamé hot pants are lain out in a vitrine. They sit beside pages from his diary and evidence of Bowery having fun in a photobooth: Leigh looking psycho, Leigh looking rough, Leigh bewigged and with his hair bleached, Leigh kiss-curled and Leigh with his head shaved. Looking at these, I thought of surrealist photographer Claude Cahun, with her own gender plays and switches of looks and attitudes for the camera, as well, of course, of Cindy Sherman's photobooth self-portraits, but Bowery was probably just having fun, not pitching himself against anyone. Tate's publicity material calls Bowery 'one of the most fearless and original artists of the 20th century'. This is beyond hyperbole and misses the point of Bowery's excess and his purpose. Playing with his image, his clothing and his body, Bowery's career – if you could call it that – was mostly about self-invention and re-invention, and seeing how far he could go. This mostly meant going from club to club, from Kensington Market, where for a while he had a stall, to Brick Lane (he lived nearby), where he bought Indian sari material, jewellery and other accessories, and to parks and public lavatories where he cruised for sex. Wherever Bowery went, he went too far. Perhaps this is why this exhibition is at Tate Modern, rather than at the V&A, where it feels it more rightly belongs. Bowery posed in blackface (as well as greenface and blueface, spot-faced and pierced face), and once used a racial slur to name a fashion collection. This was but one of the several crass provocations he made in his public life – not that he appeared to make any distinctions between public and private. Naivety is no defence here. Performing at an Aids benefit in 1990, Bowery filled his colon with a large water enema before appearing on stage, intending to lie on the floor and create a human fountain. His costume prevented him from assuming the right position, so he squatted on his hands and feet and sprayed the audience from the front of the stage. In his diary Bowery writes 'performance had problems which I turned to my advantage. Shat on the audience. Stole the show …' Bowery's primary tactic was to be a succès de scandale, and, in the light of this retrospective, to upstage everyone. As well as wanting to paint him as an animal, Freud came to admire Bowery's mind. This is one thing we don't see much of in this overstretched exhibition. What we see instead is an endless desire to be seen. All the clothes Bowery designed were primarily with himself in mind. He turned heads at high-tea in Harrods for the The Clothes Show, and posed and preened behind a two-way mirror at London's Anthony d'Offay Gallery, over two weeks in 1988, gathering crowds every day. He liked an audience and he liked the camera and the sense of confrontation, though all he could see in the reflective glass was himself, striking poses, assuming attitudes. My strongest memory of watching Bowery there was his stillness. Behind the glass, he made the rest of the room a vacuum. Somehow, he emptied us out. Bowery was inescapably a creature of his time and his milieu. Seeing him on the street in Soho, bustling along with matronly purpose, his clothing and face covered in big red spots, he made the day feel brighter, things more real. Although Bowery's fashion designs have been influential, they seem an adjunct to his own plays with his body and his self-image. Diva and dandy, a social irritant and an alarming being-about-town, he became an unlikely model for Freud. Stripping naked, unasked, for their first session, Bowery became an ocean of flesh in Freud's paintings, barely contained. In later photographs by Fergus Greer, Bowery seems to morph and shape-change from image to image, and in his costumes he slips between beauty and monstrousness, the outrageous and the vulnerable as we watch. He made of himself many things at once. This is inspiring and affirming and frightening and awful and somehow wonderful and dreadful to witness. You can't take your eyes off him. Leigh Bowery! is at Tate Modern, London, from 27 February to 31 August
Telegraph
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Leigh Bowery!: Invigorating celebration of a provocative, larger-than-life figure
'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:
