Latest news with #LeighBowery
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.
New European
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Matthew d'Ancona's culture: Toxic Town and the conscience of the nation
Jack Thorne was an undoubted pioneer of this genre and, in the powerful, emotionally draining Toxic Town , he tackles the Corby poisonous waste scandal in which the borough council was sued for negligence, public nuisance and breach of statutory duty after the birth of a cluster of children with limb differences. Between 1984 and 1999, the Midlands town, formerly a steelmaking hub, had undertaken an aggressive programme of land reclamation and waste disposal. Was this strategy responsible for contaminations that had caused the unusual concentration of babies born with deformities? Jodie Whittaker is superb as Susan McIntyre, first seen belting out Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive at a karaoke party in 1995. When her younger son Connor is born with a hand deformity, she blames herself and her partner abandons her. But she soon learns that many other mothers have had similar, or worse experiences: especially Tracey Taylor (Aimee Lou wood), whom she first meets on a labour ward, and Maggie Mahon (Claudia Jessie), whose husband Derek (Joe Dempsie) has driven lorries carrying the waste. On one of the reclamation sites, a young council engineering technician, Ted Jenkins (Stephen McMillan), starts to suspect that corners are being cut and kickbacks received. His fears are shared by councillor Sam Hagen (Robert Carlyle) who urges him to dig deeper. The moral corrosion that Doyle discloses by stages is embodied by Sam's senior Labour colleague, Roy Thomas (Brendan Coyle), who insists that compromise is the price of regeneration: 'You think any of them give a shit about us? The EU? Blair? We take their handouts, we're grateful, but it's us that gets it done'. He is sick of the demands for perfection: 'Corby was built on good enough '. Not good enough for Susan and her fellow mothers, who recruit locally born lawyer Des Collins (Rory Kinnear) to build a case. The clash between natural justice and civic expedience is powerfully rendered, and the persistence over many years of a group of determined women facing a patriarchal machine is the compelling heart of the story. Once again, drama trumps conventional politics as a delivery system for the most uncomfortable of truths. Leigh Bowery! (Tate Modern, London, until August 31) Though Leigh Bowery was born in the suburbs of Melbourne, Edith Sitwell, chronicler of English eccentrics, would have loved his art, performance, and provocations. Indeed, Fiontán Moran, co-curator with Jessica Baxter of this terrific show, situates him explicitly in the tradition of Quentin Crisp, Kenneth Williams, Lily Savage and Grayson Perry. Bowery was both a remorselessly imaginative performer and a cultural convenor: he flourished in post-punk, New Romantic London as a creator of transgressive and often shocking 'Looks' and as a clubland host, principally of Taboo at Maximus in Leicester Square. Its warning to those who queued to get in was: 'Dress as though your life depends on it, or don't bother'. Taboo was a space where London's avant-garde met the curious art establishment – notably Lucian Freud, who completed 13 portraits of Bowery (several of which are included here). Tall, corpulent and fearless, he was as much at home presenting a segment on the BBC's The Clothes Show as he was creating (and wearing) audacious costumes. Initially inspired by the designs of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, he became omnivorously eclectic, drawing on sci-fi, astrology, South Asian culture and much else. 'If you label me, you negate me,' he declared; asserting his humanity by presenting himself as extra-terrestrial, surreal, vaudevillian, and full of mordant wit. The drama of the body was a constant preoccupation. 'Flesh,' he said, 'is the most fabulous fabric.' His perennial use of spots was widely interpreted as a reference to the Kaposi Sarcoma cancer lesions that were often an early symptom of HIV. The exhibition has been mounted in collaboration with Nicola Rainbird, director and owner of the Estate of Leigh Bowery, whom he married shortly before his death in 1994, aged only 33, from an AIDS-related illness. In form and content – not least its recreation of clubland ambience – it captures both an era in British culture and Bowery's enduring influence. The Last Showgirl (selected cinemas) More than 25 years after she left Baywatch , Pamela Anderson is at last given a role that allows her to show what a great actress she can be. And Gia Coppola's elegiac and gently absorbing movie is the best to be made about Sin City since Mike Figgis's masterly Leaving Las Vegas (1995). Anderson is Shelly Gardner, a performer for decades in Le Razzle Dazzle – an old school cabaret show that is closing after 37 years. The tide has turned decisively in favour of Cirque du Soleil-style entertainment and so, the dancers are told by manager Eddie (Dave Bautista, excellent), they will all soon be handed their cards. Shelly's fear of redundancy in middle age is compounded by estrangement from her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), who thinks that the show is 'lame trash' and resents her mother for neglecting her while she was growing up. As Le Razzle Dazzle edges towards extinction, the two try fitfully to repair their scarred relationship. The movie is almost stolen by Jamie Lee Curtis, as Shelly's best friend Annette, a perma-tanned ex-showgirl who has stayed on as a cocktail waitress, spending what little money she has on booze and gambling. When she dances drunkenly on a table to Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart , her sheer abandon gradually acquires a defiant magnificence. Autumn Durald Arkapaw's cinematography perfectly captures the scuffed nostalgia that is Coppola's theme: filmed on 16mm in only 18 days, The Last Showgirl is a bold work of emotional candour which never slides into sentimentality. 'This is just the beginning of my career,' insists Shelly, and her quiet insistence, echoing Anderson's own, packs quite a punch. Much Ado About Nothing (Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, until April 5) Hot on the heels of Romeo and Juliet (with Tom Holland) and The Tempest (starring Sigourney Weaver), Jamie Lloyd completes his Shakespearean trilogy in style with this glorious production. Peter Ackroyd has written aptly of the 'reckless melancholy' of Much Ado About Nothing – but Lloyd tilts firmly towards recklessness in his depiction of the 'merry war' between Benedick (Tom Hiddleston) and Beatrice (Hayley Atwell). Perhaps he had no option, given the star wattage of the two leads (both excellent); if so, the gamble pays off magnificently. Lloyd's Messina is a pulsing nineties club, Soutra Gilmour's design emphatically ditching the director's trademark monochrome aesthetic in favour of pink confetti, disco glitter balls and a giant inflatable heart. There are sight gags galore, at which Hiddleston proves especially adept, and a soundtrack of bangers, with Mason Alexander Park as the maid Margaret singing a series of wonderful covers. Lloyd leans into the Marvel movie celebrity of his performers, even including images of Hiddleston as Loki and Atwell as Captain Carter. 'I am loved of all ladies,' declares Benedick – but he loves only one, and there is a yearning tenderness beneath his dancefloor braggadocio that is deftly revealed as the drama unfolds. Splendid, unhinged fun. The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource , by Chris Hayes (Scribe) 'Attention must be paid,' says Linda Loman of her husband Willy in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman . But attention to what, exactly, in our hypermodern digital age? In this intelligent and highly readable book, Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor, argues that we are losing cognitive and deliberative agency in the face of 'a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit'. As much as we try to focus upon what we think matters, algorithms drive us away from genuine inquiry and curiosity, and towards aggressive confirmation of what we already think, suspect or subconsciously believe. In this sense, our information environment is 'akin to life in a failed state, a society that had some governing regime that has disintegrated and fallen into a kind of attentional warlordism'. As Hayes admits ruefully: 'Everyone, including myself, complains they can't read long books any more.' His own book's title refers to Odysseus binding himself to a mast to resist the lure of the Sirens' call. In a different analogy, he hopes that 'attentional farmers' markets' will emerge: informational counterparts to the organic food movement, natural food stores and gatherings of farmers selling their produce directly to customers. On this basis, the monopoly of the tech giants will be challenged by the demand for a healthier, curated, wisely edited information ecosystem. 'You can feel that this era is ending,' he claims, 'that the power of attentional capitalism is so formidable that the state is going to find ways to bring it to heel.' As the Zen master says: we'll see.
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:
The Independent
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Was Leigh Bowery one of the most original artists of the 20th century?
Leigh Bowery was larger than life in all senses: a self-styled performance artist whose exuberantly physical antics took place in nightclubs rather than art galleries; a monstrous egotist who ruthlessly pursued – and achieved – fame as nightlife entrepreneur, fashion designer and musician; and an imposing physical presence, whose shaven-headed, unashamedly fleshy physique is the subject of some of Lucian Freud's most notable paintings. This major Tate survey, Leigh Bowery!, is one of a plethora of Eighties-centred exhibitions (including the National Portrait Gallery's The Face Magazine: Culture Shift and Tate Britain's The 80s: Photographing Britain) that appear intent on recasting the much-contested Thatcher decade as a time of radical creative experimentation and emergent identity politics. The Australian-born Bowery, with his penchant for sinister masks and makeup, is presented here as a kind of overbearing ringmaster to alternative Eighties London, in terms that are at once absurdly overinflated and disconcertingly personal. Bowery, we are told, was 'one of the most fearless and original artists of the 20th century'. Really? And while you might imagine that a show comprising Bowery's 'outlandish and dazzling' costumes, alongside painting, photography and video, could be wrapped up in a couple of modest-sized rooms, it's given one of Tate Modern 's very largest spaces. At the same time, the wall texts invite us to identify with Bowery as a human being – and to take him at his own estimation – in a way you'd expect of the lightest of popular biographies rather than a heavy-hitting retrospective exhibition. 'A smalltown boy from Sunshine, a Melbourne suburb in Australia. He's bored. Inspired by the punk scene, Bowery leaves fashion college and arrives in London in October 1980... It took time for Bowery to find his people.' Despite this apparently tight personal focus, the fact that many of the works in the first room – and throughout the show – are by Bowery's friends and associates, rather than Bowery himself, gives the impression of a show that is around Bowery, rather than about him. One example is the cartoon-like painting of our hero (as he's very much presented) in the bath by his close friend Gary 'Trojan' Barnes. Andhe makes a fantastic supporting player in Hail the New Puritan (1986), Charles Atlas's film about enfant terrible choreographer Michael he is, sprawled around his flat in that day's streetwear, blue pancake makeup inspired by the Hindu god Krishna, face piercings and a 'leather man' peaked cap. You don't get many people walking around London looking like that even now. Exhibitions revolving around performance and social scenes are often let down by the quality of their documentary evidence; this one is crowded with riotous and marvellously vivid photographs of London nightclubs. Not least among them isBowery's West End club Taboo, with its entry policy of 'dress as though your life depends on it, or don't bother'. Whether wearing a sequin-studded motorcycle helmet and leering black-and-white makeup, or carrying fashion designer and DJ Rachel Auburn over his shoulder with illuminated lightbulbs taped to his head with sticking plasters, Bowery is a borderline terrifying proposition. Seen in the exhibition, his outfits are exquisitely made in collaboration with his close friend (and later wife) Nicola Rainbird, with painstaking embroidery and use of sequins. Yet without Bowery's extravagantly corpulent physical presence, they seem just, well, costumes. Wall-filling videos of dance performances by Michael Clark reveal new aspects of Bowery's abilities, as designer and occasional dancer, though the fact that the presiding talent is Clark (the subject of a large exhibition at the Barbican in 2020) dilutes the focus on Bowery. His dedicated artworks, deprived of the self-aggrandising razzamatazz that no doubt accompanied them at the time, often feel a touch half-hearted. Ruined Clothes (1990), photos of some of Bowery and Rainbird's most lovingly created garments thrown into the street to be trashed by the weather and passers-by, sounds like the ultimate anti-fashion statement. Yet the original clothes, displayed here, look mildly soiled rather than outright ruined. And it's disappointing that a section labelled 'transgression' boils down to not much more than an argument with Clark over the use of the 'C' word. This exhibition has plenty of amazing material, but it's so woefully overextended, with too many repetitive videos and too much insignificant ephemera through too many large rooms, that some of the best material almost gets lost. (Bowery's wacky holiday snaps, for instance, could be anybody's.) Freud's now famous oil paintings of Bowery feel a touch inconsequential dropped in among all this stuff, with little in the way of context. More seriously, Bowery's later fashion designs, wearable surreal sculptures, which genuinely achieve the goal of being works of art in their own right, are seen only in photographs – if brilliant ones – by Fergus Greer. And some of his most powerful performances are barely documented. The night he sprayed water over the audience from his anus as part of an Aids benefit at Brixton's Fridge nightclub in 1994is lent poignancy by the fact that he died of the disease himself later that year, though it's evident here (perhaps unsurprisingly) only through a single photograph. The show's climactic and perhaps most extraordinary work, Birth, is a small and tremulous video shot at New York's drag festival Wigstock in 1993. An alarmingly corpulent Bowery got up in a surreal 'female' mask performs a tuneless rendition of The Beatles' 'All You Need Is Love', before lying down and 'giving birth' to Rainbird, who bursts naked from the front of his tights covered in remarkably real-looking 'blood'. The show's aim of showing Bowery as an explorer of 'the body as a shape-shifting tool' feels realised here – even if it's only for about three seconds. But the show's most revealing moments are excerpts from the BBC's mainstream fashion programme The Clothes Show, compered by Bowery in full flowered mask and dress and appearing completely at home. Clearly the master of outrage could charm all the grannies in the world out of the trees when he wanted to. But then, when you reflect that alongside his immersion in the European avant-garde at its most visceral, Bowery was plugged simultaneously into a tradition of camp outrage that goes back centuries – from, say, the court of Versailles to Kenneth Williams – the fact that he should have been a natural on early evening British television doesn't seem so surprising.
