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Indian Express
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Tate Modern turns 25: Prestigious UK museum marks occasion with series of events this weekend
In the late 1990s, when the rather unassuming Bankside Power Station building — located across the Thames from St Paul's Cathedral in London — was selected as the future home of Tate Modern, few in the art world could have anticipated that the museum would rise to become one of the most visited and acclaimed institutions of modern and contemporary art worldwide. One of the most visited museums in the world, recording over 4.6 million visitors in 2024, this weekend marks 25 years of the institution. 'It's hard to imagine London without Tate Modern, even though it's only 25 years old. In that short time, it has transformed London's cultural landscape – cementing our city's status as a global art capital, commissioning and celebrating emerging voices alongside world-renowned artists, and inspiring Londoners while welcoming millions of visitors from around the world,' stated Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, in a release. Marking the 25th anniversary, meanwhile, there will be a series of events this weekend. Welcoming visitors in will be artist Louise Bourgeois's iconic steel spider Maman, standing 10 metres high in the Turbine Hall, where it was first unveiled 25 years ago at the inauguration of the museum. Twenty-five more works of famed artists, including Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Monster Chetwynd and Pipilotti Rist, will also lead them into the museum galleries. While live tarot readings will take place at Meschac Gaba's Museum of Contemporary African Art, the weekend will also see performances by artists such as Abbas Zahedi, Lawrence Lek, María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Maxime Jean-Baptiste. Several panel discussions will be held, as well as artist talks by Nalini Malani and Robert Zhao Renhui. The several ongoing exhibitions at the venue, meanwhile, include 'Leigh Bowery!' which will explore how the Australian performer influenced art, fashion and pop culture, and the exhibition 'The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh' that invites visitors to explore works that question notions of home, memory and identity. 'Anthony McCall: Solid Light' presents an immersive environment with projecting beams of light creating ever-changing sculptures. Khan notes in the release: 'The 25th Birthday Weekender is a fantastic way to celebrate Tate's extraordinary contribution to our city, as we continue working to build a better, more vibrant London for everyone.'
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Flamboyance, creativity, club culture – and no smart phones: why the 1980s are all the rage again
In the future everyone will blame the eighties for all societal ills, in the same way that people have previously blamed the sixties,' Peter York, the quintessential observer of 1980s' style and cultural trends, said recently. He was referring to what he called the 'big bangs' of monetarism, deregulation and libertarianism which 'have been working their way through the culture ever since'. Curiously, he did not mention one of the eighties' equally enduring, but more positive 'big bangs' – the 'style culture', which began in that much-maligned decade and continues to echo through contemporary culture in an altogether less malign way. It is currently being celebrated in three exhibitions across London. At the National Portrait Gallery, the walls of several rooms are filled floor to ceiling with bright, glossy images from the Face magazine, which its press release describes as 'a trailblazing youth culture and style magazine that has shaped the creative and cultural landscape in Britain and beyond'. The show features the work of more than 80 photographers, some of whom, like Juergen Teller and David Sims, have since become globally famous. Likewise, some of their fresh-faced subjects, who include a teenage Kate Moss, a sassy Neneh Cherry, and the mischievous fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier. Across the river at Tate Modern, another related exhibition, Leigh Bowery!, celebrates the life and times of the most outrageous figure to emerge out of the intertwined world of eighties' fashion and club culture, his self-created, larger-than-life costumes perhaps the most extreme manifestation of the decade's succession elaborately expressed tribal subcultures. Alongside these two eighties-themed blockbusters, another smaller but equally intriguing show, Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London, at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey, ends on Sunday. This is particularly bad timing as it is a deep dive into the ground-level explosion of DIY creativity that underpins both of the bigger exhibitions and which helped define what as then known as the style decade. It features an array of maverick independent designers and stylists such as Christopher Nemeth, Judy Blame and fashion label BodyMap as well as early creations by more established names such as the now globally successful John Galliano. The eighties' reappraisal will continue apace in September, when London's Design Museum hosts an exhibition entitled Blitz: the club that shaped the eighties, which pays homage to the venue hosted by self-styled New Romantic scenesters Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, where, as their website somewhat extravagantly claims, '1980s style began'. The convergence of these eighties'-themed exhibitions has prompted an outburst of collective nostalgia among the generation that came of age back then alongside an attendant buzz of envious curiosity among today's style-conscious young. The latter are turning out in force to explore the vibrant word-of-mouth cultural interconnectivity of a time before smartphones and social media that must seem almost unimaginable to them. Given that the eighties are as far removed from the present moment as the forties were from that time, the question all of these shows beg, though, is: why now? One possible answer is provided by author and curator Ekow Eshun, who began his career as a writer for the Face. 'The magazine to a degree defined the last pre-digital period,' he says, 'It is a period that is frozen in time almost exclusively in still images and words, that is both outside our current moment, but somehow tantalisingly close, not least because it still echoes through our contemporary popular culture. One of the things the exhibition highlights is the way in which the magazine celebrated, and indeed normalised, notions of fluidity and identity that now seem utterly contemporary. On its pages, the boundaries that held sway for so long were being redefined.' The Face was founded by Nick Logan, a visionary magazine editor who had reimagined the music paper NME in the early 1970s, and then created the successful pop magazine Smash Hits in 1978. Launched in 1980, its trajectory over the decade echoed, and to a degree propelled, a wider cultural shift in pop cultural taste exemplified by the birth of club culture, the attendant rise of a generation of fiercely independent fashion designers and aspirational consumers eager to learn more about style, design, what to wear and which clubs to go to. When I started working for the Face for a brief time in the early nineties, it had established itself as an arbiter of all things pop cultural. I wrote features on Bristolian trip-hop, the enigma that was Sinéad O'Connor, the surreal humour of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer and the second coming of U2, who had suddenly ditched sincerity for irony via the McLuhanesque sensory overload of their Zoo TV tour. I remember being taken aback the first time I visited the Face office in the Old Laundry in Marylebone and found that the full-time staff seemed to consist of about half a dozen people, all of whom worked late into the night as the monthly production deadline loomed. (That changed soon after when it moved to a bigger office in Farringdon.) Unlike the NME, where I had previously worked, it was a magazine in which the art director seemed as important as the editor, and the photographers even more so than the writers. In this brave new world, stylists, too, came to the fore, trailing bags of clothes to elaborately-themed shoots. Logan hovered over the magazine like a guiding spirit: quiet, unassuming, and with an instinctive talent for recognising and nurturing new talent that seemed to have been passed one to everyone else on the editorial team, including art directors like Neville Brody and Phil Bicker. What is more apparent, in hindsight, is the way the DIY ethos that fuelled punk in the late 1970s had been carried over into the eighties in unexpected ways. It fuelled not just the ascendancy of the Face, but the emergence of a generation of maverick fashion designers, whose wildly inventive creations often adhered to a process that the post-modern continental theorists of the time called bricolage – the creative repurposing of what was at hand. 'It was a time before the tyranny of brands and sportswear,' says Martin Green, writer and curator of the Outlaws exhibition. 'People were deconstructing and repurposing outfits, using whatever they could, from safety pins to swathes of cloth bought from fabric shops in Soho that were cut up, put together again and maybe handpainted. I think of incredibly creative talents like Judy Blame as the fashion equivalent of mudlarks. They were creating wild outfits out of what was affordable and available, from Turkish rugs to tea towels and even beer mats.' The exhibition is an illuminating glimpse of a creative community driven by creative iconoclasm and experimentation rather than careerism and profit, which is perhaps why today's young find these eighties' retrospectives so intriguing. Both Green and the Sabina Jaskot-Gill, senior curator of photography at the National Portrait Gallery and curator of the Face exhibition, point out that much of the ground-level creativity paradoxically came about through a lack of money and resources. 'What struck me while researching the Face show and speaking to the people involved, from art directors to photographers, was that it was all done on such a shoestring,' says Jaskot-Gill. 'Hardly anyone was getting paid in the beginning so it was a bit like the wild west. In that sense, it has definite parallels with the present time, though at least there was some government funding back then to enable people to create.' One such project was the Youth Employment Training Scheme, which was introduced in 1981 to provide basic training and work experience to under-18s. 'The photographer Glen Luchford told me that when he started work at the Face, almost everyone there had come through that scheme,' says Jaskot-Gill. Today, though, the young and creative are at the mercy of an even more brutal neoliberal economic environment, one that ironically has its ideological beginnings in the Thatcherite eighties. Prohibitive tuition fees, high rents and low-paid jobs have inevitably had a negative impact on the once meritocratic worlds of art, fashion and magazine publishing, which is now out of reach to many aspiring young talents from working-class backgrounds. 'I was grateful to work at the Face,' says Eshun, 'For a start, no one ever asked you what school you had attended. Its values were not based on the traditional class-based hierarchies. Instead, it gave space to people from working-class and ethnically diverse backgrounds to flourish, but also to establish a new ways of thinking and speaking about style and design. It was a relatively small scene, but its impact was large and still ripples through today's culture.' While that is undoubtedly the case, Green, a keen observer of pop cultural currents, past and present, detects a more profound shift in the way that the past haunts the present. 'To a degree, young people have always been interested in the styles and fashion of past generations,' he says. 'In the eighties, cool rockabilly kids based their style on the fifties. In the sixties, the Biba label drew on twenties' styles. Today, though, the young people who have come to see the Outlaws show tend to look back longingly at the time itself rather than the styles. They see opportunities that they don't have in today's corporate-driven world – college grants, communal squats, the chance to be creative for the sake of it. 'There seems to be a hunger for that time, and the sense of unlimited creative possibility it offered.'
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 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.
New York Times
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Leigh Bowery Arrives at Tate Modern, Without Labels
'If you label me, you negate me,' the performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery said in 1993, one year before his death at age 33. Maybe it is this resistance to easy categorization that has meant Bowery never quite became a household name. His cultural influence, though, is beyond question: His provocative performances led him to work with artists including Lucian Freud and Marina Abramovic. His extreme fashions are still referenced on runways, by designers including Rick Owens and John Galliano. And his status as a queer culture icon is cemented by regular invocations at L.G.B.T.Q. club nights and on 'RuPaul's Drag Race.' But during his short, colorful and often shocking life, nobody knew what box to put Bowery in. Three decades after his death, they still don't. A new exhibition called 'Leigh Bowery!' at Tate Modern in London will bring his work to a much broader audience. The show, which opens Feb. 27 and runs through Aug. 31, charts Bowery's journey from suburban Australia to the heart of London's alternative gay club scene in the '80s, and his transformation into a figure that Boy George once described as 'modern art on legs.' George later went on to play Bowery in the 2003 Broadway run of the biographical musical 'Taboo,' for which George also wrote the lyrics. The musical is named after an infamous club night that Bowery hosted, which opened in 1985 on a dingy corner of London's Leicester Square. Every Thursday, the party attracted artists, models, designers and celebrities including George Michael, Sade and Bryan Ferry — but also drag queens and heroin users. Each week, Bowery arrived with a wild new outfit that challenged conventional notions of taste, gender and decorum. He described his role at the club as 'a local cabaret act,' explaining: 'If people see me behaving in such an outrageous manner, they won't feel inhibited themselves.' Fashion was the chief concern at Taboo, which operated by the mantra: 'Dress as if your life depends on it, or don't bother.' The doorman would flash a mirror in the face of aspiring entrants and ask, 'Would you let yourself in?' The exclusivity was not just to generate mystique: It also created a space where people on society's margins felt like they belonged. 'I remember Leigh in this insane Bart Simpson mask on roller skates, just bumping into everyone and screaming,' Boy George said in an email. 'He brought such anarchy and energy to every club or party.' Taboo closed after just one year when a tabloid newspaper ran an article about drug use in the club — but just like Bowery himself, the short run only served to cement the legend. Epic Looks Bowery grew up in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where he felt stifled by the conventions of his surroundings and would gaze longingly at magazine photos of Britain's New Wave and punk scenes. When he turned 18, he moved to London, adopted a British accent and set about infiltrating the city's gay party circuit. Though he started out making clothes for others, Bowery soon realized that he preferred to design for himself alone. 'Directing his own performance and being the star was a better fit for what he wanted to do,' his sister, Bronwyn Bowery, said recently by phone. While he didn't consider himself a drag queen, he was inspired by drag, combining high camp with high fashion. His huge figure — heavy set and a towering 6-foot-3 — only accentuated the impact of his outlandish looks. One of his design collaborators was the sequin expert Nicola Rainbird, who was Bowery's close friend and eventual wife. Though he was gay and, according to one biography, a lifelong devotee of anonymous public sex, Bowery married Rainbird a year before his death, in a ceremony he called 'a little private art performance.' For Bowery, makeup and clothing were not just cosmetic decoration, but tools for reinvention — and he reinvented himself often. He made outfits from whatever he could lay his hands on, including bobby pins, tennis balls, tuna tins and even meringues. Some of his best-remembered looks include colored glue dribbled down his bald head like a splattered egg, and giant polka dots covering not only his clothes, but also his face. Others on display in the Tate Modern show include a pink leather harness that secures flashing lightbulbs over the ears, and a sculptural white jacket that also obscures the wearer's face with a puffball of orange tulle. Fashion designers continue to reference Bowery today. In a 2015 show, Rick Owens sent models down the runway carrying other models in harnesses, which Owens admitted was 'totally ripped off' from a Bowery concept. A 2009 Alexander McQueen show painted models with Bowery's signature oversized lips. Gareth Pugh, Charles Jeffrey and Maison Margiela have all nodded to him in collections. Bowery's outré style has also influenced the high-concept looks of pop stars like Lady Gaga and a vast swath of contemporary drag queens — though George said something had been lost in the transition to the mainstream. 'When you see drag queens referencing Leigh on 'Drag Race,' it's gorgeous, but too polished,' George said. 'Leigh was very rough around the edges and he had the build of a rugby player — and was not dainty or fey.' That legacy also still plays out in many L.G.B.T.Q. clubs, which present the dance floor as not just a space for hedonism, but also for presenting elaborate looks, experimenting with gender and blurring the lines between performance and partying. It was nightlife impresario Susanne Bartsch who introduced Bowery to New York, inviting him to contribute clothes to a fashion show displaying the latest London fashions in 1983. (She also took him to Tokyo, where she said that he startled the prime minister of Japan by baring his bottom on the runway.) 'When he came in his look, everything stopped,' Bartsch said. 'You just wanted to see it again and again. His charisma, even when you couldn't see his face, oozed through all the pieces that he made.' Bowery would later return to New York as a performer, hosting Bartsch's 1991 Love Ball, which raised money for AIDS research, and influencing New York club kids like Michael Alig, Amanda Lepore and James St James. 'Leigh had a very special relationship with New York,' said the choreographer Michael Clark, 'he was particularly celebrated there. There was a whole gang of people ready for him there and he was embraced with open arms.' Clark first met Bowery in 1984, when he was bewitched by one of Bowery's outfits and followed him into a club bathroom to invite him to collaborate. Before long, Bowery was making provocative costumes, playing piano and dancing for Clark's contemporary dance company, until he and Clark fell out in 1992. By this time, Bowery was increasingly turning toward performance. In 1988, he presented himself as a living art installation at Anthony d'Offay Gallery in London for five days, posing behind a two-way mirror on a chaise longue in a series of his best-known looks. He also worked with the performance artist Marina Abramovic on a piece using 400 live rats titled 'Delusional,' which she has called 'the most insane work I have made to this day.' The Tate will show a video of Bowery's notorious 'Birthing' act, which he performed many times, including at the 1993 Wigstock drag festival in New York. There, he wore a bulging costume from which Rainbird, his wife, burst out like a newborn, covered in red gunk and with links of sausages as an umbilical cord. Bowery loved to provoke outrage, commenting after one particularly extreme show involving an onstage enema: 'If I have to ask, 'Is this idea too sick?' I know I am on the right track.' Bowery's sister said that his desire to shock was partly a response to his conservative upbringing in Australia. 'My parents encouraged us immensely to conform,' she said, 'but at the same time, we were told to stand out, so we were pretty confused. When someone wants you to conform because they don't accept who you are, you have a choice: You conform and you lose yourself, or you react.' 'Disco Monster Terrorist' 'Flesh is the most fabulous fabric,' Bowery once said, and the body's expressive potential is a through line in his work. Even for an artist strongly associated with clothing, some of Bowery's most enduring images show him completely nude. He began sitting for a series of portraits with the painter Lucian Freud in 1990, often posing for seven hours a day. When a show of Freud's work prominently featuring these paintings opened at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993, it represented the beginnings of a legitimacy in the fine art world that Bowery had long been seeking. Though Bowery was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1988, he only told Rainbird and his friend Sue Tilley, instructing them to explain his absence once he was gone with a characteristic quip: 'Tell them I've gone to Papua New Guinea.' He died on Dec. 31, 1994, of AIDS-related meningitis and pneumonia. In a biography of Bowery that Tilley published in 1998, she describes his final moments lying in hospital under an oxygen mask, hooked up to a tangle of tubes. 'It really was a fantastic look,' she writes, 'and if he had seen someone else with it, we were sure that he would have soon been wearing it to nightclubs.' Freud paid for Bowery's body to be sent back to Australia, where he was buried next to his mother. At the funeral, the grave had to be widened to fit his plus-size coffin. As in life, there was no conventional space big enough to accommodate Bowery. In a song about Bowery released the year after his death, Boy George lauded him as a 'disco monster terrorist, hanging in the Tate with Turner and van Gogh.' Three decades later, the Tate Modern show is placing Bowery in the artistic canon. In an interview, Rainbird reflected on how Bowery would feel about this moment: 'He'd be absolutely over the moon,' she said. 'He wanted to be famous and he knew he was a genius. He'd be very pleased that people were finally taking note.'
