Fashion icon, model, club promoter, musician; Leigh Bowery was a multi-hyphenate before multi-hyphenate became a thing. But above all else, he was a muse, as the Tate Modern’s extensive new exhibition tracing the Melbourne native’s life and legacy does an excellent job of portraying.
Starting with his arrival onto London’s New Romantic scene in 1980, we’re whisked through Bowery’s many different eras in loose chronological order, from his early days as a club promoter for the short-lived but influential Taboo, through to his later practice as a performance artist, clothes designer and life model for Lucian Freud.
Re-invention was what Bowery stood for, and the Tate does a great attempt of categorising his many selves, from the walls (the first section is plastered in the Star Trek wallpaper from his home, the next his favoured polka-dot motif, and so on), to the clothes, video clips and portraits on display, which grow ever more out-there as Bowery gained confidence in his craft and voice with each year he lived in London. In the final room, beautiful blown-up fashion photographs show him literally shape-shifting, wrapping and warping his flesh like a sculptor working the wheel.
Photos show him literally shape-shifting, wrapping and warping his flesh like a sculptor
In the curator’s tour, we’re told that this exhibition could have been called ‘Leigh Bowery and Friends’ and perhaps that would have been more appropriate: the Bowery on show here wouldn’t exist without collaboration, and figures and friends such as Princess Julia and Boy George consistently pop up as reminders of the artistic community which he was a part of.
Despite the increasing conservatism of Britain under Margaret Thatcher, Bowery’s London was dynamic, queer and outrageous: it was a creative bubbling pot, and he took his inspiration from everywhere, like the Indian and Pakistani communities he had as neighbours when he lived in the east of the city to sweat-drenched underground parties like Cha Cha Cha, Jungle and Limelight, catalogued in the nightlife sections of a thriving magazine ecosystem via publications like Time Out, The Face and i-D.
Above all else, Bowery was an eccentric, and sometimes he took things to the extreme – one artwork, ‘Look: A Cunt’, is his celebration of the vagina in clothes form – as well as the uncomfortable, like his posing in blackface, performing as a dominatrix Nazi and accidentally spraying the audience with water from his anus during an AIDs benefit at The Fridge in Brixton (he later described it as ‘a real stinker of a show’)
There’s a lot going on in this exhibition, and sometimes it’s hard to identify exactly what point, if any, is being made about Bowery’s cultural impact. But maybe that is the point: it’s not quantifiable. It is vast, dynamic; a testament to London’s creative community and a vision of a true artist who was not afraid of pushing the limits.
