For over a decade, Leigh Bowery was an unmissable presence in London’s queer underground. Immediately recognizable because of his outlandish costumes and heavy make-up – which went method past drag, or the theatrical androgyny of the New Romantic scene of the early Nineteen Eighties – he turned himself right into a determine that was not a lot transgender as trans-human. Later to grow to be an artist, performer, musician, mannequin, clothier and TV character, Bowery arrived from Australia in 1980 and instantly started exploring the concept ran all through his life, and runs by Tate Fashionable’s retrospective: that he might flip himself right into a murals. Solely often was this idea made express – most notably in Dick Jewell’s movie What’s Your Response to the Present? (1988), which captured the responses of people that noticed Bowery on ‘show’ at Anthony d’Offay Gallery. That is one among many movies in Tate Fashionable’s celebration of Bowery, which charts the evolution of his type, profession and profile by images, sketchbooks, diaries, postcards and the costumes he designed – both himself or with collaborators – from his teenage experiments to his premature dying from an AIDS-related sickness in 1994, aged simply 33.
A lot of the exhibition consists of portraits of Bowery, which chart his rising prominence. The earliest are by London membership buddies reminiscent of Trojan, who died at 20; the most recent are by Lucian Freud, whose putting work seize Bowery in his remaining months, together with his nudity stunning not in itself however as a result of it was so troublesome to separate Bowery from his trademark ‘Seems to be’. ‘I don’t need to be a gender bender,’ Bowery advised i-D journal in April 1985. ‘Mainly, I by no means need to look strange.’ In public, he by no means did, and the exhibition’s inclusion of personal images of Bowery ‘off-stage’ with family and friends solely serves to bolster how a lot time and thought went into every outfit and efficiency. He could have continuously shocked folks, at a time when the AIDS epidemic heightened the social response that got here with Thatcher’s election, culminating in Part 28 (which banned native councils, who ran faculties and libraries, from ‘selling homosexuality’), passing in 1988, however the intent was (nearly) by no means merely to outrage, nor simply to precise himself by his outfits – he wished to be a dwelling, respiration piece of artwork.
Bowery integrated an enormous vary of influences into his aesthetic, from John Waters star Divine and the Different Miss World contests, to Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman, to science fiction and astrology, to the types of East London’s Bangladeshi neighborhood. As Tate Fashionable’s wall texts level out, he appropriated uncritically, thoughtlessly utilizing a racial slur to call a style assortment and even blackface in a efficiency till buddies advised him to cease. Extra typically, the texts describe the supplies utilized in lots of his appears: Bowery had an artist’s sensibility, with every outfit forming a piece even earlier than it turned a part of a efficiency, both solo or together with his band, Minty. This, and the litany of individuals and types he labored with, showing in Michael Clark’s choreographies and stage performs by experimental Argentinian dramatist Copi, deliver much-needed selection right into a present which may in any other case have grow to be repetitive, though the inclusion of what seems like the whole lot Bowery did and wore, and everybody he ever met, typically feels overwhelming.
There’s a robust sense of Bowery’s outrageousness opening area for others to be transgressive – the extra well-known he turned, the funnier it typically was to see him out of his authentic context. He was completely suited to the MTV age, working with artist administrators reminiscent of Charles Atlas, John Maybury or Cerith Wyn Evans, bringing excessive camp to movies for gnarly, menacing songs by The Fall, with out his infinite variations on a theme affected by the overexposure they might seemingly have had within the web age. He labored nicely within the days earlier than multi-channel TV too, when different figures often crossed into the mainstream and viewers stumbled throughout them: thousands and thousands would have seen his look on the BBC’s The Garments Present in 1988. The considered so many uninitiated folks watching him strutting down a catwalk to Stroll Like a Man (1988) by Divine, or having excessive tea in Harrods, appears very humorous when the footage is seen amongst the whole lot else – this was Bowery on his finest behaviour, not like the infamous AIDS profit act the place he had an enema and sprayed the viewers with the water. Days into the following furore, he wrote in his diary: ‘Hungover, depressed, stuffed with regrets. No cash.’
Bowery was a large character, and we see much more of the exterior manifestation of this than the interior – though we do get a way of how his challenge was a coping mechanism throughout such a troublesome time for London’s queer neighborhood. I discover it arduous to think about how Bowery may need sustained this work if he had not died so younger, and visiting an exhibition structured round such an enormous absence is a jarring and, at instances, sobering expertise, given the bizarre extent to which he was the artwork. Placing the proof of it in a gallery testifies to the enormity of his presence and the singularity of his imaginative and prescient. Nothing could make up for the lack of such a novel expertise, however maybe this well timed retrospective can encourage folks – amidst yet one more reactionary right-wing surge – to stay life freely, creatively, defiantly.
‘Leigh Bowery!’ is on view at Tate Fashionable, London, till 31 August
Important picture: Fergus Greer, Leigh Bowery, Session 4, Look 17, 1991, C-type print. Courtesy: Michael Hoppen Gallery; {photograph}: © Fergus Greer
