Leigh Bowery's Immaculate Conception

In London, by 1975, there was a sense that pop and fashion could meet to express the body and make it legible in a way that hadn't been seen before. Earlier in the decade, David Bowie's presentation of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars had opened up the possibilities of pop as shocking theatre; an attitude was being acted out and costume and cosmetics were a vital part. Ziggy Stardust brought the future to the present, introducing speed and anxiety to a rock culture which, for the most part, had seen drugs that slowed you down and feel-good romance - or quasi-mystical fantasy - as the basis of its language.

Like Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange, Ziggy Stardust was a character from the near future who marked a gear-change in British culture. In Bowie's performances from that time, and in the depiction of Alex and his droogs in Kubrick's film, bodies were transformed in such a way - a reversed false eyelash on the lower lid, orange hair and shaved eyebrows - that they became articulate as opposed to merely strange or impressive. Unlike earlier youth cultures, from Teddy Boys through Mods and Hippies, these new images were divorced from any sense of history - they didn't pun on earlier fashions - and could be seen as dangerously transgressive. Messages of violence, alienation, accelerated society and sexual ambiguity were being mainlined into British society, and the vast audience for these messages acted out their response by copying the costumes. Informed by new rock'n'roll derived from The New York Dolls, The Stooges and The Velvet Underground, and stylised by Bowie and futuristic boot-boys, the body could communicate a readily understood meaning. Most importantly, all of this activity took place outside of a 'performance art' context: this was happening on the street.

While these new pop trends were sudden and shocking in terms of fashion, their intentions and philosophy had been rehearsed by European writers and activists earlier in the century. Jean Genet talked about the 'legibility' of the body in his descriptions of low-life, transvestites and convicts in the semi-autobiographical novel The Thief's Journal: '...for I refuse to live for any other end than the very one which I found to contain the first misfortune: that my life must be a legend, that is, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry. I am no longer anything, only a pretext.' Genet's reversal of aesthetic values - turning murderers into aristocrats and saints; traitors, pimps and prostitutes into semi-divine beings, living on an exalted plane of experience - can be seen as the basis of an extreme romanticism. Within Genet's romanticism, private rituals of sex and degradation are turned into public exhibitions - through fiction, drama and poetry - in which Genet is both the voyeur and the exhibitionist. Throughout his fiction, Genet hymned bodily functions: shitting, pissing, fucking and oral sex. For him, these acts were rituals and sacred entertainments which consolidated a position of revolt. Genet wanted to loathe France, despise the cultural establishment and reserve his love (or his poetry) for the violated bodies of transvestite prostitutes and the he-men who beat them up. Genet's aesthetic, like the 'aesthetic' of A Clockwork Orange, blurred the distinctions between beauty and horror.

In the mid 70s, the Lindsay Kemp Company brought their productions of Flowers and Salome to The Roundhouse in London. Flowers was a celebration of Jean Genet's fiction with a narrative loosely based on his novel Our Lady Of The Flowers. David Bowie had worked with Kemp for the mime and choreography of his own performances, and Flowers and Salome were both fashionable and significant in the pop aesthetic which was building up to punk rock. Once more, this was a cultural event which took place outside of the gallery system and the art establishment; the audience for these performances was a proto-punk mix of people interested in pop, fashion, politics or art, but with no common agenda. Kemp and his artists - most notably The Incredible Orlando, whose blindness made his presence mesmeric - translated Genet's vision into theatre by means of heavy make-up, prosthetics, costume and bejewelment. Their productions lay outside of mere fashionableness, but were a vital statement about, and celebration of, the body as a medium in its own right. By presenting the work of Genet and Wilde, and later, Lorca, The Lindsay Kemp Company were continuing a predominantly homosexual aesthetic which could be read as personal, erotic, transgressive, or simply as spectacle. Their intention was not to shock but to amaze; to turn a world of erotic fantasy and sado-masochistic romance into amoral theatre. Any 'meaning' that the performances might have contained, political or otherwise, was written into the production of the mime, and more directly, the treatment of the body within that mime.

Leigh Bowery was drawn to London by punk rock, which in 1976 had reacted against fashion, media, art and pop to create its own language of revolt and transgression. Aside from the tremendous notoriety of The Sex Pistols, The Vibrators and The Clash, there was a burgeoning club scene which would quickly extend the boundaries of punk into hitherto white space on the cultural map. Punk was a possibility, as much as anything, and the metaphors of violence, artifice and transvestism which had already surfaced in the proto-punk theatre of Bowie and Kemp could be taken up by anyone and quickly extended through music, street-dressing or simply by going out. Punk fashion, beyond the high fashion of SEX and Seditionaries, was home-made and distinguished by its intentions. For Bowery, coming from Australia, going out could become an art form in its own right.

From the beginning of his public reputation, Bowery made personal statements which were only articulate through the medium of the body. In short, Bowery's aesthetic had the effect of taking the extravagant costuming and make-up of Kemp's Flowers and wearing them on the tube, or in the supermarket. This was art beyond the gallery, made possible by punk but unconnected to any single fashion or trend. Certainly, in fine art terms, there was nothing to compare with it; the nearest comparison would be Warhol's superstars, but Bowery has exchanged the traditions of simple drag for a personal surrealism.

Bowery's costuming and make-up has usually taken the form of extending his appearance to a limit which would be unacceptable - and inaccessible - to the imagination of fashion. He has made use of images - heavy bright spots beneath a blonde perm, or blue ink dripping down the sides of a white skull cap - which are cartoon-like and absurd in themselves, and worn them as personal fashion. Thus his outfits are unique to his ideas. The results can be grotesque or disarmingly pretty, but they never correspond to any orthodoxy already apparent in pop, fashion or art.

In the early 80s, with a revival of interest in the 'transgressive' writings of Georges Bataille, a group of writers, performers and filmmakers were brought together by Paul Buck to create three evenings of 'celebration' at The Bloomsbury Theatre, London, entitled 'Violence Silence'. Inevitably, some of these readings and performances were devoted to considerations of sexual and satanic ritual, coarsely interpreting Bataille's investigations of the relationship between literature and evil. Genesis P. Orridge and his performances with COUM in the 70s had already presented sexual acts as public performances, and by the time of 'Violence Silence', the intellectual underpinning of such work had been fully rehearsed. As with Ziggy Stardust, A Clockwork Orange, Flowers and proto-punk fashion, one can see in the championing of Bataille by London-based artists and filmmakers a continuation of the aesthetic which seems to have informed Bowery. It is a self-proclaimed underground culture, existing on a cusp between performance art and fashionable club culture, yet it is wholly immovable from its opposition of orthodoxy. Bowery distrusts the reported interview, yet it is fair to paraphrase his belief that words such as 'shocking' or 'beautiful' hold no meaning for him; he does not think or create in those terms. The lateral connection between the artists contributing to 'Violent Silence', the infamous 'Anti Art' show held in Camden Town and the early performances of Michael Clark can be seen as being embodied in the informal appearances of Leigh Bowery as an underground social celebrity. Unconnected to a specific medium, venue or gallery, Bowery could inject the luridly vivid power of his created presence as a kind of alternative muse - a zeitgeist made real - to the pop artistic activity of the time.

Around this time there were fewer figures more fashionable than Bowery in terms of his post-modern collage of media and intentions, but he remained firmly outside of fashion itself. He was feted and demanded by artists and designers as a presiding genius: the success of Clark's groundbreaking ballets was due in part to Bowery's presence, as were the designs of Body Map. Bowery worked on the extreme edge of self-expression, making himself as relevant to Culture Club's soft pop as to the sexual politics of Clark's work. There was always an element of clumsiness in Bowery's appearances - a reference to the traditional drag parody of sluttish or matronly dignity, used by pantomime dames as much as Lily Savage or Hinge and Bracket. This quality of vulgar femininity (or vulgarised femininity) was made genuinely transsexual by many of Bowery's outfits. Unlike the late Divine, who was modelled on a grotesque American matron, Bowery became an hermaphrodite character whose sexuality was either lobotomised or masked. As a sign, his body was singular.

The mid-80s saw Bowery's first involvement with the work of Mark E. Smith and The Fall. Smith, like Bowery, is an artist who works outside of fashionability to the point that he is never fashionable yet always in fashion. Smith's play, Hey Luciani!, was premiered at The Riverside Studios in 1987, and featured Bowery as a papal figure. Hey Luciani! was based loosely on the five days between the election and death of Pope John Paul I and showcased new songs from The Fall's Bend Sinister LP, while merging Smith's fractured prose with performance and film. Smith's language of grotesque comedy, personal polemic and vicious satire was perfectly suited to Bowery's persona as a kind of free-floating allegorical figure, and as a marriage of sensibilities the play was a success. In 1988, when Bowery performed with Michael Clark in Smith's I Am Kurious, Oranj the increased professionalism of the production lost the rough edges which had made Hey Luciani! more engaging. Now regarded as a member of Michael Clark's company, Bowery was clearly uncomfortable with the more formal, high art productions which Clark's increasing celebrity commanded. The old fate of an underground which becomes merely fashionable seemed to lie in wait by the end of the 80s. Both Smith and Bowery drew strength from being on the outside at a time when fashionable pop society wanted them to become insiders' insiders.

Increasingly famous as a prime candidate for Sunday supplement questionnaires and 'guest appearances' on fashion catwalks, Bowery's real work was being produced in clubs such as Taboo at Leicester Square's Maximus. Returned to the limitless, non-art medium of the 'art of going out', Bowery could recreate his appearance and his 'performance' according to his own chosen milieu. Interestingly, his performances at the Anthony d'Offay gallery were little more than extensions of his own ritual of studying himself in the mirror. By partitioning the gallery with a one way mirror, thus allowing the viewers to watch Bowery looking at himself, Bowery was having the last laugh at the expense of formal art. Like Warhol's appearances in a glass-fronted cubicle, his performances involved nothing more than 'being himself'. There could be no possible 'art dialogue' between Bowery and his audience: it was like a conversation between people who have no common language. Bowery was a 'phenomenon' - a self-reflecting signifier of a particular state of mind. By painting make-up on to gauze masks, using prosthetics and piercing, Bowery can turn himself into a character who explores, clumsily or stubbornly, his own desires and fetishes. To paraphrase once more, he will always be interested in presenting private sexual or bodily rituals as entertainment.

The culmination of Bowery's career to date is his work with his pop group, Minty. Musically, Minty have been compared to Magazine and Wayne County, but for the generations who missed punk rock those references will matter less than the group's utter dissimilarity to prevalent techno or indie guitar rock. Minty have the trash aesthetic of some early punk, developing their songs and their performance with each of their rare live appearances. At present, Minty are an underground group, but legends about the context of their shows are already proliferating. And the extreme contents of these legends have a basis in fact: most famously, Bowery gives birth to a blood and excrement covered woman, on stage, before vomiting in her mouth and giving her a cup of his urine to drink. In another piece, Bowery mimes coprophilia, his mouth smeared as he sings 'only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate...' Ultimately, Bowery would like to perform with Minty on Top Of The Pops.

Hopefully, Minty will not become this year's Sigue Sigue Sputnik: Pop has had ample time to weary of extreme and excessive performances, and tends to be cynical about what could be termed 'outsider' performance. Historically, however, Minty are well placed to find an audience amongst younger pop consumers who delight in the theatricality of Suede and will find that the sheer spectacle of Bowery's performances offers them a unique engagement with targeted punk cabaret. Disconnected from pop history and the challenge which one pop era throws down to another, Minty can be seen as both continuing a tradition which runs from David Bowie to Throbbing Gristle - and developing that tradition for a new audience. Bowery's involvement with pop owes more to The Sex Pistols than it does to Pop Art performance groups such as John Maybury's Max. There is always humour in Bowery's presentation, as well as an uncompromising idea of what art is or may be. Success, for Leigh Bowery, is little more than an occupational hazard.