‘Leigh Bowery!’ Depicts a Life Lived Outrageously

For over a decade, Leigh Bowery was an unmissable presence in London’s queer underground. Instantly recognizable thanks to his outlandish costumes and heavy make-up – which went way beyond drag, or the theatrical androgyny of the New Romantic scene of the early 1980s – he turned himself into a figure that was not so much transgender as trans-human. Later to become an artist, performer, musician, model, fashion designer and TV personality, Bowery arrived from Australia in 1980 and immediately began exploring the idea that ran throughout his life, and runs through Tate Modern’s retrospective: that he could turn himself into a work of art. Only occasionally was this concept made explicit – most notably in Dick Jewell’s film What’s Your Reaction to the Show? (1988), which captured the responses of people who saw Bowery on ‘display’ at Anthony d’Offay Gallery. This is one of many videos in Tate Modern’s celebration of Bowery, which charts the evolution of his style, career and profile through photographs, sketchbooks, diaries, postcards and the costumes he designed – either himself or with collaborators – from his teenage experiments to his untimely death from an AIDS-related illness in 1994, aged just 33.

Much of the exhibition consists of portraits of Bowery, which chart his rising prominence. The earliest are by London club friends such as Trojan, who died at 20; the latest are by Lucian Freud, whose striking paintings capture Bowery in his final months, with his nudity shocking not in itself but because it was so difficult to separate Bowery from his trademark ‘Looks’. ‘I don’t want to be a gender bender,’ Bowery told i-D magazine in April 1985. ‘Basically, I never want to look ordinary.’ In public, he never did, and the exhibition’s inclusion of private photographs of Bowery ‘off-stage’ with friends and family only serves to reinforce how much time and thought went into each outfit and performance. He may have frequently shocked people, at a time when the AIDS epidemic heightened the social reaction that came with Thatcher’s election, culminating in Section 28 (which banned local councils, who ran schools and libraries, from ‘promoting homosexuality’), passing in 1988, but the intent was (almost) never simply to outrage, nor just to express himself through his outfits – he wanted to be a living, breathing piece of art.

Bowery incorporated a huge range of influences into his aesthetic, from John Waters star Divine and the Alternative Miss World contests, to Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman, to science fiction and astrology, to the styles of East London’s Bangladeshi community. As Tate Modern’s wall texts point out, he appropriated uncritically, thoughtlessly using a racial slur to name a fashion collection and even blackface in a performance until friends told him to stop. More generally, the texts describe the materials used in many of his looks: Bowery had an artist’s sensibility, with each outfit forming a work even before it became part of a performance, either solo or with his band, Minty. This, and the litany of people and forms he worked with, appearing in Michael Clark’s choreographies and stage plays by experimental Argentinian dramatist Copi, bring much-needed variety into a show that might otherwise have become repetitive, although the inclusion of what feels like everything Bowery did and wore, and everyone he ever met, sometimes feels overwhelming.

There is a strong sense of Bowery’s outrageousness opening space for others to be transgressive – the more famous he became, the funnier it often was to see him out of his original context. He was perfectly suited to the MTV age, working with artist directors such as Charles Atlas, John Maybury or Cerith Wyn Evans, bringing high camp to videos for gnarly, menacing songs by The Fall, without his infinite variations on a theme suffering from the overexposure they would likely have had in the internet age. He worked well in the days before multi-channel TV too, when alternative figures occasionally crossed into the mainstream and viewers stumbled across them: millions would have seen his appearance on the BBC’s The Clothes Show in 1988. The thought of so many uninitiated people watching him strutting down a catwalk to Walk Like a Man (1988) by Divine, or having high tea in Harrods, seems very funny when the footage is seen amongst everything else – this was Bowery on his best behaviour, unlike the notorious AIDS benefit act where he had an enema and sprayed the audience with the water. Days into the ensuing furore, he wrote in his diary: ‘Hungover, depressed, full of regrets. No money.’

Bowery was a massive personality, and we see far more of the external manifestation of this than the internal – although we do get a sense of how his project was a coping mechanism during such a difficult time for London’s queer community. I find it hard to imagine how Bowery might have sustained this work if he had not died so young, and visiting an exhibition structured around such a huge absence is a jarring and, at times, sobering experience, given the unusual extent to which he was the art. Putting the evidence of it in a gallery testifies to the enormity of his presence and the singularity of his vision. Nothing can make up for the loss of such a unique talent, but perhaps this timely retrospective can inspire people – amidst yet another reactionary right-wing surge – to live life freely, creatively, defiantly.

‘Leigh Bowery!’ is on view at Tate Modern, London, until 31 August

_{Main image:  Fergus Greer, Leigh Bowery, Session 4, Look 17, 1991, C-type print. Courtesy: Michael Hoppen Gallery; photograph: © Fergus Greer}