Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is a bizarre proposition on so many levels. Its subject, the Australian designer, performer, provocateur and club scenester Leigh Bowery, was by all accounts inescapable in London for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Standing at well over 6ft and weighing 17st, he would have been a conspicuous presence on the capital’s streets even had he not adopted the berserk sci-fi drag attire that became his signature aesthetic. He appeared on TV, at Sadler’s Wells and in a ponderous suite of portraits by Lucian Freud. His life could be read as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, but he was not an artist in any conventional sense and there’s no explicit evidence here to suggest he ever identified as such. Tate Modern gets around this by effectively launching the event with a disclaimer: this is not so much an art exhibition, its introductory caption implies, as ‘a journey into a dynamic creative scene’.
Annoying as that formulation might be, the show is a blast, an often context-defying sensory overload of sound, vision and glitter. We’re introduced to our hero with a vitrine containing all manner of random ephemera: childhood photos, his college diploma, even a bus pass from which a tousle-haired, makeup-free Bowery meets your gaze with a gormless stare. Raised in a conservative Melbourne suburb, he expatriated himself at the first opportunity and arrived in London in October 1980, aged 19, with an itchy desire to make his life as interesting as possible. He was just in time to witness the emergence of a new subculture then crystallising in the city’s gay clubs, at which he soon became a regular and ultimately a celebrity figurehead, inaugurating his own night, Taboo, in 1985.
The register of this new club culture was bitchy and grandiose, the style maximalist glam, heavy on mascara, feathers and gaudy colours. Bowery began making his own clothes, creating ludicrous dresses from cheap fabrics picked up in Banglatown textile shops. We see replicas of his long-since trashed handiwork throughout – a reflective, silvery frock embellished with big, Warholish flowers, a fringed number in pink and silver sequins, an outfit involving a trailing silk cape and orange satin loon pants. Almost all of these ‘looks’ came complete with Bowery’s favoured style of headgear, a kind of face-enveloping balaclava pitched somewhere between bondage hood and Mexican wrestling mask. The objective, if it wasn’t obvious, was to become unignorable.
The show is an often context-defying sensory overload of sound, vision and glitter
Bowery’s world is channelled with some imaginative and borderline-unhinged exhibition design. One gallery is wrapped in the home-made Star Trek wallpaper with which Bowery decorated his Stepney council flat, another in mirrored polka dots. There’s footage of 1980s clubbers projected on to a chainmail mesh hanging from the ceiling and a clashing soundtrack of disco, house, Boy George and the Fall. Even the entrance doors are framed by fish scale-silver wallpaper. It all adds to the sense that the Tate is responding to an apparent public demand for immersive cultural ‘experiences’, and actually excusing itself rather well.
The actual exhibits feel like an afterthought. There are photos of nights out, films of the performances Bowery staged with the choreographer Michael Clark, posters, correspondence, scandalised tabloid clippings (‘I saw Wham! star sniff danger drug, says club boss’), a room devoted to snaps of Bowery out of costume, including one in which he moons to the camera through a hole in a Barbara Hepworth sculpture. There’s even some pieces that you could unambiguously describe as art: a number of those Freud portraits, depicting Bowery naked, his bulk exaggerated to colossal proportions; an early Peter Doig drawing inspired by a night out at Taboo.
Bowery comes across sympathetically, a charming presence with a neat line in Antipodean self-deprecation
There’s not much in the way of narrative development: even Bowery’s death from an Aids-related illness on New Year’s Eve 1994 is announced dutifully, an unavoidable biographical detail momentarily interrupting the surrounding spectacle. Indeed, the closest we get to a dramatic climax comes with Jeffrey Hinton’s photo-documentation of a notorious performance at Brixton’s Fridge venue on Valentine’s day 1990, for which Bowery gave himself an enema and sprayed the contents straight into the front row. Accounts vary as to whether this was by accident or by design – Tate’s captions go with the former – but it wasn’t a good look. Even Bowery acknowledged it as ‘a real stinker of a show’.
That episode aside, Bowery himself comes across sympathetically, a charming presence with a neat line in Antipodean self-deprecation. The joke, he said, was always on him. ‘I’m laughing at the way I’m dressing myself,’ he once admitted. ‘What possible criticism can people make, really?’ I’m with him on this one: as the Tate warned, what we’ve seen doesn’t make any sense as a pedagogical exhibition. But as a picture of a particular, outlandish cultural moment it is evocative and entertaining – a triumph of style over substance, perhaps, but one of which Leigh Bowery would undoubtedly have approved.
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