A blast: Leigh Bowery!, at Tate Modern, reviewed

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’.

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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.