About Me
THE GOD OF ODD
Leigh Bowery first came to public attention as a leading light of the early '80s London club scene. By the time the boy from Sunshine, Victoria, arrived in London in 1980, Punk had petered out to be followed by the Cult With No Name.Bowery described his attraction to the New Romantics. "It was like Punk but maybe it wasn't so aggressive," he said. "It was completely theatrical in a way, the very opposite of what you were expected to look like on the street. It was confrontational, and there was this sort of gender blurring."In 1985, Bowery was offered his own nightclub, and so Taboo was born just off Leicester Square. Mine host Bowery and best friend Trojan Name tottered about the premises in anything from baby-doll nighties, elephant ear collared 1970s disco shirts, kilts with frilly underwear, blouses and tights, above multi-coloured patent leather platform-soled shoes.To top off the look, Bowery took to extremes of makeup, wigs and hats, from a curly yellow-blonde coiffure with face painted in huge red polka dots, to a tiny policeman's helmet perched above a face made up to resemble a herpes scab infestation. Making the most of his very oversize girth and height, Bowery then shaved his head, poured black molten wax over it, wore two-inch white false eyelashes, and painted his face and cheeks in grotesque imitation of a kewpie doll.Bowery had become a walking cartoon parody of humanity, two dimensions inflated into three in the midst of a chaotic drug-soaked decadence. After the OD deaths of flatmate Trojan and another famous Taboo identity, and the subsequent demise of the club itself, Bowery diverted his energies into the arena of live performance with live music and dance.In the latter part of the 1980s, he began collaborating with the post-Punk ballet dancer Michael Clark, becoming a moveable member of his company after having designed the costumes for several years. Most notably, Bowery took part in multi-media extravaganzas like I Am Curious, Orange, and Hey, Luciani, featuring Mark E. Smith's band The Fall.Bowery explained his move away from clubland: "Michael liked the idea of how some movements and shapes looked on an untrained body, I didn't have a classical dance background, and I was very open and eager. I began doing more performance rather than just the look of things, spending more time on the context in which the look is placed." Just then, for later that November, Bowery was anticipating a return to live multi-media shows with a week-long residency at an upstairs club in Wardour Street, Soho.On the poorly attended first night, which Bowery regarded as more a dress rehearsal than actual show, officials of the Westminster City Council were in attendance. They may have been prompted to do so by reports of an earlier stage show where Bowery ran around spraying the results of a self-administered enema onto his audience. The Soho performance was closed that first night, pending legal proceedings.Bowery was inducted into the mainstream art world in the late 1980s via the most prestigious contemporary London art space, the Anthony d'Offay gallery, off New Bond Street. In a performance piece over several days, Bowery sat, preened and posed into a two-way mirror lit only on his side so he could see just his own reflection, not the audience.He wore a succession of costumes, wigs and makeup effects, attempting to become woman, child, cat-like animal, blue-skinned Hindu god/goddess, at least on the mirror's surface. It was a slow-moving study in purest narcissism. One regular visitor fascinated by this spectacle was the painter Lucian Freud.Shortly thereafter, the Pepe jeans company invited Bowery to appear in a series of cinema and TV commercials. In a Post-Modernist/Surrealist cut-up, he posed, and repeatedly posed the question of "Wears Pepe?" in a sound-effected trill. Suddenly General Public knew who and what Bowery was.This widespread recognition was further enhanced when he agreed to pose naked for Freud, who after the death of Francis Bacon, was being proclaimed the foremost English figurative painter. Bowery told me that he had "always liked Lucian's work and his subject matter, the way he uses the human form - very psychological and very majestic - and kind of worn out in the way people come out."Freud showed his last painting of Bowery as a towering and entirely naked figure in full frontal, showing evidence of strain on his face, in a memorial exhibition on Bowery's life and work late January.One reviewer wrote of Leigh Under The Skylight: "Certainly there is something increasingly brutish about this Freudian nudity. I would advise little girls and old ladies of a nervous disposition who have wandered into the gallery expecting Van Dyck and Gainsborough not to look up at Freud's naked behemoth too attentively. His sole pictorial task is to show it like it is, to appear large and lumpen."Bowery discussed his work with the professional ingenuousness of those artists who prefer more attention be paid to the artwork than the reasons for its making. He would stymie interviewers with bald statements that he was merely interested in this, or excited by that. Even his old collaborator and new wife Nicola was as much in the dark about his real intentions as she was about his HIV status.Put Bowery's imagery together with the facts of his immense physique, sexuality and huge sexual appetite (he admitted before his death that his biggest regret was "having unsafe sex with 1000 men"), and his work becomes a demonstrative monologue on the conflict between how our bodies are and how we believe them to be. The further western society grows away from easy intimacy with the natural world, in search of a totally artificial environment, the more anti-nature (or Au Rebours, to cite the title of Bowery's favourite book) it becomes.Attesting to how much we have chosen to live inside our fantasies rather than deal with the facts of the Real, the vast majority of Bowery's "looks" were about delicacy and extreme femininity. Yet, as Freud's portraits show, he was tall, bald, fat and had legs like tree trunks.Although he could never be described as light on his feet, Bowery hatched the idea of being a ballet dancer. And, this man who never failed to attract attention to himself whether in performance drag or not, sincerely believed that he stood out on the street just as little as anyone else.As a completely "out" homosexual, Bowery chose to ignore the facts of his own gender and the construction of the male body, to use an organ formed for the expulsion of faecal matter as stand-in for an organ of procreation. That his work was about contradiction, outrage, challenging the idea of the normal, surely stemmed from this fundamental and original conflict.Like many other homosexuals, Bowery turned to fashion early in his career and this allowed him to play with cloaking the facts of his maleness with a fantasy femaleness, a second and removeable skin of fabric, feathers, glitter and extreme colouration.Given how loudly Bowery's masculinity broadcast itself even from his younger days, those early attempts at dressing up must have looked ridiculous, even absurd, leaving him the choice of either accepting his gender unvarnished, or to deny it through costume and makeup.Being an essentially honest man, as I believe he was, Bowery chose to shout out loud his homosexuality, and out of this he made a life and a body of work that could never belong to any other period than the 1980s and any other place than London. Those inspired by his example, such as the late Peter Tully of Sydney, simply appeared somewhat tragic by comparison. Leigh Bowery was the groundbreaker and sole true owner of the Leigh Bowery tradition.He died in a London hospital in the early hours of New Year's Eve, 1994, of pneumonia and the side effects from antibiotics prescribed for a previous bout with meningitis. Bowery left a wife, Nicola, and he was HIV positive.
