Otherwise known as Leigh Bowery! Almost fourteen years after he arrived in the UK from Australia, in 1994 Bowery recited the above lyrics at the indie club night Smashing Live in London, for the first official outing of his new band Minty. Appearing in a more conventional ‘Look’ than his earlier club years, he wore a green velvet skirt-suit coupled with a red wig and a face made up with makeup daubed over a pair of tights. After repeating the words ‘Useless Man’ multiple times, the performance culminated with him lying back on a table, flailing his legs and groaning as designer Nicola Rainbird burst through a Velcro opening in the crotch of his unitard, naked, painted red, with a string of sausages around her neck as an umbilical cord. It was the perfect climax to a performance that signalled a rebirth for Bowery.
Bowery had formed Minty with designer-turned-musician Richard Torry, and then added members for the live show, with ‘Useless Man’ selected as the first single. The lyrical structure appropriated a Pepsi Cola advertisement slogan that went:
Lip smacking, thirst quenching, ace tasting, motivating, cool buzzing, high talking, fast living, ever giving, cool fizzing – Pepsi!
Bowery’s reimagining of the satisfaction of a fizzy drink as an inventory of sexual gestures, was written to honour the lesbians he witnessed fisting gay men at the S&M club night Fist, taking place at The Fridge in Brixton, south London. Against a social and political background of the AIDS epidemic and crackdowns on ‘illicit sex’ and ‘pornography’, Bowery’s performative birth scene foregrounded the abject messiness of the body in a gender play that dissolved the boundaries between the internal and external realms. Bowery suggested you can birth ideas, birth art, birth a world. In many respects, the theatrical staging of reproduction and ‘uselessness’ dramatised the way the queer community, club culture, and performance art, had often been seen as ‘useless’ to a heteronormative society and capitalist economy. Bowery performed uselessness, but he always saw the use value in his work, stating:
I guess I’ve been working for six years fairly solidly. Five or six nights a week. Three or four clubs a night. That’s quite a lot of labour, and that’s not including the time it takes to prepare myself.
18. PP Hartnett – Leigh Bowery Polaroid
Blurring the lines between work and play, human and alien, decadence and horror, Bowery refused classification, once stating ‘If you label me, you negate me’. In his lifetime he was variously described as a fashion designer, club monster, professional dandy, vaudeville drunkard, pop surrealist, human sculpture, guru without a sect, clown without a circus, piece of moving furniture, modern art on legs, monument of our times. One constant, however, was his fascination with the body, which he used as both an object and a site of performance, once having students come ‘dressed as a house’ (no cardboard boxes allowed) when teaching at the Architecture Association. For Bowery, the body was a ready-made architecture, and he used it to challenge the pregiven structures of society. Any environment could become his stage – be it a catwalk, a club, a TV show, a gallery or the outside – and any passers-by his potential audience.
Extracted from Fiontán Moran’s essay Inverse Reverse Perverse published in Leigh Bowery! via Tate Publishing, February 2025; Paperback £30, Hardback £40. The full catalogue will be available at the end of February 2025 to coincide with the opening of ‘Leigh Bowery!’ at the Tate Modern.
