Ethan Price reflects on what the legendary Leigh Bowery would have made of his grand retrospective and the ultimate party thrown in his honour at Tate Modern.
Decked out in a sleeveless pink satin doublet, a ridiculous ostrich feather ruff, and painted face, dancer and choreographer Michael Clark careens through blue, then black, space, brandishing a sunflower in place of a sword. Pout furrowed, he prepares for war. The colossal, plump face of Leigh Bowery – all clown-like with overdrawn red lips and black panda eyes – hurtles into frame, sweetly unfurls his tongue, and gobbles up the tiny Clark. It is a sequence I have seen countless times, though repetition has not dulled this excerpt from the Charles Atlas film Because We Must (1989). Nothing in the Tate Modern’s sublime retrospective of Leigh Bowery’s work and life could ever be dulled. A biography seems unnecessary, the name alone speaks volumes. Whip up, seduce, repel. Bowery is still unparalleled in his ability to drop jaws.
Bowery’s mythical five days behind glass performing at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, is where I will begin. The glass of 1988 was an enormous two-way mirror; the audience could see Bowery, but the artist could only see his own reflection. Twisting and preening on a chaise lounge, Bowery presented a selection of his outfits: creations bizarre, seemingly raided from alien wardrobes. Despite the attention-seeking looks and torturous manipulations of the flesh, it has always felt like Bowery’s art was actually about examining those around him – or him examining you examining him.
In the Dick Jewell film that recorded viewers’ reactions to the d’Offay show, Brix Smith beams: “It’s like a really cool zoo.” Many of the voyeurs would have seen Bowery as the caged animal. In fact, he turned the audience into the zoo. With a stare that could rupture glass, even when laced with comedy, he was the one in control as he posed behind that two-way mirror. His performance, his life, showed the public the cage they had created for themselves, reminding them: You are scared, trapped little animals; within this confine I couldn’t be more free. There was nothing on the other side of the glass that could beat him at his game. As Michael Bracewell has written, Bowery was “having the last laugh at the expense of formal art.”
Bowery, by all accounts, seemed vitally and eminently in touch with the world. Rubbing against the grease of reality with joy, the friction he created left behind a residue of fantasy. Self-fascinated, he was the centre of his world. Being looked upon was intrinsic to his art – looking out was secondary. The attendees of the opening night and day of the exhibition, simply and perfectly titled Leigh Bowery! were once again the voyeurs, the animals at the zoo, and he the party boy, party thing, party monster. I wonder what the legendary Leigh Bowery would have thought of this ultimate party, held in his honour. Pretty stuffy? Pretty dreary? Not enough human fluids, not enough debased gossip, perhaps. Let’s take a trip to the zoo.
“Yeh, yeh, I saw that exhibition… but where’s the poison?” Here, Cerith Wyn Evans quotes Bowery in the Atlas documentary, The Legend of Leigh Bowery (2002). And so, I went on the hunt for some poison – in the space, in the work, in the people. Bowery’s mischievous high camp, a sort of technicolour macabre, rubs off on the visitors. Swilling wine dregs, I overheard one man say: “Alcohol is my poison of choice, but I love people that are injecting things.”
The piss-excrement-yellow hued “Street: Hardcore Normcore” room exhibits the day-time version of Bowery, complete with holiday snaps, postcards, and letters written by Bowery to friends (“Find enclosed a well-handled five-pound bank note, which before placing in this envelope I tightly wrapped around my hot, throbbing veiny banana” and “I’m lonely. You rotten bitch. Mummy I’m thirsty. Fuck off cow. I need you. You stink!”). In the centre of the room are a pair of shoes Bowery would wear to, I suppose, pop to the shops: clogs with high heels inserted in order to exaggerate his already imposing size. Given plenty of air away from the rest of the room’s work, they become static and surrealist, recalling a bronze sculpture. Ridiculous yet somehow sad.
Bowery’s daywear look, though mild compared to his club outfits, was nevertheless perverted. Mangey grey-blonde wigs covered his bald pate, unflattering drab overcoats and beige turtlenecks, the looks seem to mock the way ordinary nine-to-fivers dressed. (I wonder what he would have parodied about some of the attendees’ outfits). Despite his cherubic face, you’d be uncomfortable in a post office queue with him, let alone a dark alley. The show’s curator, Fiontán Moran, consciously chose this room for day-Bowery as it’s the one in which the toilet is located, referencing Bowery’s enthusiasm for cottaging (cruising in such outfits!). Affixed to the facilities’ door is a photo of Bowery posing next to an Amsterdam pissoir. Similar small curatorial touches littered throughout the show allow Bowery’s humour to survive the sometimes-nullifying restrictions of a public institution. It’s a relief. The room’s display creates a dirty atmosphere; I was chatted up twice by men double my age (good for them). And yes, I did use the loo – though unfortunately, nothing saucy was happening in there. If Bowery was alive, I imagine he would be holding court at the urinals, making the tiniest room in the show the place to be.
Usually, a mirror used in an exhibition is just a dreadful gimmick – a blatant opportunity to gain traction on social media via the relentlessly vain (there’s almost always one piece of mirror-masquerading-as-art in these major shows). The gimmick worked, and the most ostentatious types beelined for the mirror in the first room, ignoring anything around but their own image. However, in this show – maybe the only show I’ve seen with a mirror that isn’t an artwork in itself – the mirror makes complete sense. Affixed with a quote from the doorman of the nightclub Taboo – “Would you let yourself in?” – it worked as a way to interrogate the audience, to directly ask the viewer: are you living up to all you can be? Style is a weapon – what have you got in your ammunition? Shoot! To the man wearing a rip-off Bowery (a denim jacket covered in hair pins as tassels): not fabulous. Originality is key! Bowery was notoriously against copycats, refraining from making sellable collections and avoiding the tube so that the casual commuter wouldn’t nick any style tips.
At the morning preview, Catherine Wood, Tate Modern’s director, said that “the exhibition could be called Leigh Bowery and Friends.” It is because of the inclusion of art made by Bowery’s contemporaries that the show feels so energetic and rich. Instead of endless Bowery-costumed mannequins, there is a documentation of many subversive lives, whose art and hedonism was a retaliation against Thatcher-choked Britain and Section 28. Here was some more poison: the poison of bigotry, and the work trying to purge it out of the system. In John Maybury’s film, The Union Jacking It Up (1985), the viewer is shown a kaleidoscope of flames and boys. Recordings of Trojan, Clark, Bowery and friends are layered with footage of the Brixton and Toxteth riots, shots of early AIDS newspaper headlines, wordplay, and phrases (“BLOOD CHEEK” flashes up, quickly replaced with “BLOODY CHEEK”). Though the film is gorgeous, the colours garish and vibrant, what is at work below the surface is something violent, an aggressive pain. Rivulets of this pain run through the entire show, no matter how gaudy the surface. Elsewhere, a collage work by Stephen Willats, Are you good enough for the Cha Cha? (1982), assembles disco detritus, photos, and written statements from partygoers, revealing how uncomfortable they felt in the daytime, surrounded by people that would mock or attack them for their outfits, sexuality, or gender play. Maybury has said Jacking It Up was “about London, and the way things are in London.” This could be said for the majority of the works in the show. It feels highly pertinent in 2025. In a room displaying an affective and cheeky new video installation by Jeffrey Hinton, footage is projected through a chain curtain, creating the shadowy, sneaky forms of a nightclub. On the ceiling were fire-like spinning light reflections, reminiscent of devils’ arseholes. My gaggle of mates shrieked with joy. The fight continues!
Bowery was a man that put art above commerce, and having a laugh above everything else. Poignant, alarming, political, perverse, gorgeous things are being said through the filter of silliness. The party goers responded with wide grins. I encountered expressions and talk of bliss, of lightness, inspiration. People still feel attached to this world that ended 30 years ago. It somehow provides liberation, comfort. As the night progressed, our outfits fell apart, make-up ran, things became ridiculous, filthy. I feel restored and energised. I must remain fabulous.
This is a show about a life well-lived and in good company over and above an exhibition of objects. If art is about transmitting a message from the interior to the exterior, Bowery is successful. The atmosphere was changed by his posthumous presence. In writing about this show, I am doing the thing that Bowery was so heatedly against: categorisation, making-sense-of, explaining. As I am just one of the zoo animals, I’ll leave the final words to him: “The fact that I am, you should be grateful for.”
Written by Ethan Price.
