Life was a guise to the performance artist Leigh Bowery (1961-94). His looks were so outlandish, his costumes so teemingly various, they jam every inch of this huge retrospective. He is a gilded boy-god, a Christmas pudding on legs, a prosthetised Venus of Willendorf. He is a leather-clad dame in a zipped-up mask or a Regency dandy in pistachio pantaloons, their orange polka dots spreading upwards all over his face.
He fills the frame every time, in period photographs and videos, an enormous Australian with a shaved head and powerful calves, standing 6ft 3in and higher in towering platform soles painted scarlet or silver. Even though he is long gone, a sense of his colossal presence is apparent from the opening gallery, where a rack of Bowery’s earliest costumes gives an immediate sense of his size.
He had left a quiet Melbourne suburb for London in 1980, and was wearing patchwork coats and tweed jackets with hillbilly hats. The first of many portraits in this show, a tentative drawing by the fashion designer Rachel Auburn, shows him in a baseball cap before he has shorn off his hair. For a moment, it seems as if this going to be a V&A show, gorgeously fashion-conscious, one costume after another in elegant vitrines.
But playing alongside is a hilarious film of Bowery and his pals, already post-punk, getting into frocks and police hats in the Stepney flat where he lived for the rest of his life, lined with kitsch Star Trek wallpaper. Waiting for the dancer Michael Clark to arrive, they turn gossipy and fractious. It is like a souped-up scene from EastEnders.
Soon we are at Taboo, the nightclub Bowery hosted in a Leicester Square basement on Thursdays, and Clark is flat on the floor with a half-clad lover. Snapshots cover the walls, music booms out. A beautiful monochrome photograph by David Gwinutt shows Bowery and his unrequited love, Trojan, in Picasso-inspired makeup and glittery hats outside the club. Trojan will die at 21 of an overdose.
An early diary, Bowery’s handwriting cast on a large scale, like everything about him, ponders the question of whether to change image. It is almost poignant, when you consider what is to come. He will burst through drag and bondage, couture, carnival and masquerade to create personae without parallel. Here is his famous dalmatian dress and mask, the vast pinstripe suit caked with sequins he wore to Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World, the unitard he used to conceal his wife, Nicola, during the “birthing performances”, when she would emerge from between his legs.
Headpieces with glowing lightbulb ears, lace neck corsets, thick facial makeup that conceals him entirely, the trademark egg splat dripping down over his skull in every colour of latex and paint. His shapeshifting is sometimes reminiscent of the French artist Claude Cahun, especially the sunburst masks, padded skirts and goggle eyes. But Bowery’s body is not just a complex instrument of self-portraiture; it becomes a living sculpture: a majestic column, a strutting vector with a pompom for a head, at one point so completely concealed in white Lycra that the spreadeagled form no longer appears human at all.
The whole show is evocative not just of another era in music, dance and performance art, but also the media. There are vividly inventive magazine shoots here for i-D, Blitz and the Face – currently having its own celebratory exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery – as well as for the press. And in a droll sequence for BBC One’s The Clothes Show, Bowery spends a day at Harrods in spangled hoods and sequined trapeze dresses, parodying the stunned punters. Auntie would never broadcast such programmes today.
Bowery went on to design costumes for Clark’s dancers, who perform on pointe in massive platforms and tights with the bum missing to music by the Fall in American video artist Charles Atlas’s jump-cutting film. Bowery toured with the troupe, bringing back wild variations on Noh costumes, plus an extra layer of couture cutting from Japan. (It is a pity this show makes nothing at all of his ability to stitch staggering get-ups from old curtains.)
And then he becomes an artwork in himself, posing daily in front of a two-way mirror in Anthony d’Offay’s gallery in 1988. Cerith Wyn Evans’s contemporary video records every kind of vox pop response, from the baffled to the liberated, at the spectacle of the great exhibitionist as installation.
There are many portraits in this show, climaxing, inevitably, with Lucian Freud’s nude studies of Bowery lolling, sleeping, or splayed on the ground with one leg cocked, lending a monumental defiance to both his own nakedness and Freud’s heavily worked painting. Bowery is said to have nicked an unfinished work from Freud.
What is missing from this show is any hint of his wilful grotesquerie, either, pissing and defecating in small clubs onstage. Grimy footage of Bowery laboriously giving birth to his wife gives an inkling of his later performances, however, in stark contrast to Fergus Greer’s stylish photograph of the couple bound together.
But there are words as well as images at Tate Modern. And perhaps this is where Bowery’s feelings emerge, in postcards to friends, all exuberant emotion and explicit humour, and in his A3 diaries. An entry from 1990, after a high hit of a show, reads: “Hungover, depressed, full of regrets, no money.” Bowery already knows he is going to die. He kept his illness secret, telling his sole confidant to explain his final absences as a trip abroad. Tell Them I’ve Gone to Papua New Guinea was the title of Fitzrovia Chapel’s Bowery show in 2022, on the site of the Middlesex hospital, where he died of an Aids-related illness in 1994.
This retrospective grows harsher, darker. The shapes become more bulbous, the forms more exaggerated. Some of the images are sinister as well as ugly.
Even in his civvies, Bowery liked to wear wigs, ill-fitting jumpers and a strip of tape to yank one eyebrow awry. He wanted, he said, to be like that “weirdo in the street that you tell your mum about”.
But look at his denim jacket fluttering with gold feathers, which turn out to be nothing more than thousands of blond hairpins, or his beard of bristling pegs. Or the multicoloured ribbons wound around his naked body like shining reels at John Lewis. Make yourself new every day.
This is what stuns, in the end – this extreme originality. No matter what body you were born with, or how shocking you might appear to others, Bowery’s work is a lesson in looking – and living – like nobody else.
