“If you label me, you negate me,” the performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery said in 1993, one year before his death at age 33.
Maybe it is this resistance to easy categorization that has meant Bowery never quite became a household name. His cultural influence, though, is beyond question: His provocative performances led him to work with artists including Lucian Freud and Marina Abramovic. His extreme fashions are still referenced on runways, by designers including Rick Owens and John Galliano. And his status as a queer culture icon is cemented by regular invocations at L.G.B.T.Q. club nights and on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
But during his short, colorful and often shocking life, nobody knew what box to put Bowery in. Three decades after his death, they still don’t.
A new exhibition called “Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern in London will bring his work to a much broader audience. The show, which opens Feb. 27 and runs through Aug. 31, charts Bowery’s journey from suburban Australia to the heart of London’s alternative gay club scene in the ’80s, and his transformation into a figure that Boy George once described as “modern art on legs.”
George later went on to play Bowery in the 2003 Broadway run of the biographical musical “Taboo,” for which George also wrote the lyrics. The musical is named after an infamous club night that Bowery hosted, which opened in 1985 on a dingy corner of London’s Leicester Square.
Every Thursday, the party attracted artists, models, designers and celebrities including George Michael, Sade and Bryan Ferry — but also drag queens and heroin users. Each week, Bowery arrived with a wild new outfit that challenged conventional notions of taste, gender and decorum. He described his role at the club as “a local cabaret act,” explaining: “If people see me behaving in such an outrageous manner, they won’t feel inhibited themselves.”
Fashion was the chief concern at Taboo, which operated by the mantra: “Dress as if your life depends on it, or don’t bother.” The doorman would flash a mirror in the face of aspiring entrants and ask, “Would you let yourself in?” The exclusivity was not just to generate mystique: It also created a space where people on society’s margins felt like they belonged.
“I remember Leigh in this insane Bart Simpson mask on roller skates, just bumping into everyone and screaming,” Boy George said in an email. “He brought such anarchy and energy to every club or party.”
Taboo closed after just one year when a tabloid newspaper ran an article about drug use in the club — but just like Bowery himself, the short run only served to cement the legend.
Epic Looks
Bowery grew up in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where he felt stifled by the conventions of his surroundings and would gaze longingly at magazine photos of Britain’s New Wave and punk scenes. When he turned 18, he moved to London, adopted a British accent and set about infiltrating the city’s gay party circuit.
Though he started out making clothes for others, Bowery soon realized that he preferred to design for himself alone.
“Directing his own performance and being the star was a better fit for what he wanted to do,” his sister, Bronwyn Bowery, said recently by phone. While he didn’t consider himself a drag queen, he was inspired by drag, combining high camp with high fashion. His huge figure — heavy set and a towering 6-foot-3 — only accentuated the impact of his outlandish looks.
One of his design collaborators was the sequin expert Nicola Rainbird, who was Bowery’s close friend and eventual wife. Though he was gay and, according to one biography, a lifelong devotee of anonymous public sex, Bowery married Rainbird a year before his death, in a ceremony he called “a little private art performance.”
For Bowery, makeup and clothing were not just cosmetic decoration, but tools for reinvention — and he reinvented himself often.
He made outfits from whatever he could lay his hands on, including bobby pins, tennis balls, tuna tins and even meringues. Some of his best-remembered looks include colored glue dribbled down his bald head like a splattered egg, and giant polka dots covering not only his clothes, but also his face.
Others on display in the Tate Modern show include a pink leather harness that secures flashing lightbulbs over the ears, and a sculptural white jacket that also obscures the wearer’s face with a puffball of orange tulle.
Fashion designers continue to reference Bowery today. In a 2015 show, Rick Owens sent models down the runway carrying other models in harnesses, which Owens admitted was “totally ripped off” from a Bowery concept. A 2009 Alexander McQueen show painted models with Bowery’s signature oversized lips. Gareth Pugh, Charles Jeffrey and Maison Margiela have all nodded to him in collections.
Bowery’s outré style has also influenced the high-concept looks of pop stars like Lady Gaga and a vast swath of contemporary drag queens — though George said something had been lost in the transition to the mainstream. “When you see drag queens referencing Leigh on ‘Drag Race,’ it’s gorgeous, but too polished,” George said. “Leigh was very rough around the edges and he had the build of a rugby player — and was not dainty or fey.”
That legacy also still plays out in many L.G.B.T.Q. clubs, which present the dance floor as not just a space for hedonism, but also for presenting elaborate looks, experimenting with gender and blurring the lines between performance and partying.
It was nightlife impresario Susanne Bartsch who introduced Bowery to New York, inviting him to contribute clothes to a fashion show displaying the latest London fashions in 1983. (She also took him to Tokyo, where she said that he startled the prime minister of Japan by baring his bottom on the runway.)
“When he came in his look, everything stopped,” Bartsch said. “You just wanted to see it again and again. His charisma, even when you couldn’t see his face, oozed through all the pieces that he made.”
Bowery would later return to New York as a performer, hosting Bartsch’s 1991 Love Ball, which raised money for AIDS research, and influencing New York club kids like Michael Alig, Amanda Lepore and James St James.
“Leigh had a very special relationship with New York,” said the choreographer Michael Clark, “he was particularly celebrated there. There was a whole gang of people ready for him there and he was embraced with open arms.”
Clark first met Bowery in 1984, when he was bewitched by one of Bowery’s outfits and followed him into a club bathroom to invite him to collaborate. Before long, Bowery was making provocative costumes, playing piano and dancing for Clark’s contemporary dance company, until he and Clark fell out in 1992.
By this time, Bowery was increasingly turning toward performance. In 1988, he presented himself as a living art installation at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London for five days, posing behind a two-way mirror on a chaise longue in a series of his best-known looks. He also worked with the performance artist Marina Abramovic on a piece using 400 live rats titled “Delusional,” which she has called “the most insane work I have made to this day.”
The Tate will show a video of Bowery’s notorious “Birthing” act, which he performed many times, including at the 1993 Wigstock drag festival in New York. There, he wore a bulging costume from which Rainbird, his wife, burst out like a newborn, covered in red gunk and with links of sausages as an umbilical cord.
Bowery loved to provoke outrage, commenting after one particularly extreme show involving an onstage enema: “If I have to ask, ‘Is this idea too sick?’ I know I am on the right track.”
Bowery’s sister said that his desire to shock was partly a response to his conservative upbringing in Australia. “My parents encouraged us immensely to conform,” she said, “but at the same time, we were told to stand out, so we were pretty confused. When someone wants you to conform because they don’t accept who you are, you have a choice: You conform and you lose yourself, or you react.”
‘Disco Monster Terrorist’
“Flesh is the most fabulous fabric,” Bowery once said, and the body’s expressive potential is a through line in his work. Even for an artist strongly associated with clothing, some of Bowery’s most enduring images show him completely nude.
He began sitting for a series of portraits with the painter Lucian Freud in 1990, often posing for seven hours a day. When a show of Freud’s work prominently featuring these paintings opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993, it represented the beginnings of a legitimacy in the fine art world that Bowery had long been seeking.
Though Bowery was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1988, he only told Rainbird and his friend Sue Tilley, instructing them to explain his absence once he was gone with a characteristic quip: “Tell them I’ve gone to Papua New Guinea.” He died on Dec. 31, 1994, of AIDS-related meningitis and pneumonia.
In a biography of Bowery that Tilley published in 1998, she describes his final moments lying in hospital under an oxygen mask, hooked up to a tangle of tubes. “It really was a fantastic look,” she writes, “and if he had seen someone else with it, we were sure that he would have soon been wearing it to nightclubs.”
Freud paid for Bowery’s body to be sent back to Australia, where he was buried next to his mother. At the funeral, the grave had to be widened to fit his plus-size coffin. As in life, there was no conventional space big enough to accommodate Bowery.
In a song about Bowery released the year after his death, Boy George lauded him as a “disco monster terrorist, hanging in the Tate with Turner and van Gogh.” Three decades later, the Tate Modern show is placing Bowery in the artistic canon.
In an interview, Rainbird reflected on how Bowery would feel about this moment: “He’d be absolutely over the moon,” she said. “He wanted to be famous and he knew he was a genius. He’d be very pleased that people were finally taking note.”
Leigh Bowery!
Feb. 27 and through Aug. 31 at Tate Modern, in London; tate.org.uk.
