Leigh Bowery
Michael Frazier
Color Theory sat-9am
Research Project
Leigh Bowery
Judged in his day as an ostentatious outsider with all the artistic gravitas of a punk/goth drag queen, Leigh Bowery etched out a career and reputation that stands to this day as a testament to the underground subculture of the 1980’s club scene.
Having moved to London from Australia as a portly young man given to sever bouts of depression and a keen hatred of his own body the performance artist found camaraderie with performance artist, Guy Barnes and soon to be painter David Walls. Soon however Bowery turned from Barns’ influence and began creating looks reminiscent of early 20th century dandyism.
The medium of performance appealed to Bowery and his early work became a response to fantasy fetishism and 1980’s decadence As he settled into the ultra urban life of London’s club district he slowly began to gain popularity for his quirky and usually salacious style of dress. His work managed to convey a beauty and grotesqueness in unison. His deep disdain for his size began to represent itself in the garments and creations he was quickly becoming popular for. He began to accentuate his large frame with additional shapes and unnatural proportions.
On a cultural note it’s interesting to remember that at this time in Great Britten, Margaret Thatcher was still in power and times were difficult for Bowery both financially and socially. Although he had never professed to being a homosexual (and in fact was briefly married to a woman) what he considered his artistic work was often balked at and equated to little more than drag-queen-circus freak. His opportunity and, arguably,only escape was in the secret underworld of pansexual nightclubs. To these clubbers London was the Wiemar republic of the 1980s.
Officially, Bowery would describe himself as a fashion designer and club promoter, although his early fashion career is often ignored, he had considerable artistic success and it included several collections in London Fashion week, shows at the ICA, The Camden Palace as well as in New York, and Tokyo.
These events were not, however the work that Bowrey really wanted to do.
Usually the shows met with critical acclaim even though little of it could translate to the commercial sphere.
In 1981 Bowery began showing regularly at London’s equivalent of Studio54, Taboo. The wild and extreme atmosphere would prove to be the perfect venue for the sort of avant garde demonstrations of self that he would become infamous for.
Bowery as a child had been very studious and socially ostracised and uncomfortable in his own skin. His most famous and influential work centered around exhibiting and exaggerating these insecurities.
Many have speculated that his designs were, at their core, armor to guard what he thought of as flaws in plain site of the audience. This approach is innately confrontational and as aggressive as it is effective. For his piece entitled “cunt” his entire body becomes an entire effigy of the uncomfortable in subject matter, title, form, and restrictive qualities.
Another of his works (orange head), distorts his face into a puff ball of material with the belly and butt of the costume distended to the point of revulsion. Unlike other club sensations, Bowery was highly intelligent, well read, passionate about art in all it’s forms and an expert seamster. In “cowboy” and “birthday cake” the evidence of his extremely meticulous construction and acute attention to form and detail makes him far away more interesting then his contemporaries, James st. James, Michael Alec and Amanda Limpor. Nor does he fit into the category of female impersonator.
His costumes are not intended to glamorize women or even aide in making him appear more feminine, instead he achieves something beyond that, something in the realm of androgyny without regard to gender roles or artifice.
In 1988, after the decline of Taboo, he had a week-long show at d’Offay’s, a prestigious gallery in London’s West End. The show consisted of Bowery lolling on a chaise chaise longer behind a two-way mirror, all the while primping and preening in a variety of garments while gallery patron looked on. In hind sight it was most likely the audacity of this brand of overtly queer narcissism that captivated most viewers, critics and other artists, but Bowery’s exquisite appearance, silence and intense self-absorption were further accentuated by his own recordings of random and abrasive traffic noises which were played for the shows duration.
Truly an artistic achievement it reminds us vaguely of the kind of interesting and pivotal performance happenings of the dadaists and the “human canvas” movements in the 1970’s.
Later in his career Bowery had his cheeks pierced to allow safety pins to be used as mouth stretching implements. The effect was and continues to be astonishing. The incredibly grotesque addition to his costume pushed his idea of self-distortion even further. It’s during this time that he was approached by internationally renowned painter Lucian Freud to sit for a series of paintings. Lucian was attracted to the broad surfaces of skin and painted them with an incredible level of respect and intimacy capturing the light and the shape of Bowery’s body with a confident grace and empathy. In return Bowery asked for a pile of Freud’s brush-cleaning rags which he set about cutting up and rearranging to create a mosaic 12′x12′ of Hitler’s face that he sent back to Freud.
Witty, talented, intelligent and an amazing craftsman Bowery’s artistic contributions are far reaching. Affecting great designers like Alexander McQueen and Drag Queens like Pussy Tourette and Painter’s like Lucian Freud, Bowery’s insistence on pushing himself and expressing the hypocrisy of fashion and taste he forever questioned the ideas of beauty. He managed to capture, in every piece, the fine line and competition of the grotesque and the beautiful.
Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon by Sue Tilley. Published by Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1999.
Lucian Freud: Recent Drawings and Etchings
Leigh Bowery by Robert Violette, published by: Violette Editions (London, July, 1998).
“Generations of Love” (1990), Baillie Walsh for Boy George
“Read Only Memory” (estratto) (1998), John Maybury
BBC Clothes Show excerpt with Leigh Bowery
Donut Party hosted by Michael Alig at Twin Donuts with many New York Club regulars including Isaac Mizrahi
Bowery footage by UK fashion photographer Nick Knight on SHOWstudio.com
I-Mind
The final video project for my Media Design class, I-Mind, is a short study of narrative storytelling in the digital age. The fact that the internet, being a product of mass-production, makes ephemeral any art created using it as a medium. The montage-esque quality of this piece comes from the idea that, like the web, digital-artistry in the 21st century are fast, technical and cheap. Using a highly abstracted portion of Bill Viola’s “Ocean without a Shore” and some stop motion work I did myself; I’ve layered the two and countered them with a snippet of Japanese experimental footage involving an antique hand-crank music box. My goal was to generate a story that had the feel of the Film Noir while simultaneously imagining a futuristic scenario in which the human mind is little more than a conduit for technological development. The work is set to an extremely moody Schoenberg piece which is layered and spliced intermittently with a dialogue that becomes increasingly less human as the piece progresses. I love the films of Cassavettes, Fellini and Bergman and their influence on my filmic aesthetic is evident here – albeit greatly modernized. The typewriter is a reference to the computer spoken of in the narration and its surrounding black picture frame begins to hint at the technology as figural. All the elements are visible throughout the entire duration save for the human elements (the face, the hands) which are visible only briefly. It’s my intention to make sinister the human form and create an impression of impending doom and fear by removing the recognizable, and therefore, comfortable, biological elements.
PLEASE GIVE ME AN A!!!
A Very Sarah Holiday
For we dwindling few still anamored with celebrity phenomenom, Sarah Palin, I’ve reposted this eerie video of her next to a Turkey-slaughtering machine. The farmer and the turkey go through bizarre sort of dance before he finally does the deed in the last moments of Sarah’s speech about safety and honor. It’s interesting to me how the addition of the background action (about which Sarah appears entierly unaware) manages to infuse the speech with a creep-tastic element of absurdity and satire.
Happy Holidays!
-m-
My Project
http://clem.mscd.edu/~mfrazie8
The project assignment was to create a mini interpretation of the Internet landscape. Perhaps I took this in a different direction.
Process: I spent two weeks putting together an elaborate nine-chapter story about a fictitious town called Inevitability. Peopled with quirky characters and misanthropic families the story essentially goes nowhere – a fact that goes unnoticed while the reader is reading. Like the town, the Internet and the reading the piece is less of a product than it is an exercise in the process of exploring arrangements of information.
The Concept: The idea of “internet as landscape” may fall by the wayside in this piece. More interesting to me is the idea of the Internet as global information-categorization tool. Typically people approach the Internet with two intents, one: information seeking, and two: entertainment seeking. The two approaches are fundamentally different in the way they convey knowledge. The project is therefore divided into two systems. The first is a recognizable encyclopedic style that juxtaposes a chronological numeric labeling system to take readers through the sections of the story. The other is a visual interaction that imposes no restrictions as to how the reader can access the same sections – something akin to “surfing”.
Color and Font Choice: The story is about a town and employs language that smacks of 1920’s rural America. In opposition to this is the story’s font choice, which is exceedingly modern and highly informed by digital text. The colors are “slick” and contemporary with de-saturated tones (perhaps speaking of the wearing of time). To emphasize the concept of the Internet as global encyclopedia the numerical tabs are in a graceful font that nods, slightly, to the struggle of modernizing language visually.
Story: It’s a Fucking Rad story that I slaved over! I hope you like it. For a full version please contact me. frazier1119@msn.com
Tobias Wong
My FAVORITE FAVORITE FAVORITE object maker. He’s smart, sentimental and irreverant. He also taps into themes of consumerism and opulance by juxtaposing glamour and the everyday following common-logic paths to thier suprising end.
Tobias Wong:
http://www.brokenoff.com/tobias.html
-m-
Metube Favorites
Artist Kumi Yamashita- Dialogue
Poet, Billy Collins, suggests he hasn’t got control over his own poetry.
Cityscape in Newsprint
Collins’s ciggarette memior.
Omg, becky. Look at thoes finger…they are so salad.
