Today would have been the 51st birthday of Leigh Bowery, the Australian-born, London-based artist, club promoter, pop star, model, fashion designer and “dancer” in Michael Clark’s ballet company. Bowery was one of the most influential figures in the fashion world of the 1980s and 90s, before his death at the age of 33 from an AIDS-related illness. Bowery was famously a model/muse for painter Lucien Freud and a central character of Boy George’s ill-fated Broadway show Taboo (the one Rosie O’Donnell financed). The documentary about his life by Charles Atlas, The Legend of Leigh Bowery is a must-see.
I knew Leigh Bowery dating back to 1984, when I’d see him and his boyfriend Trojan (who was dressed by Leigh) when they’d be out and about at London clubs like White Trash or The Mudd Club (where I spent nearly every Friday night of my 18th year). At the time I met them, they had a stall selling make-up in the Great Gear Market on King’s Road. After that, Bowery became well-known for his Taboo nightclub, the infamous “Where’s Pepe?” TV jeans ads—WHY are these not on YouTube???—and his association with Michael Clark. For someone who appeared so monstrous, Leigh was extremely friendly and always remembered me when I’d see him around New York.
Little Britain’sMatt Lucas is currently developing a dramatic film about Bowery’s life. He’s the perfect actor for the role.
In the clip below, shot by pioneering NYC video-artist Nelson Sullivan, celebrants at Leigh Bowery’s birthday party in 1989 include video artist Tom Rubnitz, Loretta Hogg (see if you can guess who that is), The Pop Tarts, Sister Dimension, Erich Conrad, Lisa Edelstein (from TV’s House), Ffloyd, Lady Bunny, RuPaul, Larry Tee, Lahoma VanZandt and Nelson himself, who we see in the beginning and throughout (he’s shooting it, while keeping himself in the shot). This video was originally broadcast on the ARTE Cable Channel in Europe.
First look at the new documentary film, The British Guide to Showing Off, which celebrates Andrew Logan, artist, living legend and creator of the outrageous, anarchic and always spectacular Alternative Miss World Show.
The Alternative Miss World Show, is a pageant and fancy dress party for grown ups, launched back in 1972, it has involved the participation from the likes of Derek Jarman, Divine, Duggie Fields, Leigh Bowery, David Hockney, Richard O’Brien Zandra Rhodes, Molly Parkin, Angie Bowie and Grayson Perry over the years
“In The British Guide to Showing Off, director Jes Benstock takes us under Logan’s glittering wing to take a joyous look at this most quirky and exotic subculture event.
“Raucous, liberating and sexually charged, The British Guide to Showing Off speaks to the outsider in all of us. For anyone who has ever wanted to break out.”
The Legend of Leigh Bowery is a brilliant documentary about a brilliant man.
Directed by Charles Atlas, the film covers Bowery’s life and times from his suburban beginnings in Sunshine, Australia, to his fame on London’s club scene in the 1980s and his success as one of the most influential and daring fashion designers in the past thirty years.
The Legend of Leigh Bowery has incredible archive footage and excellent contributions from Michael Clark, Sue Tilley, Michael Bracewell, Richard Torry, Donald Urquhart, Damien Hirst, Boy George and Leigh’s wife, Nicola Bowery.
In this rarely seen (for obvious reasons) clip, the fabulous Leigh Bowery keeps his composure as the be-quiffed pop star stumbles through his questions, rambles, misses the point and seems at times lost like a patient woken up for his meds.
Taken from Glitter’s late night chat show Night Network, Bowery shines, while Glitter’s inappropriate questions reveal more than he perhaps intended:
Lucian Freud, one of Britain’s most distinguished and acclaimed artists, has died at the age of 88. Described as a “great realist painter,” Freud first came to prominence when he was just twenty-one, with his first highly successful one-man-show in 1944.
Freud’s early work was illustrative - doe-eyed portraits of his wife Caroline Blackwood, or his friend, Francis Bacon, which are reminiscent of the work of Stanley Spencer, and seem almost polite representations compared to his later giant nudes. Freud was greatly impressed by Bacon, and the older artist influenced Freud’s development as a painter. Freud and Bacon exhibited alongside Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, a loose grouping of London artists, whose work established the foundations for figurative painting for decades to come.
The critic David Sylvester named Bacon as the head, while Freud
“produced easily the best portraits painted in this country during the last decade.”
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Freud’s technique changed as he began to use impasto to create intense, almost physical assaults on his sitters. Freud said of his portraits:
“I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.”
Mr. Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud and a brother of the British television personality Clement Freud, was already an important figure in the small London art world when, in the immediate postwar years, he embarked on a series of portraits that established him as a potent new voice in figurative art.
In paintings like “Girl With Roses” (1947-48) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1951-52), he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. Ordinary people — many of them his friends and intimates — stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist’s ruthless inspection.
From the late 1950s, when he began using a stiffer brush and moving paint in great swaths around the canvas, Mr. Freud’s nudes took on a new fleshiness and mass. His subjects, pushed to the limit in exhausting extended sessions, day after day, dropped their defenses and opened up. The faces showed fatigue, distress, torpor.
The flesh was mottled, lumpy and, in the case of his 1990s portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the phenomenally obese civil servant Sue Tilley, shockingly abundant.
The relationship between sitter and painter, in his work, overturned traditional portraiture. It was “nearer to the classic relationship of the 20th century: that between interrogator and interrogated,” the art critic John Russell wrote in “Private View,” his survey of the London art scene in the 1960s.
William Feaver, a British critic who organized a Freud retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, said: “Freud has generated a life’s worth of genuinely new painting that sits obstinately across the path of those lesser painters who get by on less. He always pressed to extremes, carrying on further than one would think necessary and rarely letting anything go before it became disconcerting.”
Amongst Freud’s great late paintings were his enormous portraits of the performance artist, Leigh Bowery. Theirs was a special relationship, as Freud’s portraits of Bowery revealed the shy humanity hidden behind the make-up and costumes of a performer who invested all in concealing himself.
As Bowery discovered, sitting for Freud was a challenge, as the sitter allowed Freud “maximum observation”, as the BBC reports:
Lucian Freud’s portraits were not concerned with flattery or modesty - disturbing was one adjective applied to them - and some were said to have compelling nastiness.
His early work was the product of “maximum observation”, Freud said
Though sometimes startling, his portraits could also be beautiful and intimate. Freud had been an admirer of the artist Francis Bacon and painted a striking portrait of him.
Freud, who lived and worked in London, said his work was purely autobiographical - he painted “the people that interest me and that I care about and think about in rooms I live in and know”.
A close relationship with sitters was important to him. He painted several affectionate portraits of his mother and his daughters Bella and Esther were also models.
Sittings could last for a year and sitters were often profoundly affected by the process. One of them once said: “You are the centre of his world while he paints you. But then he moves on to someone else.”
Freud seldom accepted commissions. His work is in a number of galleries in Britain and overseas, but much of it is privately owned.
He was one of few artists to have had two retrospective exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London.
The following short documentary looks at Lucian Freud’s portraits through the people who have posed for him, from David Hockney to Duke of Devonshire.
Rest of documentary plus Lucian freud speaks, after the jump…
Back in dear olde Blighty in 1975, the Observer Sunday supplement magazine published an article previewing The Rocky Horror Picture Show under the heading, “Something To Offend Everyone.” The thought of a musical focussing on a bi-sexual, cross-dressing, psychotic alien was enough to curdle the milk in Tonbridge Wells, and the article gleefully anticipated the shock the movie would cause. It didn’t. It was too far ahead of its time, and Rocky Horror would have to wait a year or so, until the Waverly Theater, New York, started the film’s slow, but relentless rebirth.
As a headline, “Something To Offend Everyone” could have been equally applied by copy editors to performance artist, fashion designer, dancer, actor, singer, style icon and all-round good egg, Leigh Bowery and his band Raw Sewage. The band was formed after Bowery’s 3-minutes of fame as a lip-synching backing singer to Felix on the BBC’s music chart show, Top of the Pops. The band consisted of Leigh, Stella Stein (Stephen Brogan) and Shelia Tequila, who together originally performed under the name The Quality Street Wrappers. In her biography Leigh Bowery - The Life and Times of an Icon, Sue Tilley described the band’s first gig:
Their first show was at the Iceni club in Mayfair. They sang the Donna Summer classic ‘Enough Is Enough’ to a live piano accompaniment. For their finale they stripped off naked and then walked around the club to receive the congratulations of all their friends. However, the management was not happy with this and asked them to put their gowns back on.
It was a start, and encouraged by the response, the band decided to cover a second song, Run DMC and Aerosmith’s ‘Walk This Way’:
“Leigh rehearsed endlessly, demanding that every step was right and that they learnt how to throw the microphones to each other so that there was an element of juggling involved. Leigh designed new costumes for the band which were big net petticoats with tartan taffeta dress on top… Underneath this costume they had their genitals strapped back between their legs so it looked like they didn’t have any, long black stockings and three belts wrapped around their torsos. They then teetered on top of two-foot-high platform boots that Leigh had specially made… The look was completed with minstrel-style black faces with the main features highlighted in white.”
Bowery was convinced the band would achieve chart success, but not everyone was so enthusiastic as Sue Tilley recalled:
“...Leigh asked me what I thought and if they might get chart success. He was devastated when I replied that I didn’t think the record buying public were quite ready for three freaks on platforms doing second-rate covers of songs. It made me realize that Leigh was removed from reality. He was so far ahead of the general public in what he accepted as normal he couldn’t see that his semi-naked, blacked up, genital-less band might cause a bit of a problem.”
Leigh was impervious to criticism and the trio continued with their outrageous performances, each more bizarre than the last - one at the Fridge in December 1992, saw a drunk spectator fellated and smeared with excrement. By 1993, performing as Raw Sewage, the shows lived up to the band’s name with a mix of confrontational theater and childish shock tactics:
“They still started with ‘Walk This Way’ but the next number involved Nicola and Christine Bateman dressing up as nurses and injecting neat vodka into the group’s bottoms (that is all except Stella who had a phobia about needles). They then rushed backstage and filled their mouths with vegetable soup which they vomited all over the audience while singing ‘Mickey’, the old Toni Basil hit.”
Raw Sewage carried on for a few months, even recording a video at the Tracadero, Picadilly, before the band fell apart. Bowery went onto form Minty with his wife, Nicola Bateman, which became notorious for their stage show, where Bowery gave birth to his naked wife.
It was not Leigh Bowery’s ability to shock and entertain that made him important and influential, rather it was his ability to subvert identity and image through the way he presented himself. As the art dealer, Anthony d’Offay once said:
“I tried to think what was it that changed one’s feelings about things, why (Leigh) was so important, the thing that I decided whether right or wrong was this: I felt Leigh did was to be a very bright shiny mirror to reflect very clearly one’s conscious and unconscious thoughts…Leigh’s presence allowed you to grow into the person you really were and face your real feelings at that moment.
“He allowed you to feel real. When I said he was a shiny mirror what I meant was he allowed you to see yourself in this strange shape that he took and that for me was his genius….He unlocked a key in you…”
Bonus clips of Leigh Bowery and Minty after the jump…
