Leigh Bowery: Useless Man

‘I think the fact that I am you should be very grateful for’.
             (Leigh Bowery, 1986)

Bowery wearing self-designed 'pussy wig'

Australian-born Leigh Bowery (1961-1994), ‘defies definition’, said choreographer Michael Clarke.[1] A fashion designer, performance artist, musician, model, agent provocateur and living art object, Bowery’s life and art crossed gender and genre definitions, media and social conventions. His body was his primary artistic site, his materials flesh, cloth, paint, found domestic objects and the affected gaze of his audience (his response to witnessing the shock of others was a part of his art). Bowery did not conform to the expected conventions for even the most extreme ‘artist’ or ‘performer’ of his era, so naturally he influenced the work of other artists. Although writing about the feminist performance/body artist Hannah Wilke, Amelia Jones’ observation can be adapted to fit Bowery: [his] work, which insistently articulates what I call the radical narcissism typical of much … body art from this period flamboyantly objectifies the …  body but also simultaneously performs [the] body/self as subject’.[2] I have removed Jones’s gender references, because while Bowery never denied his masculine gender, his appearance confused his audience —which was any and everyone who saw him—so much that he was considered to be male, female and, somehow, neither. He was a determinedly individual and unique ‘I’.
              Bowery arrived in London from Sunshine, Australia in 1980, inspired by the British street music and fashion movement of Punk, and what he saw as an apparent freedom of extreme expression appreciated by the English. He arrived as the New Romantic movement was gathering momentum in the city, when scores of young Londoners were dressing up in frills and sashes in order to go out to small clubs in order to pose and occasionally dance. The display of over-dressed self defined the movement as a Peacock phenomenon and Bowery, determined to be the most extravagantly plumed ‘peacock’ put his skill at dressmaking and clothes design to creating an original look for himself and his flatmate/lover, the artist Trojan (b Gary Barnes, 1966, d. 1986). Together, wearing blue makeup, adorned with pearls and safety pin face jewelry, wearing military caps with Middle Eastern-style pants, the pair became well known fixtures on the nightclub scene of the early 1980s. Bowery soon began making different, extravagant and extreme outfits for each night he went out. Former friends commented that he would suffer a form of performance anxiety in the hours before going out to a club;  ‘I can’t tell the difference between a stage and a street’, he said.[3]

Bowery (bottom) and Trojan in 'Paki's From Outer Space' look, 1983

             Initially Bowery was considered to work ‘in fashion’, and his first exposure to public gaze was via a fashion show in 1982/3 when he presented ‘Pakis from Outer Space’ at the Camden Palace as part of London Fashion Week. In 1983 Bowery’s clothes were presented on a conventional, performance art stage for the first time, when choreographer Michael Clarke used his outfits on dancers for a piece titled ‘Flippin 'eck Oh Thweet Mythtery of Life’. Over the next five years Clarke would use Bowery-designed outfits for different performances and eventually persuaded Bowery to appear as a performer, in 1985. Clarke’s employment of transsexual dancers and Bowery’s gender-confusing outfits on the dance stage confined Bowery’s appeal to the resolutely avant garde dance crowd however, at a time when, via his nightclub Taboo , he was gaining something of a public profile. As a television documentary presented by Hugh Laurie (South of Watford, 1986), and appearances on TV arts chat shows demonstrate, curiosity about what Leigh Bowery is concerned the program makers and audience most. 

l-r: Sue Tilley, Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, from Hail The New Puritans, 1986

             The fact of gaining access to publicly viewed media was of primary importance to Bowery the artist, because it enabled him to be what he was; neither male nor female but simply ‘art’. In her definition of Foucault’s idea of ‘sex’, Judith Butler writes;

The body is not “sexed” in any significant sense prior to its determination within a discourse through which it becomes invested with an “idea” of natural or essential sex. The body gains meaning within discourse only in the context of power relations. Sexuality is an historically specific organization of power, discourse, bodies, and affectivity. As such, sexuality is understood by Foucault to produce “sex” as an artificial concept which effectively extends and disguises the power relations responsible for its genesis.[4]

Bowery’s work is perhaps unique in its simultaneous negation of gender achieved while exploiting the erotic possibilities of taboo sexual ‘perversions’. He manages to evoke an idea of sexual perversion without allowing his audience to know whether Bowery is hetero- or homosexually inclined; the matter of sex rests purely with the audience. His performances over time sought to negate his humanity as well as his sexuality in acts of pure powerplay, during which he exploited the fear of the unknown that he engendered in his audience. Bowery alone knew what he was underneath his all-enveloping foam stretch  ‘monster’ outfits and his lightbulb-headed cartoon gimp look. 

             Numerous artists experimenting in exploratory body art of the 1960s and ‘70s used clearly defined art spaces—galleries and studios—to exhibit work that exploited their gender, sex and perceived corruptions of normative behaviour. Carolee Schneemann, in 1964’s Meat Joy, had several females in underwear rubbed with raw chicken, fish, sausages and paint, tied with ropes and covered in plastic and scrap paper by men wearing only underpants. The fact of their near-nakedness exacerbates the female form as sexually desired object and defenseless being. The women are ‘man-handled’ as an audience watches their debasement.

Schneemann in performance: Internal Scroll, 1975

              In 1975’s Internal Scroll, Schneemann stood naked but for stripes of paint, and pulled a roll of paper from her vagina, reading the poem on the strip as she revealed each bit.  That work, Jones asserts, ‘extended her sexualized negotiation of the normative (masculine) subjectivity authorizing the modernist artist, performing herself in an erotically charged narrative of pleasure that challenges the fetishistic and scopophilic “male gaze”.[5] Much of Bowery’s work similarly challenged ideas of fetishistic gaze, both male and female, arguably without the same erotic charge, but certainly with masochistic pleasure. He once splattered the front row of an audience at a performance when he spurted water from his anus, claiming later that it was ‘an accident’. Arguably his most outrageous and shocking public act however, was that of  ‘giving birth’ to a fully-grown woman, who emerges naked but for ‘blood and gore’ from between his legs. Bowery achieved the seemingly impossible on stage during a performance by his punk performance band, Minty, in 1994. They had performed two songs on stage before Nicola Bowery (they were married after a Minty gig had gone well) emerged from Leigh’s ‘womb’. She had been held upside down in a harness under his extravagantly embroidered dress until the moment that Bowery went into ‘labour’.

Bowery in self-designed harness with Nicola Bowery, 1993

             There is no evidence that Bowery intended to become a transsexual, despite his forcing his body into assuming a female bust (using gaffer tape and a bra), wearing versions of feminine attire and ‘giving birth’. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not seek to escape his birth identity or gender, and did not adopt a female pseudonym as so many transvestites did; ‘Marilyn’ the minor pop singer, for instance, was formerly Peter Robinson; ‘Manita’ a member of Body Map designers and a Michael Clarke troupe dancer, was formerly Les Child, while h/er colleague Lollah Hollah was formerly David Hollah. Leigh Bowery, a 6ft+ Australian of large build, used his masculine presence powerfully during his act—exaggerating his height by wearing platform shoes or stiletto shoes within sneakers, covered over with fabric to disguise the lifts—and rejected effete or weak aspects of cross-gender display. Bowery’s masculinity was emphasised by his physical presence and his adoption of grotesque aspects of appearance added to enforce his physical ‘threat’. Even when wearing his ‘pussy wig’, a home made item made from unrealistic wig hair glued over his gaffer-taped penis, and no trousers (see first image, above). Bowery’s heavy frame, bald head or dehumanizing headwear (with eyes and lips disfigured, enlarged or obscured) declared him to be of non-specific gender and indeterminate sexual preference.

             In male performance body art of the 1970s, aspects of heterosexuality and masculinity were challenged— most notably by Vito Acconci, perhaps—but usually found to be ‘true’, if problematic, for the artist. As Jones states, ‘Acconci’s body art works suggest that the very need for the continual performance of masculinity—the repetitious restaging of its boundaries to keep out that which is not it—testifies not to its durability and coherence but, rather, to its radical instability’.[6] Bowery’s body art is, because of the physicality of his ‘canvas’ as it were, inherently masculine, radical and unstable. The heterosexual, chauvinist aspects of Acconci’s work in which he fantasizes about copulation with females rarely deviated from the hetero norm. In Seedbed (1971) Acconci lay underneath a raised wooden floor and masturbated as his ‘audience’ walked on the floor above him; Acconci ‘spoke’ to his audience via a microphone and speaker system, emitting moans and groans along with fantasies concocted about the person he couldn’t see, walking over him. Acconci was hidden from his audience and supposed object of desire—‘supposed’ because it appears from viewing most of his work that Acconci’s true desire was limited to himself.

Acconci in performance: Seedbed, 1972

             Bowery ‘hid’ from his audiences in as much as his face was always covered, either in full-face masks akin to those worn by Mexican wrestlers and sado-masochistic ‘gimps’, by extreme make-up or within all-encompassing body suits that dehumanized the wearer. However, he was always visually present and on show to his audience, whether they were dancers at a club, passers-by in the street or paying customers at a performance or gig. Bowery’s rejection of standard social codes of gender and identity were purely artistic (he was, said Michael Bracewell, ‘art through anti-art’[7]), and when sexually active he would dress ‘normally’ in order to solicit men (no make up, no drag and a sober wig). As an artist/art work, and dressed in his unique, one-off, self-made costumes and/or extreme make-up, Bowery did not ‘exist’ in terms of generally understood, coherent identity. As Judith Butler writes on Sex/Gender/Desire,

The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of “identities” cannot “exist”—that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not “follow” from either sex or gender. ‘[8]

             Bowery conformed to normative homosexual ideas of identity in order to be desired, and when engaged in performance existed purely as an art object.  In his work Bowery achieved a kind of Foucaultian emancipation, because as Butler puts it, ‘the overthrow of “sex” results in the release of a primary sexual multiplicity, a notion not so far afield from the psychoanalytic postulation of primary polymorphousness or Marcuse’s notion of an original and creative bisexual Eros subsequently repressed by an instrumentalist culture.’[9] In one of his ‘birth’ performances Bowery not only releass Nicola onto tage, but also ‘feeds’ her by urinating, in full view, into a cup that she drinks from. He thus demonstrates both female and male reproductive organs, an Hermaphroditic capability (which he did not physically have). 

            

In 1988 Bowery placed himself within an establishment art context when, between the hours of 4pm and 6pm, Tuesday 11 to Saturday 15 October, he sat on a 19^th century divan at the Anthony D’Offay Gallery in New Bond Street, London W1 (where Gilbert & George, Joseph Beuys and Jeff Koons exhibited) and gazed at a reflection of himself. Watched from the other side of the mirror (he couldn’t see them), unlike Acconci in Seedbed, Bowery had no interaction with his audience. Neither did he talk or ‘perform’ other than to move, shift poses and adjust his costume. Aware, perhaps, that he was not conforming to 'usual' artistic methods of creation or display, between1988 and 1990 Bowery had photographer Fergus Greer make studies of him wearing different creations in order that each look be documented, that something be 'left' of his work: his one-off outfits were not kept, and often destroyed in the wearing of them. One of the viewers of Bowery’s exhibition of self at the D’Offay was Lucian Freud (1922-2011). Bowery became a model for Freud, and the resultant series of paintings show the model in the nude (his idea, according to the painter), his gender clearly revealed, his gaze unflinching. According to Bella Freud[10] (Lucian's daughter), the men got on well, sharing an irreverent attitude (‘I put art above commerce’, Bowery told Hugh Laurie in 1986, ‘And having a laugh above everything’), and mutual respect.

Nude with leg up (Leigh Bowery), 1992 by Lucian Freud

             One of Freud’s paintings of Bowery has him reclining on a pile of rags. The scaps of material were used by Freud to wipe his palette knife and brushes, and were discarded in a corner, the pile to be burned when it grew too big. Bowery asked if he might keep the rags rather than burn them. Freud agreed and Bowery took them home, in order to sew them into a likeness of Adolf Hitler. If it was Bowery’s intention to annoy or shock Freud (his family had, of course, fled to England in order to avoid Nazi persecution, in 1939), it failed; Freud was delighted with the artwork.[11]

            Searching the internet for Leigh Bowery in 2012 throws up results which vary from videos of imitators of the artist (which he would have hated, ‘I don’t want people to copy me’ he told Laurie), to documentary footage, performance video and remixes of the one song recorded by Minty which Bowery genuinely thought might make him a music superstar to rival Madonna (or Lady Gaga); Useless Man.  It was a comment on self, gender and sexuality in general; the parodying of a well-known, crass commercial advertising jingle a suitably contrary and defying act, full of humour and menace. It is rumoured that a young fashion designer-to-be named Alexander McQueen saw one of Minty's final performances, in 1994, and his later designs reflect some Bowery influences. As Vogue Italy has recently noticed, Bowery has begun (pace Gaga) to be referenced by many fashion designers. The lack of artistic invention shown by the designers who mimic his work serves to highlight the extraordinary vision and invention of Bowery, the living work of art.

Leigh Bowery, 1991 by Lucian Freud

[1] South of Watford, LWT documentary, 1986

[2] Introduction, Body Art/Performing The Subject, Amelia Jones, p.17 (Minneapolis, 1998)

[3] South of Watford, LWT documentary, 1986

[4] Subversive Bodily Acts, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler, p.92 (New York, 1990)

[5] Introduction, Body Art/Performing The Subject, Amelia Jones, p.3 (Minneapolis, 1998)

[6] The Body In Action, Vito Acconci, Ibid, p.111

[7] The Magnificent Leigh Bowery, dir. Charles Atlas, 2002

[8] Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler, p.17 (New York, 1990)

[9] Subversive Bodily Acts, Ibid p.96

 [10] The Magnificent Leigh Bowery, dir. Charles Atlas, 2002
[11] Ibid