Leigh Bowery

Biography

Leigh Bowery (26 March 1961 – 31 December 1994) was an Australian performance artist, club promoter, and fashion designer. Bowery's performances featured striking costumes and make-up and were conceptual, flamboyant, outlandish, and sometimes controversial. Based in London for much of his adult life, he was a model and muse for the English painter Lucian Freud. Bowery's friend and fellow performer Boy George said he saw Bowery's performances a number of times, and that they "never ceased to impress or revolt." Bowery also appeared in the video for the song Cruiser's Creek by English Band The Fall.

== Early life and years in London == Bowery was born and raised in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. From an early age, he studied music, played piano, and went on to study fashion and design at RMIT for a year. He moved to London in 1980, saying, "I was so itchy to see new things and to see the world, that I just left." Bowery became part of the London club scene. He became a figure in the underground clubs of London and New York, as well as in art and fashion circles. He attracted attention by wearing outlandish and creative outfits, which he made himself. He became friends and flatmates with artist Gary Barnes (known as "Trojan") and David Walls. Bowery created costumes for them to wear, and the trio became known in the clubs as the "Three Kings". Bowery appeared in magazines and on television, including commercials for Pepe Jeans and Rifat Ozbek. In 2005, the National Portrait Gallery of Australia acquired a portrait of Bowery in his fur coat by the photographer David Gwinnutt. In 2007, the National Portrait Gallery in London purchased Gwinnutt's portrait of Bowery and Trojan (Barnes), which also appears in the Violette Editions book.

== Taboo club == Bowery was a club promoter, and created the club Taboo at Maximus in Leicester Square with promoter Tony Gordon in 1985. Taboo became "the place to be" with long queues. Drugs, particularly ecstasy, became a part of the dancing scene for the attendees. The club defied sexual convention, embraced "polysexualism", and played unexpected song selections. The DJs were Jeffrey Hinton, Rachel Auburn and Mark Lawrence. Regular guests included Boy George, George Michael, John Galliano, Judy Blame, Bodymap, Michael Clark, John Maybury, Cerith Wyn Evans. Taboo lasted 18 months and closed in 1986.

== Fashion and costume design == As a fashion designer, Bowery had several shows exhibiting his collections in London, New York and Tokyo. His work contained wildly creative costumes, makeup, wigs and headgear, all of which combined to be striking and often kitschy. He also designed costumes for the Michael Clark Dance Company. When that company performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1987, Bowery won a Bessie Award for his work on No Fire Escape in Hell.

== Performance artist == As a performance artist, Bowery enjoyed creating the costumes, and often shocking audiences. Working alongside Michael Clark, he would often have solo scenes in many of Clark's shows. His first one-man installation was in 1988 for a week at the Anthony D'Offay Gallery in London. Hidden behind a two way mirror he would lie on a 19th Century divan, primping and preening himself at his own reflection, while the audience would watch sitting on the floor from the other side. Each day he changed costumes and so visitors would often come back to see what he would be wearing next. Various traffic sounds would be played over the speaker system during the performance and there was a different smell every day. In 1990 at the London club night 'Kinky Gerlinky' he introduced his signature 'Birthing' performance. Dressed as the drag performer Divine from 'Female Trouble' he appeared on stage in an oversized t-shirt, dark glasses and headscarf, looking huge and miming along to the film dialogue. Then suddenly, much to the audience's surprise, he dropped onto his back and simulated 'giving birth' to his baby, a petite and naked young woman who was his friend, assistant and later wife Nicola Bateman. She had been hidden for the first part of the performance by being strapped to Leigh's belly with her face in his crotch. Then she would slip out of her harness and appear to pop out of Bowery's belly, bursting through his tights, along with a lot of stage blood and links of sausages, while Bowery wailed. Bowery would then bite off the umbilical cord, hug his 'new' baby and the two would take a bow. Boy George said he saw it a number of times, and that it "never ceased to impress or revolt". In mid-1994 one of Bowery's last performances took place at the Fort Asperen Art Festival in Holland, where he and his assistant Nicola and bass player Richard Torry performed to a bemused crowd during the day and fully naked, Richard covered in bright blue balloons. Bowery hung upside down singing into the microphone while Richard pulled him back and forth by the foot until the climax of the song and Bowery smashed himself through a plane of glass, cutting his body. The whole performance lasted five minutes.

== Lucian Freud's model == In London in 1988, Bowery met the painter Lucian Freud in his club Taboo. They were introduced by a mutual friend, the artist Cerith Wyn Evans. Freud had seen Bowery perform at Anthony d'Offay Gallery, in London. In Bowery's first public appearance in the context of fine art, Bowery posed behind a one-way mirror in the gallery dressed in a flamboyant costume. Bowery used his body and manipulation of his flesh to create personas. This involved almost masochistically taping his torso and piercing his cheeks with pins in order to hold masks, as well as wearing outlandish makeup. Freud said, "the way he edits his body is amazingly aware and amazingly abandoned". In return, Bowery said of Freud: "I love the psychological aspect of his work – in fact, I sometimes felt as if I had been undergoing psychoanalysis with him ... His work is full of tension. Like me, he is interested in the underbelly of things". Bowery posed for a number of large full-length paintings that are considered among Freud's best work. The paintings tend to exaggerate Bowery's 6-foot-3-inch (1.91 m), 17-stone (110 kg; 240 lb) physique to monumental proportions. The paintings had a strong impact as part of Freud's exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. Freud said he found him "perfectly beautiful", and commented, "His wonderfully buoyant bulk was an instrument I felt I could use, especially those extraordinary dancer's legs". Freud noted that Leigh by nature was a shy and gentle man, and his flamboyant persona was in part a form of self-defence. Jonathan Jones, writing for The Guardian, describes Freud's portrait, Leigh Bowery (seated):

Bowery is a character out of Renaissance art – perhaps Silenus, the companion of Dionysus. His flesh is a magnificent ruin, at once damaged and riotously alive. Who knew skin was so particoloured? To count the hues of even one of his feet is impossible: purple, grey, yellow, brown, the paint creamy, calloused, bulging. In a velvet chair tilted down towards us on the raked stage of the wooden studio floor, his mass looms up and dwarfs us. Walk close your eyes are probably the height of his penis. Bowery's violet-domed, wrinkly tube hangs between thighs marked with sinister spots or cuts his knees are massive. Bowery is a painted monument who quietly contemplates his existence inside this flesh.

== Minty ==