Leigh Bowery (March 26, 1961, in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia – December 31, 1994, in London, United Kingdom) was a performance artist, club creature, and clothing designer.



Having abandoned his home in Australia and a fashion course there he had a colourful exhibitionist career following his arrival in London in 1980, making a name for himself by dramatic performances of dance, music and simple exhibitionism, while wearing bizarre and very original outfits of his own design. He was frequently seen performing in Taboo, a fashionable night club he operated, (after years brightening the doorways of other people's events) near Leicester Square and is frequently identified as a key influence on the style of the New Romantic music movement that was popular in Britain during the early 1980s. Though perhaps he is more properly placed within the context of "The Cult With No Name" as the activities of the pansexual set of young Londoners had already been dubbed. A large man, he used his costumes to exaggerate his size and the effects were frequently overpowering and unforgettable for those who encountered him, the more so because of his confrontational style. A wallflower he was not.

In the late 1980s, Bowery collaborated as a dancer with the post-Punk ballet dancer Michael Clark, after having been his costume-designer for a number of years. He also participated in multi-media events like I Am Kurious Oranj and the play Hey, Luciani, with Mark E. Smith and The Fall.

In 1988 he had a week-long show in Anthony d'Offay's prestigious Dering Street Gallery in London's West End, in which he lolled on a chaise longue behind a two-way mirror, primping and preening in a variety of outfits while visitors to the gallery looked on. The insouciance and audacity of this overt queer narcissism captivated gallery goers, critics and other artists. Bowery's exquisite appearance, silence and intense self-absorption was further accentuated by his own recordings of random and abrasive traffic noises which were played for the show's duration. The very intimate and private was flung in the face of the public complete with a "Street Life" sound track, hinting perhaps at something still darker. In some outfits he appears like some strange roadside creature, like a cat that finally got the cream (of art world attention), in others he is the "Satan's Son" that he would whisper, years later, on his death bed.

The difficulty of engaging in such an hedonistic and wilfully original life and artistic practice without independent financial means has long been the curse of the both the innovator and bohemian. For all his art world exposure and contacts it seems peculiar now that no-one suggested to Bowery that he might adopt the very viable strategy of Gilbert and George - an earlier generation's living sculpture - and derive an income from selling images of himself rather than rely on occasional commissions, modelling work for Freud, or design consultancy for Rifat Ozbek. In the later years of his life the advantages of having an independent income started to become more obvious and Bowery looked to music, in the form of art rock/pop group Minty, to possibly provide this independent income stream. "I have a profile." he confided to flatmate and fellow Australian Anne Holt "But I have no money." Minty he hoped would provide a solution to this crux.

He outraged the London gay scene with a performance at SMact, a short lived SM Night at Bar Industria. Using Nazi costumes with a lesbian friend named Barbara, they turned concentration camp experimentation into SMart. The readers of Capital Gay, the London weekly newspaper, turned on fellow performer Berkley, who had played the victim, and Barbara and Leigh weathered the storm. He was after all, "the punk of the eighties" and longtime darling of the international avant garde.

In 1993 Leigh formed Raw Sewage with Nicola Bowery, Sheila Tequila and Stella Stein .They performed in 18" platforms at the Love Ball in Amsterdam, but the collaboration ended in dramas. Leigh went on to appear as "Madame Garbo" in "The Homosexual (or the difficulty of sexpressing oneself)" by Copi at Bagleys Warehouse in London's King's Cross.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Bowery

Creation date : 06/12/2004 @ 04:00
Last update : 18/01/2007 @ 21:25
Category : Bio
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