Lifestyle
Leigh Bowery Arrives at Tate Modern, Without Labels
“If you label me, you negate me,” the performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery said in 1993, one year before his death at age 33.
Maybe it is this resistance to easy categorization that has meant Bowery never quite became a household name. His cultural influence, though, is beyond question: His provocative performances led him to work with artists including Lucian Freud and Marina Abramovic. His extreme fashions are still referenced on runways, by designers including Rick Owens and John Galliano. And his status as a queer culture icon is cemented by regular invocations at L.G.B.T.Q. club nights and on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
But during his short, colorful and often shocking life, nobody knew what box to put Bowery in. Three decades after his death, they still don’t.
A new exhibition called “Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern in London will bring his work to a much broader audience. The show, which opens Feb. 27 and runs through Aug. 31, charts Bowery’s journey from suburban Australia to the heart of London’s alternative gay club scene in the ’80s, and his transformation into a figure that Boy George once described as “modern art on legs.”
George later went on to play Bowery in the 2003 Broadway run of the biographical musical “Taboo,” for which George also wrote the lyrics. The musical is named after an infamous club night that Bowery hosted, which opened in 1985 on a dingy corner of London’s Leicester Square.
Every Thursday, the party attracted artists, models, designers and celebrities including George Michael, Sade and Bryan Ferry — but also drag queens and heroin users. Each week, Bowery arrived with a wild new outfit that challenged conventional notions of taste, gender and decorum. He described his role at the club as “a local cabaret act,” explaining: “If people see me behaving in such an outrageous manner, they won’t feel inhibited themselves.”
Fashion was the chief concern at Taboo, which operated by the mantra: “Dress as if your life depends on it, or don’t bother.” The doorman would flash a mirror in the face of aspiring entrants and ask, “Would you let yourself in?” The exclusivity was not just to generate mystique: It also created a space where people on society’s margins felt like they belonged.
“I remember Leigh in this insane Bart Simpson mask on roller skates, just bumping into everyone and screaming,” Boy George said in an email. “He brought such anarchy and energy to every club or party.”
Taboo closed after just one year when a tabloid newspaper ran an article about drug use in the club — but just like Bowery himself, the short run only served to cement the legend.
Epic Looks
Bowery grew up in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where he felt stifled by the conventions of his surroundings and would gaze longingly at magazine photos of Britain’s New Wave and punk scenes. When he turned 18, he moved to London, adopted a British accent and set about infiltrating the city’s gay party circuit.
Though he started out making clothes for others, Bowery soon realized that he preferred to design for himself alone.
“Directing his own performance and being the star was a better fit for what he wanted to do,” his sister, Bronwyn Bowery, said recently by phone. While he didn’t consider himself a drag queen, he was inspired by drag, combining high camp with high fashion. His huge figure — heavy set and a towering 6-foot-3 — only accentuated the impact of his outlandish looks.
One of his design collaborators was the sequin expert Nicola Rainbird, who was Bowery’s close friend and eventual wife. Though he was gay and, according to one biography, a lifelong devotee of anonymous public sex, Bowery married Rainbird a year before his death, in a ceremony he called “a little private art performance.”
For Bowery, makeup and clothing were not just cosmetic decoration, but tools for reinvention — and he reinvented himself often.
He made outfits from whatever he could lay his hands on, including bobby pins, tennis balls, tuna tins and even meringues. Some of his best-remembered looks include colored glue dribbled down his bald head like a splattered egg, and giant polka dots covering not only his clothes, but also his face.
Others on display in the Tate Modern show include a pink leather harness that secures flashing lightbulbs over the ears, and a sculptural white jacket that also obscures the wearer’s face with a puffball of orange tulle.
Fashion designers continue to reference Bowery today. In a 2015 show, Rick Owens sent models down the runway carrying other models in harnesses, which Owens admitted was “totally ripped off” from a Bowery concept. A 2009 Alexander McQueen show painted models with Bowery’s signature oversized lips. Gareth Pugh, Charles Jeffrey and Maison Margiela have all nodded to him in collections.
Bowery’s outré style has also influenced the high-concept looks of pop stars like Lady Gaga and a vast swath of contemporary drag queens — though George said something had been lost in the transition to the mainstream. “When you see drag queens referencing Leigh on ‘Drag Race,’ it’s gorgeous, but too polished,” George said. “Leigh was very rough around the edges and he had the build of a rugby player — and was not dainty or fey.”
That legacy also still plays out in many L.G.B.T.Q. clubs, which present the dance floor as not just a space for hedonism, but also for presenting elaborate looks, experimenting with gender and blurring the lines between performance and partying.
It was nightlife impresario Susanne Bartsch who introduced Bowery to New York, inviting him to contribute clothes to a fashion show displaying the latest London fashions in 1983. (She also took him to Tokyo, where she said that he startled the prime minister of Japan by baring his bottom on the runway.)
“When he came in his look, everything stopped,” Bartsch said. “You just wanted to see it again and again. His charisma, even when you couldn’t see his face, oozed through all the pieces that he made.”
Bowery would later return to New York as a performer, hosting Bartsch’s 1991 Love Ball, which raised money for AIDS research, and influencing New York club kids like Michael Alig, Amanda Lepore and James St James.
“Leigh had a very special relationship with New York,” said the choreographer Michael Clark, “he was particularly celebrated there. There was a whole gang of people ready for him there and he was embraced with open arms.”
Clark first met Bowery in 1984, when he was bewitched by one of Bowery’s outfits and followed him into a club bathroom to invite him to collaborate. Before long, Bowery was making provocative costumes, playing piano and dancing for Clark’s contemporary dance company, until he and Clark fell out in 1992.
By this time, Bowery was increasingly turning toward performance. In 1988, he presented himself as a living art installation at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London for five days, posing behind a two-way mirror on a chaise longue in a series of his best-known looks. He also worked with the performance artist Marina Abramovic on a piece using 400 live rats titled “Delusional,” which she has called “the most insane work I have made to this day.”
The Tate will show a video of Bowery’s notorious “Birthing” act, which he performed many times, including at the 1993 Wigstock drag festival in New York. There, he wore a bulging costume from which Rainbird, his wife, burst out like a newborn, covered in red gunk and with links of sausages as an umbilical cord.
Bowery loved to provoke outrage, commenting after one particularly extreme show involving an onstage enema: “If I have to ask, ‘Is this idea too sick?’ I know I am on the right track.”
Bowery’s sister said that his desire to shock was partly a response to his conservative upbringing in Australia. “My parents encouraged us immensely to conform,” she said, “but at the same time, we were told to stand out, so we were pretty confused. When someone wants you to conform because they don’t accept who you are, you have a choice: You conform and you lose yourself, or you react.”
‘Disco Monster Terrorist’
“Flesh is the most fabulous fabric,” Bowery once said, and the body’s expressive potential is a through line in his work. Even for an artist strongly associated with clothing, some of Bowery’s most enduring images show him completely nude.
He began sitting for a series of portraits with the painter Lucian Freud in 1990, often posing for seven hours a day. When a show of Freud’s work prominently featuring these paintings opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993, it represented the beginnings of a legitimacy in the fine art world that Bowery had long been seeking.
Though Bowery was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1988, he only told Rainbird and his friend Sue Tilley, instructing them to explain his absence once he was gone with a characteristic quip: “Tell them I’ve gone to Papua New Guinea.” He died on Dec. 31, 1994, of AIDS-related meningitis and pneumonia.
In a biography of Bowery that Tilley published in 1998, she describes his final moments lying in hospital under an oxygen mask, hooked up to a tangle of tubes. “It really was a fantastic look,” she writes, “and if he had seen someone else with it, we were sure that he would have soon been wearing it to nightclubs.”
Freud paid for Bowery’s body to be sent back to Australia, where he was buried next to his mother. At the funeral, the grave had to be widened to fit his plus-size coffin. As in life, there was no conventional space big enough to accommodate Bowery.
In a song about Bowery released the year after his death, Boy George lauded him as a “disco monster terrorist, hanging in the Tate with Turner and van Gogh.” Three decades later, the Tate Modern show is placing Bowery in the artistic canon.
In an interview, Rainbird reflected on how Bowery would feel about this moment: “He’d be absolutely over the moon,” she said. “He wanted to be famous and he knew he was a genius. He’d be very pleased that people were finally taking note.”
Leigh Bowery!
Feb. 27 and through Aug. 31 at Tate Modern, in London; tate.org.uk.
“You kinda have this Wednesday Addams vibe going on.”
I shrieked.
I was wearing my best armor: a black dress that accentuated my curves, a striped bolero to cover the arms I’ve resented for years and black platform sandals displaying ruby toes. My dark hair was in wild, voluminous curls and my sultry makeup was finished with an inviting Chanel rouge lip.
I would’ve preferred the gentleman at the speed dating event had likened my efforts to, at least, Morticia, a grown woman. But in this crowd of men and women ages ranging from roughly 21 to 40, I suppose my baby face gave me away.
My mind flitted back to a conversation I had with my physical therapist about modern love: Dating in L.A. has become monotonous.
The apps were oversaturated and underwhelming. And it seemed more difficult than ever to naturally meet someone in person.
She told me about her recent endeavor in speed dating: events sponsoring timed one-on-one “dates” with multiple candidates. I applauded her bravery, but the conversation had mostly slipped my mind.
Two years later, I had reached my boiling point with Jesse, a guy I met online (naturally) a few months prior who was good on paper but bad in practice.
Knowing my best friend was in a similar situationship, I found myself suggesting a curious social alternative.
Much of my knowledge of speed dating came from cinema. It usually involved a down-on-her-luck hopeless romantic or a mature workaholic attempting to be more spontaneous in her dating life, sitting across from a montage of caricatures: the socially-challenged geek stumbling through his special interests; the arrogant businessman diverting most of his attention to his Blackberry; the pseudo-suave ladies’ man whose every word comes across rehearsed and saccharine.
Nevertheless, I was desperate for a good distraction. So we purchased tickets to an event for straight singles happening a few hours later.
Walking into Oldfield’s Liquor Room, I noticed that it looked like a normal bar, all dark wood and dim lighting. Except its patrons flanked the perimeter of the space, speaking in hushed tones, sizing up the opposite sex.
Suddenly in need of some liquid courage, we rushed back to the car to indulge in the shooters we bought on our way to the venue — three for $6. I had already surrendered $30 for my ticket and I was not paying for Los Angeles-priced cocktails. Ten minutes later, we were ready to mingle.
The bar’s back patio was decked out with tea lights and potted palm plants. House-pop music put me in a groove as I perused the picnic tables covered with conversation starters like “What’s your favorite sexual position?” Half-amused and half-horrified, I decided to use my own material.
We found our seats as the host began introductions. Each date would last two minutes — a chime would alert the men when it was time to move clockwise to the next seat. I exchanged hopeful glances with the women around me.
The bell rang, and I felt my buzz subside in spades as my first date sat down. This was really happening.
Soft brown eyes greeted me. He was polite and responsive, giving adequate answers to my questions but rarely returning the inquiry. I sensed he was looking through me and not at me, as if he had decided I wasn’t his type and was biding his time until the bell rang. I didn’t take it personally.
Bachelor No. 2 stood well over six feet with caramel-brown hair and emerald eyes. He oozed confidence and warmth when he spoke about how healing from an accident a few years prior inspired him to become a physical therapist.
I tried not to focus on how his story was nearly word-perfect to the one I heard him give the woman before me. He offered to show me a large surgery scar, rolling up his right sleeve to reveal the pale pink flesh — and a well-trained bicep. Despite his obvious good looks and small-town charm, something suspicious gnawed at me. I would later learn he had left the same effect on most of the women.
My nose received Bachelor No. 3 before my eyes. His spiced cologne quickly engulfing my senses. He had a larger-than-life presence, seeming to be a character himself, so I asked for his favorite current watch.
“I love ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty,’” he actually said.
“Really?”
“Oh yeah, it’s my favorite. Oh, and ‘Wednesday.’ You kinda have this Wednesday Addams vibe going on.”
I was completely thrown to hear this 40-something man’s favorite programs centered around teenage girls, and by his standards, I resembled one of them. Where was the host with the damn bell?
Although a few conversations clearly left impressions, most of the dates morphed into remnants of information like fintech, middle sibling, allergic to cats, etc. Perhaps two minutes was too short to spark genuine chemistry.
After a quick lap around the post-date mingling, we practically raced to the car. A millisecond after the doors closed, my friend said, “I think I’m going to call him.” I knew she wasn’t referring to any of the men we met tonight. The last few hours were all in vain. “And you should call Jesse.”
I scoffed at her audacity.
When I arrived home and called him, it only rang once.
The following three hours of witty banter and cheeky innuendos were bliss until the call ended on a low note, and I remembered why I tried speed dating in the first place.
Jesse and I had great chemistry but were ultimately incompatible. He preferred living life within his comfort zone while I craved adventure and variety. He couldn’t see past right now, and I was too busy planning the future to live in the moment.
Still, in a three-hour call, long before the topic of commitment soured things, we laughed at the mundanity of our day, traded wildest dreams for embarrassing anecdotes, and voiced amorous intentions that would make Aphrodite’s cheeks heat.
Why couldn’t I have had a conversation like that with someone at the event?
It’s possible I was hoping to find the perfect replica of my relationship with Jesse. But when I had the opportunity to meet someone new, I reserved my humor and my empathy.
Also, despite knowing Jesse and I weren’t a good match, I thought we had a “chance connection” that I needed to protect. In reality, if I had shown up to speed dating as my complete self, that would have been more than enough to stir sparks with a new flame.
It would be several more weeks before I was ready to release my attachment to Jesse. But when I did, I had a better appreciation for myself and my capacity for love.
The author is a multidisciplinary writer and mother based in Encino.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
Editor’s note: On April 3, L.A. Affairs Live, our new storytelling competition show, will feature real dating stories from people living in the Greater Los Angeles area. Tickets for our first event will be on sale starting Tuesday.
Warner Bros. Discovery said Thursday that it prefers the latest offer from rival Hollywood studio Paramount over a bid it accepted from Netflix.
Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Bloomberg
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The Warner Bros. Discovery board announced late Thursday afternoon that Paramount’s sweetened bid to buy the entire company is “superior” to an $83 billion deal it had struck with Netflix for the purchase of its streaming services, studios, and intellectual property.
Netflix says it is pulling out of the contest rather than try to top Paramount’s offer.
“We’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid,” the streaming giant said in a statement.
Warner had rejected so many offers from Paramount that it seemed as though it would be a fruitless endeavor. Speaking on the red carpet for the BAFTA film awards last weekend, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos dared Paramount to stop making its case publicly and start ponying up cash.
‘If you wanna try and outbid our deal … just make a better deal. Just put a better deal on the table,” Sarandos told the trade publication Deadline Hollywood.
Netflix promised that Warner Bros. would operate as an independent studio and keep showing its movies in theaters.
But the political realities, combined with Paramount’s owners’ relentless drive to expand their entertainment holdings, seem to have prevailed.
Paramount previously bid for all of Warner — including its cable channels such as CNN, TBS, and Discovery — in a deal valued at $108 billion. Earlier this week, Paramount unveiled a fresh proposal increasing its bid by a dollar a share.
On Thursday, hours before the Warner announcement, Sarandos headed to the White House to meet Trump administration officials to make his case for the deal.
The meetings, leaked Wednesday to political and entertainment media outlets, were confirmed by a White House official who spoke on condition he not be named, as he was not authorized to speak about them publicly.
President Trump was not among those who met with Sarandos, the official said.
While Netflix’s courtship of Warner stirred antitrust concerns, the Paramount deal is likely to face a significant antitrust review from the U.S. Justice Department, given the combination of major entertainment assets. Paramount owns CBS and the streamer Paramount Plus, in addition to Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and other cable channels.
The offer from Paramount CEO David Ellison relies on the fortune of his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. And David Ellison has argued to shareholders that his company would have a smoother path to regulatory approval.
Not unnoticed: the Ellisons’ warm ties to Trump world.
Larry Ellison is a financial backer of the president.
David Ellison was photographed offering a MAGA-friendly thumbs-up before the State of the Union address with one of the president’s key Congressional allies: U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican.
Trump has praised changes to CBS News made under David Ellison’s pick for editor in chief, Bari Weiss.
The chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, told Semafor Wednesday that he was pleased by the news division’s direction under Weiss. She has criticized much of the mainstream media as being too reflexively liberal and anti-Trump.
“I think they’re doing a great job,” Carr said at a Semafor conference on trust and the media Wednesday. As Semafor noted, Carr previously lauded CBS by saying it “agreed to return to more fact-based, unbiased reporting.”
‘The Wire’ Star Bobby J. Brown
He’s Trapped Inside Barn Fire!!!
Listen To Dispatch Audio
Published
Broadcastify.com
Here’s the dispatch audio from the fatal barn fire that killed “The Wire” actor Bobby J. Brown … and you hear dispatchers saying he’s trapped in the building after trying to start an old Cadillac.
TMZ obtained the dispatch audio, which also reveals Bobby’s wife called for help. It sounds like a huge inferno, the barn is 50-feet-by-100 and — by the end of the call — it’s all up in flames.
We broke the story … Bobby died Tuesday from smoke inhalation. The deadly fire started after Bobby entered the barn to jump-start a car. His wife suffered severe burns trying to save him.
Bobby played Officer Bobby Brown on the hit HBO series “The Wire” … and his other credits include “Law & Order: SVU” and “We Own This City.”
He was 62.
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