Leigh Bowery! @ Tate Modern
Art should elicit emotion. It doesn’t matter if it makes you happy or sad, angry, confused, appalled, disgusted or curious. It just needs to elicit something. Anything. The worst thing is to walk out of an art exhibition and shrug your shoulders. Based on that criteria Tate Modern’s Lee Bowery! show scores 10 out of 10. Actually, it scores 12 out of 10 because the show, much like Bowery, is egregiously over the top. The problem is that the biggest emotion it raises is: Why?
The name Leigh Bowery is probably new to a lot of people, but since the show is in the Tate most people probably assume he was an under-the-radar painter or maybe a struggling sculptor. His only link to traditional forms of art comes from the fact that he frequently sat for Lucien Freud. Half a dozen of those works are hung in this show, along with a handful of other paintings by artists that were also inspired to depict Bowery. The Freud’s are superb and the rest are mostly forgettable. You probably won’t even stop to look at them because they pale in comparison to the eccentricity of the real thing. Bowery was a fixture of the late 80s club scene, often dressing in eye-catching homemade costumes with his face painted to match. The many photo archives of Bowery in costume make it clear just how wild, and frequently disturbing, his looks could be.
Is dressing up art? This show doesn’t even try to make that case, because by all accounts Bowery’s only reason for being was self promotion. He didn’t just want attention, he craved it. His flamboyant costumes and outlandish performances were a way to ensure no matter where he was — on the street or in his own club, called ‘Taboo’ (naturally) — that he would be the centre of attention. He wasn’t attempting political commentary or social observations. In fact, he didn’t seem to have any point to make other than to use fashion as a way to ensure all eyes were on him. That doesn’t make it art, and in room after room of Bowery vamping it up I kept asking myself: Why is this in the Tate?
The thing is, Bowery was clearly skilled with a needle and thread and costumes have long been established as a viable form of art. The V&A collection has over 3,500, including a few made by Bowery, but it’s not an area in which I’m well versed. I kept thinking of the scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep) gives a scathing dressing-down to Andy (Anne Hathaway) about how her boring old cerulean blue sweater has a revered backstory that represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. If Tate was dedicating an entire half floor to a Bowery retrospective then I assumed that I had much to learn. I expected to encounter insightful wall text that might open my eyes to Bowery’s legacy. Maybe an Oscar winning costume designer meticulously studied his works, or maybe there would be some inspiring quotes from artists like Lady Gaga or Alexander McQueen who were clearly influenced. If any such direct links exist they either weren’t researched or were excluded from the exhibition.
Instead what you get is a show overflowing with photos and anecdotes about Bowery’s antics in and out of the clubs. The whole thing feels like a Monday morning water cooler recap about what Bowery got up to over the weekend. Your jaw will drop and you’ll want to know more, but it’s all just gossip. Bowery’s “art” was essentially just spectacle, and that includes the “birth” and other staged performances he conducted. The more you see the more you realise that his creations were made solely in the interest of his gaining attention. He would have loved social media.
By the time you get to the end you’ll be unsurprised to learn that Bowery, like countless people who were famous for being famous, eventually got stuck in the trap of having to create and stage increasingly more elaborate costumes and shocking acts. By the early 90s his friends had to talk him out of doing blackface, he was squirting his own enema onto an audience, and doing photoshoots in a costume with the C word written in giant letters. None of this was smart or clever or had any merit whatsoever. Even Bowery commented that he had probably gone too far.
Bowery died in 1994, at the age of 33, from an AIDS-related illness. A sad end, but one that probably saved him from whatever form a mid-90s cancellation would have looked like, because that’s where it seemed like he was clearly heading.
Plan your visit
‘Leigh Bowery!’ runs until 31 August 2025.
Tickets from £18 adult / discounts available / children under 12 free
Visit tate.org.uk and follow @tate on Instagram for more info about the venue.
Visit the Leigh Bowery Wikipedia page and follow @leighbowery on Instagram for more info about the artist
Want more London art news and reviews?
Subscribe to the Weekly Newsletter. It’s FREE!