Tate Modern is not an institution renowned for being funny, but when I read that it was going to mount an exhibition devoted to Leigh Bowery, I guffawed heartily. They’re having a laugh! They really are!
The issue with Bowery is that there are so many issues with Bowery. First, he was not an artist. Not in any meaningful definition of the word. Bon viveur, yes. Nightclub haunter, yes. Clothes designer of sorts, yes, if you’re being generous. Artist, no.
A second problem is that so many British artists of stature who deserve shows at Tate Modern have not had them, yet Bowery is a shoo-in. How come? How is it that Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry — to pick some random names out of a very big bag — have not been granted a Bankside tribute, but Bowery has?
Even by the most active of the Tate’s present selection criteria — the diversity card — he barely qualifies. He was gay. Noisily so. But surely it takes more than that today to earn a sprawling retrospective in the British home of contemporary art? Even an institution as determined to lecture us on identity issues as Tate Modern must see that putting on a Leigh Bowery show is ridiculous overpromotion? It seems not.
So into the Bowery event I plunged, ready to have my ears assailed by screechy nightclub music, my eyes attacked by wonky homemade videos and my artistic soul clobbered by the crass assumption that going out every night and getting drunk in clothes you designed yourself constitutes an important artistic life. I must be clairvoyant. That’s pretty much what we get here.
Although Bowery (1961-94) made most of his impact on the London club scene in the 1980s and early 1990s, he was Australian by birth, from a Melbourne suburb called Sunshine. When he left Sunshine he really did leave the sunshine, spending the rest of his short life — he died of an Aids-related illness — hiding from the day and living at night.
The show starts as it means to continue, with an array of photos of its thickly made-up hero and his look-at-me outfits, with appended piles of repetitive documentary material that seek to paint a bigger picture of him during pauses in the screechy music.
Physically he was a striking specimen, well over 6ft tall and notably beefy. Watching this behemoth squeeze himself into tiny Wizard of Oz outfits as he searched for sartorial distinctiveness struck me as a poignant spectacle rather than one that was creatively impressive. An unhappy clown was seeking the friendship of other clowns.
Because he was such an outlandish presence Bowery attracted the attention of a wide assortment of artists, and their readings of him fill out the show and supply it with its rare highlights. The dancer Michael Clark supplies a sudden burst of tangible achievement with excerpts from a performance called Hail the New Puritan: edgy and exciting music by the Fall; edgy and exciting choreography by Clark; forgettable costumes by Bowery.
Also standing out here are portraits of Bowery by Lucian Freud. On this evidence, posing for Freud constitutes his most valuable contribution to British art. Forget the nightclub prancing and the polka-dot face paint. Where he turns out to have been really transformative was when he unsqueezed himself from the look-at-me costumes and allowed Freud to examine his towering, blanched, oversized nakedness in unflinching detail. Boy, was he a big one.
The half a dozen paintings of Bowery by Freud that pop up here made me yearn for a proper show devoted to this sizzling two-hander. Bowery, bald and big, and Freud, nervy and small, are like combustible chemicals that explode when they meet. A sad close-up of Bowery’s face spots the tenderness in him that the big talk elsewhere tries to hide. A painting devoted to his anaconda-sized penis makes very clear what it was that commanded Freud’s attention. These are some of his best pictures. And they definitely constitute some of Bowery’s best moments.
Elsewhere, the show’s rooms are almost identical. There are, perhaps, minor adjustments to the Bowery persona to be noticed as his short life unfolds — but you would need to be a forensic scientist to spot them. The clothes he designs and makes grow mildly louder and creepier as the S&M moods enlarge. His camp persona hardens into typecasting. But at the time of his early death he was trapped firmly in aesthetic aspic, and it’s hard to see what direction he might have strode in had he survived his era.
Among the scrawled outbursts of nightclub wisdom that wallpaper the event, one felt particularly telling: “I get the Tube to work at nine o’clock when it’s quite empty and I get a cab home. The rest of the time I’m either at home or with friends. So you just get totally divorced from the whole straight world. You can completely isolate yourself.”
To be fair, I am not 100 per cent certain this is Bowery’s voice, or the voice of one of his comrades in the fight against everydayness. There’s so much messy scrawling on the walls, it’s impossible to be certain who scrawled what.
But the sentiments are definitely his. This isn’t really a show about art. It’s a show about Leigh Bowery’s thunderous addiction to himself: about needing to belong and have friends. Which makes it a rather sad event.
Leigh Bowery!, Tate Modern, London, to Aug 31