Leigh Bowery was a groundbreaking performance artist, club entrepreneur, fashion designer, musician…. a thief, a shitkicker and…uh…he wanted to be famous.
Well, that last bit is a quote from John Water’s Female Trouble.
I first met Leigh in the early 1980s at a disastrous dinner party (long story, but the host got arrested for shoplifting). We were all on the dole, but everyone was incredibly creative, mostly uneducated (formally) and emotionally fractured, but also fiercely intelligent, bursting with energy and possessing a confidence that came from God knows where.
He was deeply inspired by Waters’ films (when he was dying of an AIDS-related illness, he checked into hospital under the pseudonym “John Waters”) and several performances, looks, and punk-campness of Leigh’s in this new Tate show are directly informed by his admiration for Waters and Divine, as well as classic Hollywood, Jean Genet, Dame Edna Everage, the cinema of Andy Warhol, Georges Bataille, Klaus Naomi, S&M imagery… and Transformer toys.
Leigh is often put in the bracket of ‘fashion’, but his creativity was so immense, so inter-disciplinary, and so multi-layered that this retrospective needs to be seen in the Tate. In line with so many artists on the fringes, he produced art that went beyond the gallery, using his body and his identity as his canvas in the same way artists like Gina Pane, Cindy Sherman, Hermann Nitsch and Marina Abramović did/do.
Yes, there are mannequins with his glorious creations on them, but the curator, Fiontán Moran, has put them in context, which is so important when looking at an unconventional artist like Leigh, whose life really was his art.
There are rooms dedicated to fashion, clubbing, his work with the Michael Clark dance company, his later performances, and his modelling work with Lucian Freud.
The galleries are arranged semi-chronologically starting with his home: the council flat he lived in with Trojan in East London, decorated with the infamous Star Trek wallpaper. Alongside are his early outfits and the publications he began to appear in. There is also an early film clip from “Hail The New Puritan” (1986), directed by Charles Atlas, featuring a hilarious bitchfest between Leigh and designer Rachel Auburn. There are so many difficult-to-source clips (no i-phones back then… thank God!) of films and videos throughout the exhibition, by filmmakers like John Maybury, Dick Jewel, and Charles Atlas, which is really needed with someone as funny, erudite and of course as visual as Leigh. They set the tone nicely and are all very entertaining.
Leigh, like most creatives of this period, never really made any money, surviving on the odd gig he got (paid trips to New York, Levis and Pepe jeans, designing for Michael Clark), by being a very good shoplifter, and as Sue Tilley tells us in her biography of Leigh, by stealing money from Lucian Freud who left wadges of fifty-pound notes lying around. “He leaves it on purpose” he told Sue, “Because he wants me to steal it”.
The “disco room” at the Tate looks at clubs, which were safe spaces for marginalised groups, a way to express ourselves freely through dance, fashion and music, which was especially important during a time of widespread homophobia and racial tension.
When he opened Taboo nightclub, it became Leigh’s stage, and every night was a “performance” where he could shine, show off his latest creations, and throw himself on the floor covered in “Disco juice”. It became the club in London, with everybody desperate to get on the guest list. It was at Taboo that Mick Jagger said to Leigh: “Fuck off, freak,” to which Bowery countered, “Fuck off, fossil.” He was sharp.
As time went on and AIDS took hold, Leigh’s looks and performances became more confrontational, and two of his most influential – and extreme – performances are covered here. During an AIDS benefit in Brixton, Bowery, who had given himself an enema before going onstage, lost control of his bowels, and “accidentally” sprayed the audience. Letters of complaints appeared in the press, giving him more publicity. Later, he revealed that he was the “angry lesbian” writing the letters, perhaps in homage to Joe Orton (another hero of his).
The other notorious performance was when he “gave birth” to a blood and excrement-covered woman on stage, his friend and later wife, Nicola Bateman. Once again, using the body to shock and stimulate a response.
Footage at Tate also features the 1988 performance at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, where he appeared behind a one-way mirror for a week. He couldn’t see the audience, and so it became less about performance and more about the act of looking. We see a clip of Dick Jewell’s film “what’s your reaction to the show?” which has honest opinions by gallery visitors: “Not the kind of thing you’d write home about is it?” says one disgruntled gallery visitor!
My absolute favourite detail is halfway through the show. The curator, Moran, has placed a small photo of Leigh on the gallery’s toilet door. It is a genius nod to Leigh’s obsessive cottaging, a reminder that pre-internet, gay sex was often public – and performative.
Over thirty years after his death, his influence is everywhere, from countless artists, creatives and performers, like Ru Paul, John Galliano, Charles Jeffrey, Lady Gaga and New Rave pop stars. Leigh’s camp aesthetic is now mainstream, but in his time, it was unique, dangerous, sexual and subversive.
But for all the fun, outrageousness and sequins, death hangs heavy over this show. Leigh’s former flatmate, Trojan, was an early casualty, dying of a drug overdose in 1986, followed by Mark Vaultier, the acerbic Taboo doorman (“Would you let yourself in?”), also overdosing in 1986. Then AIDS completely devastated the scene as one friend after another disappeared from the dancefloor, including Leigh himself on New Year’s Eve 1994, not long after he gave birth to Nicola for the last time, at the Freedom Café in Soho.
Words and photos James Payne ©Artlyst 2025 except for photo of Leigh Bowery and Lucian Freud
Leigh Bowery! is at Tate Modern from 27 February to 31 August.
Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon by Sue Tilley is published by Thames & Hudson