This post was originally published on artnews.com
“I never want to look ordinary,” Leigh Bowery told i-D magazine in 1985. Tate Modern’s new exhibition on his life and work proves that he succeeded—and then some. A gay icon in 1980s and ’90s London club culture, Bowery was a fashion designer, performance artist, and total original from the start. The show follows him from his arrival in London from Australia at the age of 19 through the inception of his infamous club Taboo, his establishment as an avant-garde fashion visionary, and his rise to greater fame and eventual exploration of graphic varieties of performance art. As the exhibition progresses, it grows darker, following Bowery’s path to body horror and the grotesque. A good portion of the work on view is not by Bowery but, instead, depicts him in his role as a muse (to use a loaded but apt term) among fellow club-goers and other artists ranging from underground figures to Lucian Freud.
“You wouldn’t be interested in me if I didn’t look the way I do,” Bowery once said. “Let’s face it, nobody would.” It’s a line that gets to the heart of his own fraught sense of self-worth, as well as the way he judged others. The first few rooms in the exhibition focus on Taboo, which—during its 1985–86 run before being closed down by a police drug raid—was known for its embrace of sexual freedom and creative risk. Frequented by the likes of Boy George, George Michael, and John Galliano, it was also famous for turning away anyone who was not suitably outrageous in terms of style and comportment. Bowery was ruthless in crafting the world he wanted both inside and outside the club, ensuring that he was surrounded by people who matched (or at least respected) his commitment to pushing boundaries. Tate’s gallery walls are papered with snapshots and Polaroids from Taboo, evoking the grimy authentic abundance of its hedonism.
Bowery’s fashion designs, which he made for himself for clubbing and then eventually also for dancers in ballets by choreographer Michael Clark, are absolutely wild. Between the garments on display in the galleries and the many photos and videos of them in action, we get a comprehensive sense of his outlandish design sensibility. Many outfits have bulbous silhouettes reminiscent of Marie Antoinette, while others feature balaclavas. Still others include ballerina skirts that leave their wearers’ asses bare. Bowery was also obsessed with polka dots, which he connected to signs of illness: zits, herpes sores, and other varieties of pox that he sometimes circled on his face when they were naturally occurring or drew on when they were not.
There are elements of Bowery that are particularly challenging to viewers and curators in 2025. For example, one wall text notes that Bowery performed in blackface and as a Nazi, wearing swastikas, in the 1990s. Neither is pictured anywhere in the exhibition, but the text calls such gestures “offensive.” There are also images of live performances in which Bowery sprayed the audience with enema fluid from his anus, which was just one of several fluids he produced on stage. Shock value was one of his main objectives.
The second half of the exhibition focuses mostly on Bowery’s performance art, which grew more extreme as he neared the end of his life in 1996. His most iconic performance, presented many times, was his “Birth” act, in which he gave birth onstage to his collaborator, Nicola Rainbird, who would become his wife. She began the performance strapped to his chest upside down, then emerged in a bloody show, both of them screaming and covered in stage blood. Bowery also incorporated body horror into other performances, including safety-pinning his mouth, cutting himself with glass, and harming himself in various other ways.
The philosophically transgressive nature of Bowery’s world drew in part on his exploration of the idea of uselessness. In the face of the relentless capitalism of the ’80s and ’90s, what did it mean to refuse to participate in the pursuit of wealth and respectability? Bowery’s life revolved instead around the pursuit of highs of different kinds—many of them drug-induced but also related to the ecstasies of performance, community, dance, music, and unbound creativity.
In an introduction at the exhibition’s press preview, one of the curators, Fiontán Moran, said that Bowery’s work asked “how uselessness could be a productive position.” But the very nature of uselessness, and the quality that makes its celebration transgressive, is that it is not productive. Which brings up a kind of bind: The institutionalization of Bowery’s work, which is antiestablishment at its core, feels counter to its ethos in many ways. It’s a catch-22 of course, because the alternative is for art like this never to find its way to wider audiences. But the disconnect between the work in this exhibition—much of it conceived in squat communities and underground clubs—and the robust pillars of the institution of Tate is jarring. It raises important questions about the evolution of the museum space and shifting definitions of “art.”
In a video made for the BBC and screened in the exhibition, Bowery showcases a series of brash outfits of his own design while shopping and having tea at the stuffiest of London department stores, Harrods. His charm is overwhelming from the moment he steps in front of the camera, and I immediately understood how he captivated so many people during his life. He somehow reminded me of Princess Diana, and indeed, the comparison is not that crazy. Both were ’80s icons, both had personalities that were indescribably magnetic, and both dealt with painful life circumstances that were outside their control—for Diana, the royal family and the effects of its accompanying circus; for Bowery, the criminality of his sexual identity and his eventual death (in 1994) from an AIDS-related illness.
On the surface, Bowery’s club culture and the psychedelic frivolity of his so-called uselessness was about the pursuit of pleasure. But pain underlies this whole show. Darkness shadowed Bowery’s life, both on and behind the proverbial canvas, screen, and stage. In complex and conflicting ways, the exhibition shows how vigorously he danced with the devils that haunted him, from his early days in zit-inspired polka dots to his later ones giving bloody birth over and over, as if in the hope that he might deliver a new world.