David Bowie Is
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
March 23-August 11, 2013
David Bowie Is (Catalog)
Edited by Victoria Broackles and Geoffrey Marsh
V & A Publishing. 288 pages, $55.
WHETHER you’re a Bowie fan or not, chances are you’ve heard about the sudden return of the Thin White Duke in the form of an album, The Next Day, released in March, which Bowie had been recording in New York over the previous two years, along with three (to date) promotional videos. The first of these accompanied the single announcing the comeback Where Are We Now? Released without fanfare on Bowie’s 66th birthday on January 8th, it received extraordinary global press coverage, overwhelmingly positive, about everything from the melancholic cadences in the singer’s vocal performance to the thematic return to the Berlin of Bowie’s acclaimed trilogy Low (1977), Heroes (1977), and Lodger (1979). These are the albums in which Bowie began experimenting lyrically with the “cut up” technique devised for prose fiction by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. They were also produced, like The Next Day, by Tony Visconti, who—in the absence of any public comment from the performer—has unofficially acted lately as his “voice on earth.” The album sleeve, with its overt referencing of that of Heroes, might likewise suggest an instruction to overlook three decades of Bowie’s subsequent career.
Scottish actress Tilda Swinton—who appeared in the video for the second single, The Stars (are out Tonight)—opened the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum’s David Bowie Is exhibition, giving a slightly surreal dinner speech, addressing the absent singer: “When I asked you if you wanted me to say anything here tonight, you said: ‘Only three words, one of them testicular.’” Bowie, it had seemed and been reported, was indifferent to the Victoria and Albert’s plan to raid his wardrobes, cupboards, bookshelves and photograph albums. Whether this was true or not, he had allowed the curators full access—and, apparently, free choice as to what to display. A more cautious figure might not have welcomed the inclusion of one ’70s fixture, for instance: an elegant cocaine spoon.
Swinton emphasized the perverse reach of Ziggy Stardust, who, always representing himself as an alien, an outsider, or an astronaut, had thereby reflected the marginality experienced by millions of people. Thus, in her words, “the freak becomes the great unifier; the alien is the best company after all.” His biggest-name collaborators may not have been at the launch. But there were plenty of “Blitz Kids,” the now fifty-something New Romantics who had accompanied Bowie in his brilliant 1980 reinvention in the “Ashes to Ashes” video and accompanying album, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). Here was Steve Strange, who’s featured in the video as a Futurist pallbearer (and who has just relaunched his own group, Visage, on the back of Bowie’s re-emergence); legendary DJ Princess Julia, also in the video (and looking cryogenically similar today); actor Bill Nighy; actress Rosario Dawson; model David Gandy; designer Bella Freud; artist Tracey Emin; and pop scions such as Pixie Geldof, daughter of Bob, and Otis Ferry, son of Bryan. The show itself sold out its advance tickets in days, becoming the museum’s fastest selling event of all time—some concern, it transpired, for fans of high culture who believe that the V&A should focus on the more challenging task of stimulating the public’s interest in, say, Renaissance tapestry. But while the V&A might justly be accused of pandering in the case of its 2007 display of Kylie Minogue’s costumes and stage sets, such charges are wide of the mark in Bowie’s case. For this is no casual meander through a series of shrewdly chosen artistic collaborations, nor a predictable romp through the near and not-so-near popular Zeitgeist. What sets David Bowie Is apart is the ease with which it conveys the breadth of the singer’s cultural engagement, and the serious thinking behind his æsthetic choices. While, cleverly, it stands entirely aloof from the question of Bowie’s influence on others, paradoxically it proves the point fully without ever trying. Without his example, much of the inventive or avant-garde end of pop music might never have appeared, or appeared as it did. Still skeptical? Let’s imagine you managed to get a ticket. Consider the scores of open hardbacks and paperbacks suspended above your head as you pass through the first rooms’ focus on the art student, aspirant mime artist, and early, unreconstructed 1960s pop star, “David Jones.” Identifying all of the titles above you is only semi-possible. Of those clearly in view, I spotted a well-thumbed copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Alfred Döblin’s Weimar classic Berlin Alexanderplatz, plus works by George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, D. H. Lawrence, Harold Pinter, and Julian Barnes. A paperback edition of Colin MacInnes’ London-set Beat novel Absolute Beginners (1959) reminds us of Bowie’s later acting role in the 1986 film adaptation—and its glorious theme tune. A 1967 press release nearby announces Bowie’s imminent aim of becoming a novelist. Other titles, however, could just as well belong to any queer youth looking for gender and sexual subversion between the lines. Here is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, Anthony Burgess’ pederastic Earthly Powers and his better-known A Clockwork Orange, William Burroughs’ extreme erotic fantasy The Wild Boys, the Berlin Stories of Christopher Isherwood, and Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince. The real startler, however, is a copy of John Rechy’s 1963 super-gay hustler novel, City of Night, a book that also inspired Jim Morrison and the Doors’ L. A. Woman. What is inescapable as you progress through the chronological arrangement of some 300 of Bowie’s possessions is that, just as his endless commitment to change leaves him polyvalent, so too there have been many different “Bowies” shaped and sanctioned in different cultural contexts. It is surprising to recall, in the world of universal access to the Internet, how often record companies intervened—in the U.S. especially—to “clean up” this artist. Three record sleeves of Bowie’s have been significantly altered, from the airbrushing out his own genitalia as half-man, half-dog on Diamond Dogs in 1974 to 1991’s Tin Machine II, whose original cover featured a row of four nude Kouroi. In the U.S., the statues’ penises were removed. Bowie exclaimed: “Only in America!” His Top of the Pops flirtation with guitarist Mick Ronson during Starman was so legendary an example of gender-bending transgression in ’70s Britain that I’ve convinced myself that I saw it, and was changed by it, at age four. Likewise, the performance that truly told me there was more to humanity than the binary opposition of male and female was the 1979 video for Boys Keep Swinging, an outrageous, comical, low-budget affair in which Bowie impersonated three “female” backup singers in various states of drag debauchery. I recall seeing it repeatedly at age eleven and was both excited and bewildered, since Bowie not only looked awful (as a “woman”), but simultaneously looked just amazing as a man. The opening of the song, as the singer swirled around, jutting hips and crotch into the lens, rang out: “Heaven loves ya/ The clouds part for ya/ Nothing stands in your way/ When you’re a boy// Clothes always fit ya/ Life is a pop of the cherry/ When you’re a boy.” Then, still more challengingly, more clearly homoerotically: “When you’re a boy/ You can wear a uniform/ When you’re a boy/ Other boys check you out.” The lyrics moved on to declare, more routinely: “You get a girl/ To say your favorite things/ When you’re a boy.” Even so, the idea was planted that boys looked good, that they checked each other out. (The movie Grease, a different sort of cultural artifact, had proven exciting and daring in a comparable way just one year before.) RCA (U.S.) refused to release the single, fearing that the transvestism of the promo was market suicide. (Compare this to the Hollywood studios recently passing on Beyond the Candelabra, which aired instead on HBO to considerable acclaim [reviewed in this issue].) The follow-up video, “D.J.,” didn’t help. It featured Bowie strolling with a crowd through the streets, embraced and kissed by people of both sexes. The most fascinating room in the show is one of few that address a single period: in this case, Bowie’s time in Berlin. As well as the expected photographs and letters from a two-year rehab period, there is also: a letter from Christopher Isherwood inviting the singer to an exhibition of his partner Don Bachardy’s paintings; a number of Bowie’s own canvases, including one of Iggy Pop, whose albums The Idiot and Lust for Life he would produce in 1977; and an expressionist portrait he painted of Yukio Mishima, the gay Japanese author of Confessions of a Mask and The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea (one of Bowie’s favorite novels). Isherwood, meanwhile, had attended a 1976 Bowie concert in Berlin with the expatriate artist David Hockney, and met him and Bowie’s wife Angie backstage. Bowie had long been obsessed by the inter-war hedonism associated with the city, experienced by Isherwood and recorded in the two books Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. His published diaries, Liberation: Diaries, Volume Three: 1970–83, however, reveal that while Isherwood was attracted to celebrities who reflected his own self-worth, such as Bowie, this did not mean that he took to his music. On the eve of another Bowie concert in 1978, Isherwood noted: “which I look forward to about as much as a puja. Courage.” Bowie apparently hoped Isherwood might contribute as scriptwriter to the 1978 movie Just a Gigolo, which was directed by David Hemmings and featured Bowie alongside Marlene Dietrich. The film certainly could have done with the attention—it was panned on release, and Bowie quipped that it was “my 32 Elvis Presley movies rolled into one.” His stage and film career is fully featured at the V&A, with a comprehensive selection of clips offering evidence that whenever his roles suited his temperament, the singer had an innate stage and screen presence, and a probably intuitive sense of how to perform. A program for the Broadway production of The Elephant Man, in which Bowie starred in 1980, is signed by John Hurt, who had played the role of Joseph Merrick in the film and compliments him lavishly. Nevertheless, it is on music and performance that Bowie’s chief achievements rest. A fantastic example is the staging and costume he used for a 1979 Saturday Night Live performance of three songs—“The Man Who Sold the World,” “TVC15,” and “Boys Keep Swinging.” Flanked by his backup singers, performance artists, and Studio 54 regulars Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi, Bowie wore an outsized monochrome suit, co-designed with Mark Ravitz and on display adjacently. The costume rendered Bowie totally immobile on stage, but what of that? He was lifted into position by Arias and Nomi. Artists and celebrities flocked to embrace Bowie early on, as is shown by a backstage image taken from the Aladdin Sane tour in New York in 1973, featuring Allen Ginsberg, Bette Midler, Salvador Dalí, and Andy Warhol. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all, however, is footage of Bowie’s sole meeting with Warhol in 1971, which shows an extremely tense Bowie receiving laconic instructions and critical commentary from an off-screen Warhol and utterly refusing to demonstrate any willingness to do as he’s told. After the encounter, the camera still running, Bowie mimes a hara-kiri, showing how painful the experience has been. Bowie had written the song “Andy Warhol” for Hunky Dory that very year. But the line “Andy Warhol looks a scream” had apparently upset the artist. By this time Bowie was already artistically fully formed and commercially well-established and thus ill-disposed to defer to Warhol. He eventually found a way to imply both reconciliation with and condescension toward Warhol by playing him in the 1996 movie Basquiat, in which he wore the deceased artist’s own wig. Bowie freaks have either managed to visit London for the show by now or decided to make do with the catalogue which, though excellent, cannot replicate the experience of total immersion in the galleries. Either way, one challenging question may not be answered to everyone’s taste. The exhibition roves promiscuously across all stages of Bowie’s career but refuses to evaluate the periods of greatest achievement. To those of us for whom the blatant commercialism of Let’s Dance (1983) announced an artistic drought—which would characterize the next thirty years (with notable exceptions)—it comes as a surprise to be asked to consider Bowie’s achievements across five decades. For me at least, it’s the twelve-year period from Space Oddity (1969) to Scary Monsters (1980) that mark Bowie’s distinctive genius, his insolent assault on sexual stereotypes, his phonic brilliance, and his visual style. Still, on the basis of the evidence in this exhibition, that decade alone—and its profound influence on subsequent generations of artists—proves more than enough to secure him a rarefied place among our most legendary rock stars.
Richard Canning’s most recent publication is an edition of Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory for Penguin Classics (2012).
