Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
When sorting through all the stories, it’s important to remember that Andy Warhol’s Factory had a certain underpinning of blue-collar conservatism. Warhol’s right-hand men, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey and Fred Hughes, were all Catholics, with the artist himself going to church every Sunday. When his boyfriend asked him what he prayed for, Warhol said, “Money.” There’s a scene in Bob Colacello’s memoir where the transgender Candy Darling is subjected to a lesbian sex show. “I’ve never seen anything so disgusting in my life,” she says. “Real ladies don’t behave this way.”
Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) broke as many taboos as any of Warhol’s superstars, with little evidence of any secret reactionism. His recently opened retrospective at the Tate Modern demonstrates his profound creativity and impact, with the official literature arguing persuasively that he inspired the likes of Alexander McQueen, Jeffrey Gibson, Anohni and Lady Gaga. The catalogue opens by noting that Bowery could be called a “fashion designer, club monster, performer, model, TV personality, musician and artist,” with the caveat that he personally resisted such classifications, saying “If you label me, you negate me.” (Candy Darling, for her part, wanted to be a legitimate Hollywood starlet.)
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Bowery’s signature looks tended to land him somewhere between Ronald McDonald and Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. The harlequin makeup merged with the tragedy of the human body in the dripping shimmer he applied to his bald pate. It was joyous, but it looked like his head was sprouting something alien, or perhaps weeping glitter.
His best-known work was a performance in the window of Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988. For five days, Bowery occupied the space behind a two-way mirror—he could see his reflection, but not the passersby who ogled his voguing. It’s hard to overstate how ahead of its time this piece was. Yes, it was well before Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present (2010) at the Museum of Modern Art, but it has come to predict so much about our current reality, in which it’s fairly difficult not to become a preening creature in a hall of mirrors. There’s even something of OnlyFans culture in this piece, as the gallery’s proximity to SoHo had some contemporary onlookers describe others in the crowd as “a bit dodgy.”
But you can still look good in a narcotizing reflection world. Bowery did. One of the dresses worn in the mirror performance is on display at the Tate, a masked A-line dress with a cape, green satin with a salmon-pink lining. Capturing the remnants of a figure such as Bowery is difficult; luckily, he had many high-profile collaborators. The photography of Fergus Greer (b.1964) gave Bowery’s radical outfits the proper magazine cover treatment.
My favorite documentation of the Bowery body comes from Lucien Freud (1922-2011). Nude With Leg Up (Leigh Bowery) (1992) shows him sprawling. He is mostly off the bed, except for the elevated calf. Freud could do a lot for a person sitting in bed, but Bowery didn’t get to where he was by following the rules.
“Leigh Bowery!” is at Tate Modern through August 31, 2025.