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Documenting a Legend
By HENRY P. RALEIGH
ART TIMES May, 2005
Documentations
of artists tend
to be fairly predictable affairs, homages rather than critiques — the camera caresses the artist's works, a few glimpses
of the early days, the artist pontificating on art and life, perhaps even hamming
it up. Henri Georges Clouzot's 1956, "Le Mystere Picasso" is a notable
case in point, a handful of gallery and museum personalities attesting to the
art's significance - actually the same folks that had elevated it in the first
place. The 1972 "Painters Painting" featuring Warhol, de Kooning,
Johns, Hoffman and Rauschenberg, and the 1992 "Joseph Cornell: Works in
a Box" are typical of this genre. Celestial celebrations are reserved for
long dead artists in Hollywood epics and only if the artist is of sufficient
historic stature to call for a Charlton Heston or a Kirk Douglas. But the average
artist documentary is relatively sedate and invariably polite, its interest
lies principally in its information value, a good deal less in its entertainment
value. There are exceptions - "Schiele in Prison" in 1980, made by
Mick Gold, a rock photographer, reveals the paranoia that marked Egon Schiele's
tortured self-portraits, much aided by readings from Schiele's prison diary.
Yet in this as well is the static sameness shared by other documentaries. A
more recent one, however, is quite another matter and is enough to make your
hair stand on end. It’s the 2002 "The Legend of Leigh Bowery"
directed by Charles Atlas, a filmmaker who has also to his credit an acclaimed
documentary of Merce Cunningham. After a short run in a London theater the film
played briefly in New York's Cinema Village before going directly to a 2004
DVD (Palm Pictures and Arthouse Films).
Leigh Bowery is probably not well known to American
art audiences. He made but two club appearances in New York in 1993 —
few would know that Leigh Bowery was to London's club underworld of drugs and
drag queens of the 1980's what Warhol was to Manhattan's arty underworld of
the 1960's. That's as far as a comparison can go for Warhol is a Mr. Rogers
compared to Bowery and his singularly bizarre work. Called variously a fashion
designer, an entertainer, a performance artist, a musician he is difficult to
define although not a surprising product of the Post-Punk art world of the last
half century with its characteristic in-your-face taste for range and decadence.
Anyone familiar with Lucian Freud's paintings would have seen portraits of Bowery
in the nude — a bald, bloated, six-foot four monument of a man. He was
Freud's favorite model.
It
is just as difficult to place Leigh Bowery's art in any of the usual categories
for he was the art. As fashion designer he made outlandish costumes solely for
himself, at times for drag dance troupes, as entertainer he offered the visual
shock of his clothing creations in often public spaces, and as performance artist
he provided voyeuristic and frequently alarmingly obscene presentations of himself
as monster and clown. At the d'Offay gallery in London Bowery wore a succession
of costumes, preening behind a one-way glass, appearing to an audience as a
child, a woman, an animal, as a blue-skinned Hindu goddess — a performance
that went on for several days, portions shown in the documentary. The monster/clown
aspect permeated all of his work and is both arresting and disturbing, qualities
well captured in Atlas' film.
Everything about Leigh Bowery is artifice, he transformed
himself into his art through the manipulation of the ample flesh of his body
by taping and mastic glue into strange, perverted anatomical aberrations This
is an art made to be photographed, to fix on film the threatening intimidation
and almost hypnotically fascination of his designs. The documentary is at time
horrifying yet not without a horrifying beauty.
In
1985 Leigh Bowery co-founded the notorious London disco club Taboo, renowned
for its sexual and drug excesses. Here Bowery performed and was seen by Rosie
O'Donnell who would later back a short-lived Broadway production, Taboo-The
Musical. Scored by Boy George the character of Leigh Bowery was played by Matt
Lucas, a British comedian. Included in the film are interviews with Damien Hirst,
Lucian Freud's daughter, Normal Rosenthal of the Royal Academy of Art, Boy George
and others - the DVD adds a special interview with Rosie O'Donnell.
In
1994 Leigh Bowery filmed his marriage to his long-time assistant, Nicola Bateman
as an art piece. HIV positive, a fact he successfully concealed from all who
knew him and his new wife, Bowery died six months after his marriage and was
buried in Australia next to his mother at his place of birth, a town with the
unlikely name, Sunshine.
"The Legend of Leigh Bowery" is not a film
for the squeamish. It is, nonetheless, an absorbing document of a period in
the British New Romanticism movement much as the Morrissey/Warhol "The
Chelsea Girls" and the Palmer/Weisman "Ciao! Manhattan" is for
our own less than attractive cultural moment.
