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LEIGH BOWERY ARTICLES
THE BLITZ KIDS
I know I make jokes about excess weight and girth, chiding those who seem to be a rolling flab-alanche of flesh. Well, no more. I've learned to appreciate the wide human form from the paintings of Botero and Botticelli and films of Federico Fellini. But no form is as "phat" as the late Leigh Bowery's. The British-by-way-of-Australia performance artist is being celebrated in Violette Editions' colorful new book Leigh Bowery. (He died in 1994 from complications due to AIDS.) During his life, Bowery turned his brutal beauty into a canvas—an ebullient, flabby billboard that painters, choreographers, designers and he himself made surprisingly riveting.


Bowery wasn't looking to portray conventional good-looks. Though he dressed in drag, he often defied the glamorous drag image. He covered himself in blood, shit, black face, Saran Wrap, barbed wire, naughty slogans and Spandex. But many artists were fascinated with him. British designer John Galliano used Bowery in his runway shows. Choreographer Michael Clark used him as a dancer. Lucian Freud painted Bowery naked for pieces that proudly hang in London's Tate Gallery and New York's Met. Bowery himself made every evening a costumed event.

Whether dressed up as a hideously distorted clown or an imperfect drag beauty, Bowery seemed to be an inspiration. Not just for an audience that wanted to be entertained by "the freak," but also for those who wanted their nightmares and insecurities transformed into art. Bowery used his body to create brutal, self-deprecating displays. But he did it with great love.

In America, Bowery is probably best remembered for one of the most vivid scenes in 1993's Wigstock, a documentary about the annual Wigstock festival in New York's Tompkins Square Park. Dressed in a Day-Glo green wig and a painfully cinched muumuu, Bowery performed a bit that was both horrifying and funny.

As day turned into night, he jumped onto a stage in a hideously skin-tight mask with slits for eyes, heavy pancake makeup and Mr. Bill lips. He screeched out the words to "All You Need is Love"—karaoke style—as if he were being fistfucked, galloping around like a retarded can-can girl. Suddenly, he pretended to faint. His legs spread. Then something oozed from his fake vagina: a bloody, naked bald woman carting sausages like afterbirth. This wasn't good clean drag fun. This was no limp-wristed Bette Davis impersonator. This was Halloween 3 live on stage. Few rejoiced at Wigstock's first baby girl. Most of the glamorous queens were in shock, having heard all about this drag hero as the personification of stiff British dignity. But Bowery was there to implode gay/drag stereotypes. They expected Lady Di. They got Lizzie Borden.

Bowery started as a club kid, riding the garish fringe of U.K. punk through the flouncy frivolity of the New Romantic scene into the fragmented electrolysis of rave culture. He made every move a staged electric one—from running his own sexy, scary club Taboo to running down the catwalk.

He passed through looks—hardly just costume changes—that the public might only spy for a moment. Leigh Bowery captures them all. In the book's pages we see creations beautiful and brutal: the bare-assed painter's model (He had no problems going out in nothing more than hat and pumps.), the sexless nomad, the white-mouthed Afro-wigged mammy and S&M wrestler.

Author Hilton Als explains how Bowery affected his parents, designer pals like Susanne Bartsch and friends like Boy George who wrote Bowery's afterword.

"Leigh was a very interesting, but typically English eccentric exotic creature who became a legend very quickly," says Boy George, on the phone from Atlanta. "He was impossible to understand. It was also impossible to believe Lee could top his last outfit, but he always did."

Bowery's art got stuck in your face so it would eventually get stuck in your mind.
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