“Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern explores the life and work of the Australian performance artist, designer, club promoter, and model. An icon of London’s 1980s nightlife, Bowery transgressed and transcended his era’s conventions of gender and sexuality, forging an extraordinary aesthetic universe of outlandish costumes, shocking imagery, and outrageous performances. Organized by Fiontán Moran in collaboration with the Leigh Bowery estate, the exhibition provides an expansive look at Bowery’s world, beginning with his debut on the London scene in the early 1980s and showcasing his groundbreaking collaborations with artists including Lucian Freud, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Michael Clark. 

In celebration of the show, Artforum revisits an essay on Bowery’s art by writer and curator Bob Nickas, published in the magazine’s February 2004 issue.

“Bowery’s uncanny ability to visually disorient the senses remains unmatched, his reinvention of costume as sculpture groundbreaking,” writes Nickas. “From the tripped-out tribalism of Forcefield and the psychedelic erotics of Christian Holstad to the work of designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Alexander McQueen, his vocabulary, punctuated by about a million sequins, resonates to this day.” —The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan