Leigh’s Here!
Ahead of the Tate Modern’s ‘Leigh Bowery!’ exhibition, what can the 21st century learn from the artist’s boundary-shoving life and work?
The stomach
‘I think the only modern thing left to accentuate is the belly’. - Leigh Bowery
Bowery was a shapeshifter, and amongst the hourglass figures, shoulder pads and shapewear of the 80’s, his accentuation of the human stomach stuck out, quite literally. He used his own stomach in his work in a variety of ways - pushing it up and taping it to resemble a pair of breasts, pretending to birth his wife Nicola Bateman, his stomach covered in fake blood and sausages - but it is in his fashion design, featuring daring and rotund silhouettes, that the 21st century can take the most inspiration. Fashion and culture still seem hell-bent on emphasising the flat stomach, accentuating the breasts and the buttocks - silhouettes morphing further and further out of touch with the strangeness of the human form. For starters, we could all get a bit more comfortable with a protruding belly. Why not go further, and choose to wear something that enhances it?
2. The Art of Getting Ready
The phrase ‘getting ready’ drums up similar images for many – hair, clothes, makeup - but the concept has lost some of its sacred status over time. Michael Bracewell explained, ‘New Romanticism wasn’t about going out, it was about getting ready.’ Today, ‘getting ready’ is synonymous with becoming more appealing to others – cleaner, more attractive, more traditionally ‘sexy’. ‘Anybody in their bedsit … could become this legendary outfit,’ - for Leigh and his friends, getting ready was an act of self-creation, becoming pieces of living art in their living rooms. The freedom that nightlife can afford to us is, I believe, often lost in the quest to become more palatable to others. Stewart Laing, a friend of Bowery, said that ‘He came nearest to living his life as a work of art’. To reclassify ‘getting ready’ from an act of becoming more palatable to an act of self-creation, experimentation and artistic expression is the Bowery way.
3. Humans Are Gross
Bowery did some pretty disgusting stuff in his performances, often including his own bodily fluids. I’m not instructing you to go that far. But as we grow more and more obsessed with cleanliness and tidiness– minimal and ‘clean girl’ fashion and lifestyle trends, ripping off body hair in clumps with strips of wax, and pummelling nature with cutthroat cleaning products, Bowery’s embracing of all that is gross and disgusting serves as a gentle reminder that humans can be a bit gross – and it’s part of being alive. A nice hot shower can work wonders. But in order to live freely we must accept the grubbiness of life.
by Betty Hoggar
‘Leigh Bowery!’ opens at the Tate Modern on 27th February and runs till 31st August 2025. All quotes taken from the 2002 documentary ‘The Legend of Leigh Bowery’ dir. Charles Atlas (available on YouTube).