A portrait of the artists as a pair of young wastrels
standpointmag.co.uk
standpointmag.co.uk
http://www.artcritical.com/2014/04/30/phoebe-hoban-on-lucian...
In the first portrait, Leigh Bowery (Seated) 1990, his figure overwhelms a red armchair. Indeed, Freud kept enlarging the canvas with new strips in order to contain him. And yet, as large as he was, Bowery had an almost dancerly grace. Even in a seemingly straightforward pose like that of Naked Man, Back View (1991–92), where only the model’s back is shown as he sits on a low ottoman, Freud managed to capture a sense of both the baroque and the Buddha-like embedded in Bowery’s presence.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/01/the-nig...
Subject: Leigh Bowery (1961- 94), a man of gargantuan scale physically and culturally, a transvestite performance artist, fetishist designer, leader of the band Minty and theatrical giver of birth.
Distinguishing features: Bowery is a character out of Renaissance art - perhaps Silenus, the companion of Dionysus. His flesh is a magnificent ruin, at once damaged and riotously alive. Who knew skin was so particoloured? To count the hues of even one of his feet is impossible: purple, grey, yellow, brown, the paint creamy, calloused, bulging. In a velvet chair tilted down towards us on the raked stage of the wooden studio floor, his mass looms up and dwarfs us. Walk close your eyes are probably the height of his penis. Bowery's violet-domed, wrinkly tube hangs between thighs marked with sinister spots or cuts his knees are massive. Bowery is a painted monument who quietly contemplates his existence inside this flesh.
Leigh Bowery - Wigstock 1994, unexpectedly giving birth on stage to the first baby born at Wigstock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3yVBhVrltU
Leigh Bowrey (Take Me To The Club by Mannequin): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsLLrjnew84
If you like Leigh Bowery, one of his recent spiritual descendants is Daniel Lismore.
I also really love Klaus Nomi's work too, of course.
While I was exploring Leigh Bowery's work on youtube, I ran across VJ ladypat, who made a mesmerizing video to Leigh Bowery's charming lullaby "Useless Man" (N-fucking-SFW!!!):
A RMX BY ADAM SKY OF THE SEMINAL MINTY / LEIGH BOWERY TRACK 'USELESS MAN'. VIDEO BY LADYPAT. 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfC5OtT-Dzc
Ladypat also did some other beautiful videos with feedback and cellular automata effects that I like, for a beloved eccentric local celebrity in Brighton named Boogaloo Stu, who's quite a unique character himself:
Boogaloo Stu "Bazooka": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBDZ-KZsAzo
Boogaloo Stu "Magic Soul": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmEs1PTPNVk
Puppet Paramour and Sock Puppet Side Show - Boogaloo Stu, Dip Your Toe - Brighton Fringe 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by-GH0J4ZV8
I'm struck by the 1974 photo of these two reprobates: by today's standards they appear quite formally dressed and put together.
(My wife was a huge fan of both Bacon and Freud and would have loved this article. It's why I read it, out of a sense of nostalgia, but it turned out to be great on its own merits)
Bacon was an actual aristocrat and Freud the descendant of central-European "Jewish royalty"; of course they knew how to dress.
In the 60s and 70s I dressed up to get on a plane. Yes, as a little boy too young to wear long pants I still wore a dress jacket.
Watching "The Magic Christian" in particular is pretty interesting in this regard: at the end there is an...amazing... scene contrasting dressed up middle class businessmen with the hippies. By today's standards those radical hippy dress is pretty staid.
Middle class? Compared to what? Royal cloaks and tunics? They look like normally fine overcoats, the kind that can cost anything from $200 to several thousand dollars depending on the marker.
The distinctively British obsession with class and royalty never ceases to amaze me (especially since it's rarely actual upper class people that take joy in bringing others down as "middle class" -- not to mention that in Britain middle class is leveled at people making much more money than most commenting sneeringly at the "middle class" make, as if those sneering identify with royalty themselves).
>the kind that can cost anything from $200 to several thousand dollars depending on the marker.
The British typically pay for their clothing in pounds.
A freakishly dressed friend of mine (and gumby's) bought her best vintage outfits at a used clothing store in the Boston Garment District called "Dollar a Pound" during the 80's. Then she moved to London, so I suggested she search for a clothing store called "Pound a Kilogram".
https://garmentdistrict.com/departments/?target=by-the-pound
It all started in the 80’s.
By The Pound’s road to becoming a Boston institution began in 1981 when one Saturday morning a few bales were opened on the floor of an old Cambridge soap factory. Back then it was called Dollar-A-Pound, and there were only a few hours a week you could shop through the thousands of pounds of clothing. We opened at 7:45 because people just kept coming in earlier & earlier and closed at 2:00 so that we could go out to the racetrack. Many things have changed since those days. By the Pound has been given many coats of paint & is now open 7 days a week instead of one.
Umm .. yeah. The going theory for why the UK fails, consistently, to prosecute child sex offenders in the halls of its Parliament, is because its a "national security issue" due to the facts of 'what Russia knows'. So I wouldn't be so sure to think the UK isn't under Russian thumb...