What do we do with Leigh Bowery?

The abysmally bad Tate Modern exhibition tells us a lot about the untouchability of queer visual culture

Fergus Greer, Leigh Bowery, 1980s

When I visited Tell Them I’ve Gone to Papua New Guinea at the Fitzrovia Chapel in 2022 (the only remaining evidence of Middlesex Hospital, where Bowery died of AIDS in 1994), I overheard an extremely anxious Australian woman on the phone to someone who was apparently in charge of overseeing the transportation and display of the outfits on display in the gold-laquered chapel. There had clearly been some fuck-up concerning the insurance of one of the pieces, and this gal was getting chewed out for it. “Listen,” she eventually snaps, “it’s not like it’s even the real thing.”

This is how I learn that most of the collection is in fact not original at all, as the non-replicas have been ruined by ‘disco dirt’. During a following talk aimed at dissecting Bowery’s influence on queer culture held by a number of D-list drag performers and designers (naturally, not a single art historian/curator in sight), I stare into the middle distance at a simulacrum of a bodysuit adorned by the words A CUNT where the head should be. Somewhere in this gilded hall, I think, is a very unflattering metaphor for the current state of the institutional art world’s attitude to queer art.

It’s this very same collection that has turned up, at least in part, at the Tate Modern’s newly-opened Leigh Bowery! exhibition. I recognise many of the outfits and few of the photographs – I don’t know what the logistics of these sorts of shows are, but presumably the works have stayed in London since the show at Fitzrovia Chapel. A close friend of mine worked on the project so I really did try to go in with an open mind, but sometimes even personal connections cannot save a show from my wrath.

The Tate Modern’s iteration is excessively ugly, overwhelmingly saccharine and overdecorated. The curation is laughably desultory, although I doubt that even the world’s best curator would have been able to save such a disjointed and directionless collection. This is often the case when creating retrospectives of performance artists: the overreliance on art made by Other People (photographs, postcards, etc) makes for a particularly unmoored experience, especially when trying to capture the sort of debauched narcissism so often exhibited by Bowery. I’ll concede that the Freud paintings are excellent and almost make the £18 worth it, although it is deeply ungracious for any critic to assign the success of a portrait to its sitter rather than its artist (I would highly suggest Man With a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud by critic Martin Gayford, in which there is a very brief mention of Bowery and Freud’s relationship).

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this exhibition is happening right after the death of brat summer – in fact, looking at the timeline, I very much doubt one would have happened without the other. I’m relatively indifferent to the notion of ‘vibe shifts’ (or whatever the likes of Becca Rothfeld are waffling on about) but it seems artistic institutions are, as usual, exactly one cultural cycle behind the rest of the world. The visuality of slamming drugs and staying up dancing until 7AM just isn’t as cool when Maria Balshaw has given it the thumbs up.

Brendan Beirne, Bowery and Boy George, 1980s

However, even beyond brat summer, club kid culture has long been untouchable due to its historical alignment with progressive movements. The overt visuality of this particular area of queer history (namely, the Western metropolitan nightlife of the 80s) lends itself very favourably to this association to people interested in the arts, not to mention with broader modern visual refications of the stereotype of the flamboyant gay (Pride parties, drag queens, etc). This was allegedly an era of reclamation and transformation, and as such deserves visual reverence, although there has been a significant push towards reconsidering this sort of contextualisation. Ritesh Ranjan’s 2019 Queer Theory: A Critical Analysis Of Its Implication In Art Historical Readings in particular calls into question the shift in attention in art academia from the materiality of an artworks' social conditions to the language used to describe it. There is a small but growing body of critical thought that challenges the romanticised view of queer culture as purely revolutionary and emancipatory.

Along a similar vein, I’ve recently been enjoying Mark Simpson’s Anti-Gay, a deeply divisive collection of 'post-gay' essays collated during the late 90s which sought to address some similar contemporary anxieties about the cultural position of ‘gayness’ in Western society. I was lucky enough to see Simpson in conversation with Stonewall founder (and later, dissenter) Simon Fanshawe at Verdurin, a cultural project space programmed by critic Pierre d'Alancaisez. The discussion itself was a part of a larger series called Gay Amnesia, and this first iteration was designed to address the question of ‘how today’s emancipated subject [should] understand the entanglement of civic equality, sexual freedom, and identity’. Exhibitions like Leigh Bowery! feel potentially vital to understanding the institutional manifestations of these anxieties in contemporary visual culture.

I revisit the show the next day with a friend who worked on the exhibition, an older gay man who had seen Bowery perform several times and even met the artist during the late eighties. When I ask if Bowery’s art was any good to see live, he shrugs. “I was on ecstasy.” he tells me. “Everything is good on ecstasy.” He proceeds to tell me about Taboo, the nightclub opened by Bowery from 1985 to 1986: “It was degenerate stuff, really, you would not believe what we got up to. Looking back I think people panicking about the erosion of decency through gay sex had kind of had a point. We were revolting!” He goes on to describe some of the sex acts that were not only permissible but encouraged within the scene, which quite frankly are not fit for print, before we reach a description of Bowery showering the front row of an AIDS benefit with his enema water (yes, straight from the source).

“Jesus, at least Manzoni had the decency to put his artists’ shit in a can.” I mutter.
“Ah, but that’s the key word, isn’t it?” says my companion. “Decency.”

This leads us to a discussion about the term transgressive, which is a favourite catchall term used by journalists and curators alike when discussing anything even remotely to do with queerness. “Queerness is inherently indecent,” my tour guide tells me. “Which is why shows like this are so important, so younger queer people can feel represented.”

Do I feel ‘represented’ by Bowery? I think about my last long-term same-sex relationship, which mostly involved a lot of painting the walls of her mothers guestrooms and having arguments about money, but very few enemas. The most ‘transgressive’ thing we ever did was switching back to cow milk from almond. I ask him how he thinks the average young queer person might feel about being associated with a man known for wearing pubic wigs and doing drugs. Is queerness inherently indecent, I ask, or were gay (and straight) people only made to think it was indecent for the majority of history? He looks at me angrily; there is clearly something I don’t understand, something I am missing – about gayness, about Bowery, about his art.

Bruce Bernard, Freud and Bowery imitating Courbet's The Painters Studio, 1992. Courtesy of Virginia Verran/Estate of Bruce Bernard

We continue through the exhibition. As I’ve mentioned, these kinds of retrospectives very rarely work because so much of performance art is lost in temporal translation. After all, how do you communicate the atmosphere and message of works like Birthing, in which Bowery would come on stage dressed like Divine and ‘birth’ Nicola Bateman from his tights before eating the umbilical cord made of sausages? The answer, apparently, lies in piling up ephemeral additions from the artist’s entourage — Lady Bunny, Princess Julia, Poly Styrene, Peter Doig and the Neo Naturists and the likes — in increasingly eccentric environments, including a recreation of Bowery’s living room and a smoke-filled nightclub dancefloor. I mention to my companion that the performances themselves sound like ugly nonsense, the sort of mid-60s Fluxus experiments that make people hate art, and he sighs. “You had to be there, I suppose,” he tells me as I examine a thoroughly uninspiring collection of photographs of Bowery’s discarded, sweat-stained clothes.

I understand then that he doesn’t mean ‘there’ as in the performance, but the time itself: the excitement of club kid culture, the terror of AIDS, the thrill of transgression for its own sake, the last gasp of pre-internet subcultures before everything became instantly archivable. These were years when underground actually meant underground, not write-ups in Frieze and shoutouts from La Fomo. The re-appropriation of gay culture has placed artists like Bowery on the sort of pedestal that they would have loathed: I would not have been a fan of his work then, just as I am not now, but at least I can appreciate (however begrudgingly) the rawness of its intent. However garish and self-indulgent, Bowery’s work probably really did shock people. In 1986 a fat naked man dancing in the street wearing nothing but a headpiece and a merkin may well have been considered completely outrageous, but in 2025 it’s the sort of video you scroll past twice before breakfast. Does that make it good art? Not really, but it does make it slightly better. I just can’t shake the feeling that something essential has been lost in translation.

John Simone, Leigh Bowery at Savage, 1988

Bowery and his ilk have come to represent an entirely sacrosanct area of art history, which is deeply ironic considering his desperate desire to be reviled (“If I have to ask if this idea is too sick, I know I’m on the right track,” he said of the scatalogical stunt at the AIDS fundraiser.) I understand, of course, that context is everything: I am lucky enough to live in a time where this sort of stuff is completely unremarkable – not just visually, but politically. I see men dressed like Bowery totter down Old Compton Street on a weekly basis, and think nothing of it either socially or aesthetically. We watch artists inspired by Bowery’s style prance about on the BBC every weekend (I presume, I haven’t watched RuPaul’s Drag Race since they got rid of Santino Rice).

miss you babe

Ultimately, we fear acknowledging that shock alone is not a lasting aesthetic value. So much of the post pop-art movement relies on the audience’s ability to believe that ugliness is inherently subversive, and that subversiveness is synonymous with profundity. Club kid culture has been so firmly attached to The Factory and canon of pop art that to question its artistic merit feels almost like questioning the foundations of metropolitan art itself. But this is a post-shock culture, thanks to the internet, and so the only thing that we really find of artistic merit in Bowery is his work's role as a precursor to a world that thrives on a relentless cultural production of outrage.

But there is also a deeper anxiety at play, one tied to the ways we construct and present queer history. The cultural positioning of artists like Bowery and the scenes they emerged from is inexorably bound up with a particular narrative of defiance, liberation, and resistance. As Simpson puts in the intro to Anti-Gay, the story is that Gay Is Good, and any criticism of this is taken as Gay Is Bad — not, for example, Gay Is Neutral or Gay Is Just About Fine or Gay Can Be Very Difficult. Bowery has come to represent the same sort of cultural shorthand that insists that Vivienne Westwood was a punk or the YBAs were radicals.

If there was artistic merit to Bowery’s work, it cannot be recaptured by blurry photographs and replicas of ugly clothes. Looking at the press release I am willing to concede that Bowery (and club kid culture in general) may have had a major impact on the likes of “McQueen (cool), Jeffrey Gibson (not a flex), Anohni (who?), and Lady Gaga (who sucks now, by the way)” but, as pointed out by Adrian Searle, the idea that Bowery is “one of the most fearless and original artists of the 20th century” is insane. This kind of fetishistic, iconoclastic mythologisation of historical personas has been long present in literature and academia (see the rise of Great Man history concerning queer figures like Martha P Johnson or Stormé DeLarverie) but it is now apparently seeping into contemporary art.

The spectacle of queerness at its most flamboyant, most grotesque, most theatrical is easily fetishised. The Tate Modern’s exhibition is not interested in asking whether Bowery’s work was good, because that would mean opening the door to a question that institutions seem unwilling to face: what if not all queer art is worth preserving? What if transgression, divorced from context, is just ugly noise?

This piece was originally published in Fetch London.