CHLOE Magazine Fall Winter 2015 Volume 6 Issue 1 | Page 45

DAVID Few figures have been able TO STRADDLE THE ART/POPULAR culture nexus as well as David Bowie When Bowie sang of aliens, cross-dressed, or emptied himself of colour and light, he demonstrated the power that music, fashion and performance can have in creating the landscape of endless possibility for those who danced in his long if glittering shadow. That Bowie has influenced many lives is undeniable. For more than four decades he has represented restless change, social rebellion and artistic innovation. Ziggy partied and died too young. Aladdin Sane swam in his own melancholia and depression. The beautifully suited Thin White Duke overdosed on coke and power. And one-eyed Halloween Jack became a fairground wild animal of unlimited potentiality. In each image, one witnesses the crystalisation of difference, of alienation and marginalisation, and yet within each strutting incarnation is also an open, carnal defiance of artistic and social norms. Few figures have been able to straddle the art/popular culture nexus as well as David Bowie. Few figures have demonstrated so exactly the art of rebellion. In the terrible shocks and jolts that emerge from having to grow up into a banal and conforming world, Bowie gave each of the writers the means to exist freely, openly, and with an unearthly politics that allowed them to challenge gender and sexual norms. Exhibiting the exhibitionist The question is often asked – just who is Bowie? The answer is never a simple one: his polysemy and contradictory and challenging masks render him a figure of diversity and confusion – which is of course part of his attraction – and mean he simply cannot be defined. He exists in a carnival of exhibitionism, something that continues to this day. His cultural and artistic currency is presently at an all time high with his first album in almost a decade. The Next Day (2013) reviewed as one of the greatest rock comebacks ever; the release of a series of portentous music videos that recall and reflect upon his artistic career; the recently released, Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) from his compilation album spanning 50 years of recorded work on Nothing Has Changed (2014), and the record-breaking David Bowie Is global exhibition tour, which opens at the ACMI in Melbourne on July 16.