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.