BIG TIME SENSUALITY

A new show at Tate Modern claims Leigh Bowery was one of the most fearless and original artists of the 20th century. But despite an amazing exhibition, Mark Hudson isn't convinced

- Mark Hudson

Leigh Bowery!, Tate Modern

Leigh Bowery was larger than life in all senses: a self-styled performance artist whose exuberantly physical antics took place in nightclubs rather than art galleries; a monstrous egotist who ruthlessly pursued – and achieved – fame as nightlife entrepreneur, fashion designer and musician; and an imposing physical presence, whose shaven-headed, unashamedly fleshy physique is the subject of some of Lucian Freud’s most notable paintings.

This major Tate survey, Leigh Bowery!, is one of a plethora of Eighties-centred exhibitions (including the National Portrait Gallery’s The Face Magazine: Culture Shift and Tate Britain’s The 80s: Photographing Britain) that appear intent on recasting the much-contested Thatcher decade as a time of radical creative experimentation and emergent identity politics.

The Australian-born Bowery, with his penchant for sinister masks and makeup, is presented here as a kind of overbearing ringmaster to alternative Eighties London, in terms that are at once absurdly overinflated and disconcertingly personal. Bowery, we are told, was “one of the most fearless and original artists of the 20th century”. Really? And while you might imagine that a show comprising Bowery’s “outlandish and dazzling” costumes, alongside painting, photography and video, could be wrapped up in a couple of modest-sized rooms, it’s given one of Tate Modern’s very largest spaces.

At the same time, the wall texts invite us to identify with Bowery as a human being – and to take him at his own estimation – in a way you’d expect of the lightest of popular biographies rather than a heavy-hitting retrospective exhibition. “A smalltown boy from Sunshine, a Melbourne suburb in Australia. He’s bored. Inspired by the punk scene, Bowery leaves fashion college and arrives in London in October 1980... It took time for Bowery to find his people.”