Leigh Bowery

Leigh Bowery born 26 March 1961 (d. 1994)

Leigh Bowery born in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia was a performance artist, club creature, and clothing designer.

After attending Melbourne High School, and having abandoned his home in Australia and a fashion course there he had a colourful exhibitionist career following his arrival in London in 1980, making a name for himself by dramatic performances of dance, music and simple exhibitionism, while wearing bizarre and very original outfits of his own design. He was frequently seen performing in Taboo, a fashionable night club he operated, (after years brightening the doorways of other people's events) near Leicester Square and is frequently identified as a key influence on the style of the New Romantic music movement that was popular in Britain during the early 1980s. Though perhaps he is more properly placed within the context of 'The Cult With No Name' as the activities of the pansexual set of young Londoners had already been dubbed.

A large man, he used his costumes to exaggerate his size and the effects were frequently overpowering and unforgettable for those who encountered him, the more so because of his confrontational style. A wallflower he was not.

In the late 1980s, Bowery collaborated as a dancer with the post-Punk ballet dancer Michael Clark, after having been his costume-designer for a number of years. He also participated in multi-media events like I Am Kurious Oranj and the play Hey, Luciani, with Mark E. Smith and The Fall.

In 1988 he had a week-long show in Anthony d'Offay's prestigious Dering Street Gallery in London's West End, in which he lolled on a chaise longue behind a two-way mirror, primping and preening in a variety of outfits while visitors to the gallery looked on. The insouciance and audacity of this overt queer narcissism captivated gallery goers, critics and other artists. Bowery's exquisite appearance, silence and intense self-absorption was further accentuated by his own recordings of random and abrasive traffic noises which were played for the show's duration. The very intimate and private was flung in the face of the public complete with a 'Street Life' sound track, hinting perhaps at something still darker. In some outfits he appears like some strange roadside creature, like a cat that finally got the cream (of art world attention), in others he is the 'Satan's Son' that he would whisper, years later, on his deathbed.

The difficulty of engaging in such an hedonistic and wilfully original life and artistic practice without independent financial means has long been the curse of the both the innovator and bohemian. For all his art world exposure and contacts it seems peculiar now that no-one suggested to Bowery that he might adopt the very viable strategy of Gilbert and George - an earlier generation's living sculpture - and derive an income from selling images of himself rather than rely on occasional commissions, modelling work for Lucian Freud, or design consultancy for Rifat Ozbek. In the later years of his life the advantages of having an independent income started to become more obvious and Bowery looked to music, in the form of art rock/pop group Minty, to possibly provide this independent income stream. 'I have a profile,' he confided to flatmate and fellow Australian Anne Holt, 'But I have no money.' Minty he hoped would provide a solution to this crux.

He outraged the London gay scene with a performance at SMact, a short lived SM Night at Bar Industria. Using Nazi costumes with a lesbian friend named Barbara, they turned concentration camp experimentation into SMart. The readers of Capital Gay, the London weekly newspaper, turned on fellow performer Berkley, who had played the victim, and Barbara and Leigh weathered the storm. He was after all, 'the punk of the eighties' and longtime darling of the international avant garde.

In 1993 Leigh formed Raw Sewage with Sheila Tequila and Stella Stein. They performed in 18" platforms at the Love Ball in Amsterdam, but the collaboration ended in dramas. Leigh went on to appear as 'Madame Garbo' in The Homosexual (or the difficulty of sexpressing oneself) by Copi at Bagleys Warehouse in London's King's Cross.

During 1994 Leigh performed the Fete worse than death in Hoxton Square, Leigh and Nicola Bateman (later, Nicola Bowery) showed their classic 'Birth Show' in which Leigh gives birth to Nicola, using a specially designed harness which holds her upside down to his belly under his costume.

In November 1994 Minty began a two week show at London's Freedom Cafe, watched by the young Alexander McQueen but it was too much for Westminster City Council who closed the show down after only one night.

He married his long-term female companion Nicola Bateman on May 13, 1994, only months before his death from AIDS-related illness at UC Hospital London on New Year's Eve 1994, after a five week battle that only a handful of friends were informed about. 'Tell them I've gone pig farming in Bolivia' is one reported death bed pronouncement which is illustrative of the gallows humour and dark irony that can be traced in much of his work.

Glimmers of the influences of film maker John Waters and artist Andy Warhol can be seen in his keen appreciation of bad taste, truly outlandish self presentation and a deep desire to shock and confuse. 'I want to be the Andy Warhol of London' he once said. 'Dressed-up' he was obviously 'Modern Art on legs' (as Boy George commented), but in daytime attire the badly-fitting, obvious, disturbing wigs are a nod to Warhol's self-presentation strategies that has thus far seemed invisible to both critics and friends alike.

He became known to a wider audience by appearing in a Post-Modernist/Surrealist series of television and cinema and commercials for the Pepe jeans company, MTV London and other commissions such as stage work for rock band U2. He also appeared regularly in articles, vox pops and as cover star in London's i-D magazine. Tired brands in need of fresh ideas tended to covet his dazzling originality.



Bowery was painted in a series of nude portraits by Lucian Freud [above and left], and travelled internationally to the opening events of his exhibitions. This modelling work provided him with an income of sorts for a period and he certainly relished Freud's connections to the British establishment, though it seems strange now that such an explosively original and inventive artist like Bowery would subordinate himself to the likes of Freud.

Bowery received posthumous exposure in the form of the West End and Broadway musical, Taboo starring Boy George, which transferred to Broadway after running for 16 months in London - Bowery was played by Boy George [pictured as Bowery] and subsequently Matt Lucas. Bowery's career is described more straightforwardly in a 2002 documentary The Legend of Leigh Bowery, directed by Charles Atlas.

Ron Athey

Ron Athey born 16 December 1961

Ron Athey is an American artist associated with body art and with extreme performance art. He has performed in the US and internationally (especially in the UK and Europe).

As an artist, Athey uses his body to explore controversial subject matters such as the relationship between desire, sexuality, and self-mutilation. Much of his work uses the dynamics of S&M in order to confront pre-conceived ideas about the body in relation to masculinity and religious iconography. Athey's emphasis on sexuality and the queer body made him a target for the Far Right in the 1990s.

Even though Athey had received only $150 of financial support for his work from the National Endowment for the Arts via his 1994 performance at the Walker Art Center, during the 1990s his name was raised in public debates about state sponsorship of art about sexuality and AIDS. In many ways, these events continue to shape public perception of his work, even though he has not since been the recipient of public funding in the United States.

Athey's work is informed by his pentecostal upbringing and frequently explores religious subjects.

Athey engages with the ideas of queer philosophers and artists like Georges Bataille, Pierre Molinier and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Athey's performance Solar Anus refers directly to one of Bataille's essays, and in 2002 Athey curated an endurance/performance festival inspired by Pasolini's films. The Solar Anus performance is included as part of Athey's starring role in the Danish feature film HotMen CoolBoyz (2000), directed by Knud Vesterskov and produced by Lars von Trier's company Zentropa. The film was nominated for five GayVN Awards, including a Best Solo Performance nomination for Ron Athey.

He has also, with Vaginal Davis, curated performance art festivals in the US and in Europe.

Athey has been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers including Honcho and the L.A. Weekly, and occasionally teaches performance studies.

After spending 47 years in California, Athey is now based and living in London, teaching, mentoring and creating new performance works.

In 2010 Athey created a performance piece with a larger cast called Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing Study and A Score) focused upon notions of channelling through automatic writing, at the Queen Mary, University of London. In June 2011, he created a new version of this piece performed at the University of Manchester, featuring 16 automatic writers with a team of editors and typists, a musician and an ecstatic choir. I was one of those automatic writers.

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David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz born 14 September 1954 (d. 1992)

David Wojnarowicz was a gay painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.

The first American gay artist to respond to the AIDS crisis with anger and moral outrage, he used his art as a polemical tool with which to indict those he held responsible for the AIDS epidemic and to document his own suffering.

Wojnarowicz had no extensive formal training. Born in Red Bank, New Jersey into a severely dysfunctional family in 1954, he dropped out of high school soon after acknowledging his homosexuality as an adolescent. He was a street kid in New York City at the age of sixteen, turning tricks in Times Square and keeping company with hustlers and other outsiders.

Wojnarowicz found salvation in making art and writing. Yet the rawness of his life experiences would always be the stuff of a highly personal and confrontational art.

As a young man, Wojnarowicz hitchhiked across the United States and lived in San Francisco and Paris for several months. In 1978, he settled in New York.

By the early 1980s he had become, like graffiti artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, a vital fixture in the East Village art scene in lower Manhattan.

Wojnarowicz had his first solo exhibitions in New York in the early 1980s. In 1985 he had a major exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His growing prominence as a nationally recognised artist is witnessed by invitations to participate in the 1987 and 1991 Whitney Biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Wojnarowicz came to maturity as a contemporary artist and writer during a decade when the arts sought increasingly to address issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. A younger postmodern generation of artists gave expression to these concerns in non-traditional media and often worked in multimedia.

For example, Wojnarowicz expressed himself in film, installation art, sculpture, photography, performance art, painting, collage, drawing, and writing. Indeed, he became as fine a writer as he was a visual artist.

Before being diagnosed HIV-positive in 1987, Wojnarowicz tracked in his confessional art a life that vacillated between sensual abandon and despair, bringing into focus a dark vision of existence that drew upon the examples of Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet.

Also influenced by Pop Art and the example of the writers of the Beat movement of the 1950s, Wojnarowicz drew upon images of popular culture and uniquely American idioms, though often rendering them ironically or satirically.

With the onset of his disease, Wojnarowicz turned fiercely political. The tragedy and injustices of the AIDS epidemic within the gay community became the central subject in his art and writings. He took to task the medical community and the federal government for their indifference to the pressing health issues of gay men. He passionately protested the fact that, as he put it, so many people were dying 'slow and vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country'.

Wojnarowicz took a public stand against homophobia in published interviews and essays that earned him the vitriolic ire of the conservative religious right, specifically Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, Senator Jesse Helms, and John Cardinal O'Connor.

Wojnarowicz was the first American gay artist to step forward in anger and give expression to his moral outrage. His 'post-diagnostic art', as he called it, indicted all those he held responsible for the social and private horrors of those dying from AIDS, including himself. Toward the end of his life, his defiant art was a polemical and poignant record of his cruel demise.

Of all the media and formats for which Wojnarowicz is known, the works that combine image and text are the most complex and moving, offering the best summary of his art.

The buffalo imagery from the famous video for One by U2 is taken from a David Wojnarowicz image.

Wojnarowicz died of AIDS on July 22, 1992.

Jack Smith

Jack Smith born 14 November 1932 (d. 1989)

Jack Smith was an American film-maker, actor, and pioneer of underground cinema. He is generally acclaimed as a founding father of American Performance Art, and has been critically recognised as a master photographer, though his photographic works are rare and remain generally unknown.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, when he was seven his father died in a fishing accident off the Gulf Coast after his family had moved to Texas. Jack, his sister and mother lived in trailer parks until his mother remarried in approximately 1945 and the family moved to Wisconsin. When he graduated from high school in Kenosha, his parents gave him his first movie camera (8mm), which was stolen from him shortly thereafter.

He left home and moved to Chicago in 1951 and then to Los Angeles in 1952 where he begun making a 16mm film later titled Buzzards Over Baghdad. He moved to New York the following year, in 1953, where he worked as an office boy and took film classes at the City College of New York. Smith became involved in the underground film scene after moving to New York.

Smith was one of the first proponents of the aesthetics which came to be known as 'camp' and 'trash', using no-budget means of production (e.g. using discarded colour reversal film stock) to create a visual cosmos heavily influenced by Hollywood kitsch, orientalism and drag culture. His style influenced the film work of Andy Warhol as well as the early work of John Waters, and all three of them were part of the 1960s Gay Arts Movement.

Smith has also been referenced by artists such as Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman and Mike Kelley, filmmakers David Lynch and Matthew Barney, photographer Nan Goldin, musicians John Zorn, Lou Reed and David Byrne, and theatre director Robert Wilson.

The most famous (and arguably the most notorious) of Smith's productions is Flaming Creatures (1962) [pictured left]. Flaming Creatures features an Arabian harem of erotically possessed creatures amid a wild bacchanalia that blurs all gender and sexual norms. Banned in 22 states of the US and four countries, the film was subject to an obscenity case that famously reached the US Supreme Court. The scandal around Flaming Creatures, made the artist determined never to complete another film. Smith would later assert the discourse about censorship and sexuality that was generated prevented audiences from appreciating its intended humour.

The movie is basically a travesty on Hollywood B movies and tribute to actress Maria Montez, who starred in many such productions. However, authorities considered some scenes to be pornographic, copies of the movie were confiscated at the premiere and it was subsequently banned (technically, it still is to this day). Despite not being viewable, the movie gained some notoriety when footage was screened during Congressional hearings and right-wing politician Strom Thurmond mentioned it in anti-porn speeches.

Smith's next movie Normal Love was the only work in Smith's oeuvre with an almost conventional length (120 mins), and featured a whole host of underground stars, including Mario Montez, Diane di Prima, Tiny Tim, Francis Francine, Beverley Grant, John Vaccaro, and others. The rest of his productions consists mainly of short movies, many of them never to be screened in a cinema, but to feature in performances and constantly re-edited to fit the stage needs (including Normal Love).

Apart from his own work Smith has also worked as an actor himself. He played the lead in Andy Warhol's unfinished film Batman Dracula, Ken Jacobs' Blonde Cobra, and appeared in several theatre productions by Robert Wilson.

He also worked as a photographer and founded the Hyperbole Photographic Studio in New York. In 1962 he released The Beautiful Book, a collection of pictures of New York artists, which has since been republished.

After his last film, No President (1967), Smith created performance and experimental theatre work until his death on September 25, 1989 from AIDS-related pneumonia.

Until recently, Smith's archive was co-managed by New York performance artist and former Warhol superstar Penny Arcade, alongside the film historian J Hoberman via their corporation The Plaster Foundation Inc. In January 2004, the New York Surrogate Court ordered Hoberman and Arcade to return Smith's archive to Smith's legal heir, his surviving sister Sue Slater, after hearing Hoberman et al's unsuccessful arguments that the Plaster Foundation should own Smith's work. As of October 2006, Hoberman et al had yet to surrender Smith's archive, citing claims for monies due to them from the estate for time and expenses associated with managing the archive.

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