“I think of myself as a canvas,” Leigh Bowery once said about himself. This statement most probably provides the crucial formula for understanding the enfant terrible. Presenting himself in garish ways and stylizing himself as a walking work of art, Leigh Bowery stirred up London’s sub-culture of the 1980s. He skillfully staged his ample body with way-out fashion designs and materials such as paint, tulle, sequins, and satin. He was sure to draw applause on the international club culture catwalks, the everyday stage of the street, as well as in talk shows and at performance events in art galleries. Leigh Bowery’s eccentric presentations between performance, fashion, and music are still a source of inspiration for numerous artists, photographers, and film makers today.
Relying on a lot of humor and a bad taste attitude, Leigh Bowery tested individual expectations and social conventions: “I like doing the opposite of what people expect.” Holding a mirror up to the dictatorship of the conformists, he reveled in exposing them as other-directed. Leigh Bowery was born in Sunshine, Australia in 1961 and died from AIDS in 1994.
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Sue Tilly talks to Gregor Muir at the ICA about Leigh Bowery (2011) - see her book on Bowery
The Legend of Leigh Bowery, a film by Charles Atlas (2004)
With the Tanks opening on Tuesday 18th July, a space dedicated to live art, performance, installation and film, I thought I'd invite two of my favourite performance artists to make a selection of video pieces for me to post and share to celebrate this new space. I invited them to choose both recording of live performances and discussions on performance art.
Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present a solo exhibition of work by Jenny Holzer. The American artist finds ways to make narrative a part of visual objects, employing an innovative range of materials and presentations to confront emotions and experiences, politics and conflict. Entitled SOPHISTICATED DEVICES, this exhibition provides a survey of Holzer’s practice, encompassing her spray paint canvases, granite benches, LED works, painted signs, and cast plaques. The large spray paint canvases on view at the gallery are the result of collaborations with New York graffiti artists Lady Pink and A-One, whose haunting images are supplemented with Holzer’s provocative statements. In I AM NOT FREE BECAUSE I CAN BE EXPLODED ANYTIME (1983-84), Holzer’s characteristically cryptic phrase is hand-lettered over a scene, spray-painted by Pink, of bodies in despair. The collaborative works feature text from Survival, a series of cautionary texts, in which each sentence instructs, informs or questions the ways an individual responds to his or her social, physical, psychological and personal environments. Just as street art seeks to have an immediate impact on an unsuspecting public, the Survival phrases have an urgent tone, the sentences short and pointed so as to be instantly accessible to passersby. The artist’s granite benches will be on display in the front gallery, inscribed with words from the Living series (1980-1982), in which Holzer presents a set of quiet observations, directions, and warnings. The commentaries touch on how the individual negotiates landscapes, persons, rules, expectations, desires, fears, other bodies, one's flesh, and one's self. Holzer began working with stone in 1986. Her idea was to find a home for her texts that was resistant to the vagaries of time and destruction, as lasting as the light of her electronic signs is transitory. The bench form was selected because it offered people a place to sit and converse with others. The utility of the object allows her to insinuate texts that are not immediately consistent with the domestic or park-like settings where they might be placed. Similarly delivering messages from the Living and Survival series will be a selection of vintage LED artworks, enamel on metal hand-painted signs, and cast plaques. Recognized as Holzer’s signature medium, electronic signs have been part of the artist’s practice since the early eighties, initially adopted for its association with news and advertising, and as a mode of direct address. The LED work Under a Rock (1986) features text from the series of the same name, here showcasing the words ‘Tick Tick’. Composed specifically for electronic signs and stone benches, this series explores the unmentionable as well as pain’s manifestations and persistence. The plaques and painted signs, installed in the rear gallery, recall those that often appear on historic buildings, lending the writing authority and a voice of the establishment.
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Andrew Graham-Dixon interviews Jenny Holzer about her art, 2010 (duration 7:25)
Creative Time interviews Holzer, 2009 (duration 1:30)
Jenny Holzer's illuminated exterior at the Guggenheim, 2008 (duration 1:46)
Holzer's Tate installation, May 2011 (duration 0.28)
