by Jesse Slater // Apr. 25, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Public.
The exhibition ‘Leigh Bowery!’ at Tate Modern charts the gloriously brazen, glitzy and gender-bent life of the eponymous icon of the 80s London club scene. Between Leigh Bowery’s signature sequinned gimp masks, the smutty postcards he sent to friends, fizzy party pics from the nightclub Taboo, and a spangling collection of artworks where he features as muse, the exhibition attempts to encompass him and all of his sides, mostly without judgement. Bowery said himself he wanted to look “like the weirdo on the street that you tell your mum about.” For the most part, the exhibition allows for that, but with some institutional caveats.
‘Leigh Bowery!,’ 2025, installation view at Tate Modern // Photo by Larina Annora Fernandes, courtesy Tate, London
In one of the first rooms, the scene is set for me by a segment from ‘The Clothes Show,’ a BBC fashion program from 1986 that plays on an old-school monitor. Acting almost as a pre-filmed introduction to the exhibition, Bowery performs from his wardrobe in full regalia. He talks a captive public through his designs—bulbous red tulle puffball ensemble with spiky headpiece; cherubic minidress with mint-green wings; checkerboard Victorian-style gown complete with sumptuous bustle and matching monochrome make-up. “On that note, I think I better be off,” he says, before reappearing post-club with a group of friends taking the market route home. “You may well be wondering what I’m doing here,” he exclaims, vendors setting up shop around him. “One of London’s most fashionable nightclubs is just around the corner.” The footage is stark and sweet. Bowery is informative, explaining where he wears what, and why. I try to imagine it broadcast on national telly in the 80s when there were only four channels. Watching it now, inside a major institution, feels like a strange echo: Bowery being made visible as well as legible to the public again.
Peter Paul Hartnett: ‘Polaroid portrait of Leigh Bowery 1986’ // © Peter Paul Hartnett / Camera Press
Some of the outfits from the ‘Clothes Show’ clip are exhibited in the room too. But, I’m most excited to see the club pics, that feel the most live, real, queer. Many were taken at Taboo, a club night Bowery hosted in a basement disco in Leicester Square. Polaroid portraits are pinned up across the gallery walls, first names written in glam swirls of cursive beneath. There’s a photo of Bowery and his best mate Nicola Rainbird, grinning at the camera through matching powdered faces, dimples and bulges overflowing. People straddle on the club floor, between plastic cups and cigarette butts. The photos feel like residue, coded stand-ins for the stories that are a bit too raw for the museum’s voice. I overhear someone behind me say, “aw look, there’s Sharon,” or some other name, pointing at one of the photos. These pics feel lived-in, warm.
Dave Swindells: ‘Daisy Chain at the Fridge, Jan. 1988, Leigh & Nicola,’ 1988 // © Dave Swindells
Bowery’s creations outside of the club scene have a tenderness to them, too. I’m entranced by the vast screenings of Michael Clark’s ballets, filmed by Charles Atlas with dancers animated in Bowery’s clothing designs. In ‘Because We Must,’ they creep across a minimalist stage wearing faux-black tie outfits. They twirl, legs flailing, to reveal bare arse cheeks between gliding coat tails. The dancing is randomly intersected with clips of performers backstage, scrubbing make-up onto their faces. It feels fantastically absurd and commonplace at the same time, disrupting the public and private aspects of what a performance is.
Charles Atlas: ‘Because We Must,’ 1989, film still // © Charles Atlas, courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
Surprisingly, it was a content warning prefacing one of the final galleries that stayed with me most from the exhibition—it warns that the space contains work that may be considered “bad taste.” I tiptoed around the room, past a video installation of nightclub Taboo’s dancefloor projected onto dangling chains, past a lonely hearts-style collage for Leigh’s desired “brainy dirty lad.” Eventually, I landed on a photograph by Gordon Rainsford of Leigh, trousers around his ankles, with an enema-induced jet of liquid erupting from his exposed arsehole, or “anus” as Tate’s wall label insists. I assume this is it. It was taken during an AIDS benefit cabaret at the Fringe club in 1990, and captures Bowery’s willingness to do things often considered shameful, being with the messy reality of our bodies, particularly significant in tandem with the time’s taboo around AIDS. The club almost got shut down because of the stunt. Even Bowery wondered if he’d gone too far. And judging by the institutional framing today, it seems the question still lingers. This part of the exhibition stands not censored, but softened with a preamble, a bit of telling off, to be on show to the public. I can’t help but be disappointed that this sort of being brazen with a body is still labelled as “bad taste.”
Fergus Greer: ‘Leigh Bowery, Session 7, Look 37, 1994’ // © Fergus Greer, courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
The exhibition closes with a victorious photograph of Bowery with Nicola Rainbird again, this time strapped upside down to his body by a velvet harness, shiny pink like intestines. The photo ‘Session VII, Look 37, June 1994’ by Fergus Greer is a sanitized manifestation of a performance the pair did many times that year, where Bowery would birth Rainbird, slimy string of sausages for umbilical cord included. It was the same year they got married in May, and that Bowery died of AIDS on New Year’s Eve, at the age of 33. The image encapsulates strange, bodily beauty to me, in all its triumph. It’s also the shiny studio version of a gross performance, this photo being the bit that’s allowed in the exhibition.
Fergus Greer: ‘Leigh Bowery, Session 1, Look 2, 1988’ // © Fergus Greer, courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
In the exhibition catalog, writer McKenzie Wark says it how it is. She describes how Bowery “doesn’t let anyone’s body off from its monstrousness,” naming his probing at the messy reality of our corporeal selves “flesh-play.” Again and again, whether through stolen flashes of bodies or unexpected, gender-blending bulges, Bowery pushes into the weirdness of being in a body. Tate, in some ways, domesticates Bowery—tidies him up for public consumption, files the edges off, renders his weirdness legible. Some images still blush under institutional lighting. But just when it risks becoming a sanitized celebration, the exhibition leaks, as he slips back into frame. ‘Leigh Bowery!’ is an invitation, a dare, extended through his generosity: to settle into your monstrosity, your body, and to do it in plain sight.
Exhibition Info
Tate Modern
‘Leigh Bowery!’
Exhibition: Feb. 27-Aug. 31, 2025
tate.org.uk
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, UK, click here for map
