As I write this, my Facebook feed is full of heartfelt tributes to David Bowie, whose untimely passing at the age of 69 from an 18-month battle with liver cancer has shaken so many of us. Throughout his career, Bowie shape shifted through a multitude of personas, and silly as it is to say, I thought if any artist were to cheat death, it would be him. Instead of cheating, however, he set out to create a final album, Black Star, demonstrating great courage, conviction, and generosity of spirit to work through on wax the fraught and freeing realizations that come when one faces their transition. As one tweet so memorably encapsulates: “Bowie looked Death in the eye and thought, ‘I can use this.’”
In September 2013, I was invited by the artist Lorna Mills to participate in a group GIF show she was curating for the opening of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s David Bowie is show.
The works I created, a performance-based series entitled “Girls Keep Swinging” made in collaboration with Isabella Brathwaite, were re-enactments of a key Bowie performative gesture: the smearing-lipstick-off action that memorably first appeared in the music video for “Boys Keep Swinging”. Featured in the last of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, Lodger, the video was a sly swan song to Bowie’s time in the gender-bending Berlin clubs: he appears as himself, but also his own back-up singers: a drag triplette of a gum-chewing beehived sixties diva, a severe and tightly-sequinned Marlene Dietrich bombshell, and then a vampiric High Society dame.
The gesture itself was lifted from Bowie’s former lover, Romy Haag: the famous cabaret performer and transgender singer would end her performances with the total punk move of smearing her make-up, a literal kiss off about “her face” and gendered identity. Bowie, whose training as a mime artist made him so astute about body language, was smart enough to re-play the gesture in the music video for “China Girl” – but rather than from him, via the music video’s own “China Girl”, model Geeling Ng, who was also his girlfriend at the time. Tarted up with teased hair and harsh make-up, the gesture becomes complicated: Ng cycles through all sorts of deliberate Asian female stereotypes, and the gesture’s original gender-bending FU also became a middle finger to racism.
In creating these works with Isabella, my cousin’s then-six year old daughter, I was keen to take a fannish stance on the transparency of Bowie’s performative gestures. Bowie was the rare pop artist smart enough to contextualize the references he nicked, whether it be in consciously, say, recording plastic soul in Philadelphia’s Sigma Sounds Studio, or being unafraid to make his carousing in Berlin’s gay club scene the subject of a music video. He was a chameleon who absorbed his influences, but not totally: he bordered at the sidelines like a trickster, and his adopted gestures and personas opened up these worlds and escapes and freedoms for his fans. He acknowledged his pose, winked at the play: but he engaged in a generative way with influences that was employing a sort of hypertext linking before it even existed, and in effect, revealing his own source codes.
Those performative gestures are evident up until the end: watching the music video for “Lazarus”, I am struck by the autobiographical choreography — at one point, he wears a very Ziggy bodysuit, and snaps his hips in a move that takes you back to that life on Mars. Throughout the video, his body is frequently jittering, shaking, even seizure-inducing — it’s well-known how far he took his personas. The crazy coke-fuelled paranoia in the 1974 BBC documentary Cracked Actor remains a scary document of how far he went, how his appetite to evolve and be of service to his work took him to the brink. Thank god he was able to come back.
I must confess that watching the music video for “Lazarus” was painful and emotional — right to the end, Bowie communed through music and performance. At one point, I angrily shut off the video, turned off by the pop-up lower third YouTube ad that I couldn’t close. Prior to that, I had emailed with Lorna about my sudden hesitancy to share the above works from the show, especially in the context of his storied body of work, and in particular, at this time. She quickly wrote back, “Why not? Fuck it, go ahead. Your love was true.”
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