A PORTRAIT OF THE MAN

The David Bowie retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum has been organized as a long rambling walk, with artifacts from his extraordinary career displayed within half-hidden nooks and narrow passages. There are amazing things to see: the space-age Pierot costume from the Ashes to Ashes video, the lyric sheet from The Jean Jenie, diaries from the Berlin days. Visitors receive headsets that are synced to micro-zones within the galleries, cueing clips from relevant songs.

As a monument to the artist, the show is unpolished. The spaces are dark and uncomfortable, and the exhibit design is inconsistent. Objects that fans are familiar with, like CD and album covers, are hung up front, at eye level. And objects that fans would want to examine more closely, like Aladdin Sane costumes, are mounted on platforms, behind glass, or twelve feet above the floor.

As a testimony to the person, however, the show is true and moving. What grips one are videos from Bowie’s television and stage appearances. These are shown untouched, in their original format, in low resolution, grainy, shadowy, or pixellated, some on CRT monitors. The outdated formats speak powerfully, and poignantly, to the eras in which Bowie was working, before Instagram, gay marriage, and everyday cross-dressing.

Throughout his career Bowie was clear-eyed, gentlemanly, and sincere. In a television clip from the 1960′s he pleads tolerance for men who wear their hair long. In an MTV interview from the 1980′s he asks a reporter, politely, why the channel doesn’t feature black artists. And in the exhibit’s final gallery, in vintage film footage, he performs as Ziggy Stardust. Despite the studied outrageousness of his costume, makeup and hair, the beauty of the songs, and his connection to them, shine through. There are no false notes. Bowie wrote beautiful songs and performed them, meaning every word he sang.

Still from video from David Bowies’ song “Life on Mars?”, directed by Mick Rock, 1972. Suit by Freddie Burretti.

May 22, 2018 by Nalina Moses

FREE TO BE YOU

In the days after David Bowie died, some recalled his accomplishments as a singer-songwriter, and many recalled his bold sense of style, his facile gender-fluidity, and his position as a heroic outsider. He’s a music icon but what captivates is his identity.

Bowie was fine-boned and fragile-looking, and possessed, in addition, an uncanny photographic intelligence. He knew fashion and makeup, but even more he knew his angles, and how to project a potent image for the camera. As a schoolboy it was his movement instructor who first identified his star quality, not his music teacher or choir master. As a performer he adopted a series of fictional identities, all convincing and also, somehow, deeply felt. Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke are remembered as real people, more so than any of Madonna’s fashion-savvy reincarnations or Lady Gaga’s self-obscuring personae.

Bowie himself remained, to the public, mostly unknown. As a follow up to his obituary the New York Times ran a pleasing, gossipy piece about how the pop star built an anonymous, bourgeois, (mostly) paparazzi-free life for himself and his family in an apartment building on a busy shopping street in SoHo. For formal events he put on a tuxedo and fixed his hair. At other times he walked his neighborhood alone, unshaven, wearing jeans, sneakers and baseball caps, (mostly) undetected. He bough fruit at the deli and magazines at the newsstand.

Years ago, on a summer afternoon, I saw Bruce Springsteen walking through Union Square. He was wearing an ankle-length black leather trenchcoat and motorcycle boots, and had his wife beside him and a scrum of bodyguards trailing six steps behind. He was a blue collar rock star playing Blue Collar Rock Star. Maybe this is why Bowie was so remarkable. He crafted a series of images for himself that were so indelible, so intoxicating, that they allowed his own self, unmoored, to move freely behind.

David Bowie, 1975, photograph by Steve Schapiro.

January 18, 2016 by Nalina Moses