An Expansive, Boundary-Blurring Exhibition In David Bowie is

at the Brooklyn Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Angelica Villa

Arranged in a matchless array of material from David Bowie’s archive, the Brooklyn Museum’s David Bowie is encapsulates the icon’s expansive complexity. The exhibition explores the breadth of visual and musical inventions and collaborations of the artist’s prolific career. Posing challenge to social convention and encouraging freedom of self-identification for several decades, the artist’s cultural relevance is beyond compare or distillation. Including 400 objects sourced from the musician’s archive, the interdisciplinary range of material showcasing album covers, drafts of handwritten lyrics, costumes, photographs, film and audio of Bowie’s career draw together a kaleidoscopic retrospective portrait of the artist’s many selves.

The show’s ability to echo the collaborative energy and experimental grit, which permeated through the many phases of Bowie’s career, is perhaps the exhibition’s biggest success. A particular peak from the exhibition’s display of 60 custom-designed costumes is the highlight of the work of renowned designer Kansai Yamamoto, who dressed the artist to perform as his supernatural androgynous alter-ego Ziggy Stardust and later stage persona Aladdin Sane. Deeply influenced by Japanese theatrical design and its foundation in extravagance and nonconformity, Yamamoto’s influence in the 1970’s largely shaped the aesthetic foundation of some of Bowie’s most iconic moments. Additionally, the story of his 1996 Union Jack coat co-designed with Alexander McQueen also proves the essential role of fashion’s ruthlessness in the artist’s identity as a performer. After producing the commissioned design of the piece, McQueen distressed the flag-imaged fabric with force. The coat itself, a gesture of defiled iconography combined with Bowie’s personalization encompasses the designer and artist’s mutual play with brutality and freedom. These collaborations fit and fueled Bowie’s vanguard attitude. With an interest in transcending gender boundaries as well as combining and reimagining visual cultural references, Bowie’s work with Yamamoto and McQueen used the authority of clothes to intervene and disrupt the musical and performative landscape of the artist’s time.

The exhibition also moves outside of the archive’s timeline, portraying an elaborate life in simultaneous segments, both on and offstage. Photographs of the artist as a London teenager, as David Robert Jones are set against the proliferating images of his later reconfigured characters. Large multiple-screen displays of past performances vacillate against surrounding photographs, writing, audio and dressed mannequins. Images reverberate against countless sounds and selves. Surging with bouts of light, sound and spectacle, these displays invoke the limitless creations amassed under Bowie’s direction. As sound and vision swell through each room, Bowie’s alternative portfolio spans through sets of costumes, video and audio all occurring together; the material resonates like an endless concert. This sensory experience, both revitalizing and exhausting, evokes the capacity of Bowie’s sound and sight.

Installation views. Photos courtesy of  Jonathan Dorado and Brooklyn Museum

A display of the artist’s hand written lyrics also offers an insight into the unearthed, excavated thoughts and private ruminations that built his material empire. The artist used a technique of cutting his phrases into lyric pieces, splicing to form coincidental amalgamations. This chance-driven technique brings the literary and poetic force in Bowie’s process to light. Conceptualized in the early nineteenth century with French poet Stephane Mallarme, through the Dadaist movement and later utilized in American poetry in the 1950s-1960s, the method was later co-opted by Bowie in his song-writing process. This practice opened his work to the boundless dimensions of language and form. And with this physical manipulation, the urgency to create, a compulsive need to see the new again and again can be seen in Bowie’s procedure as well.

As each of his artistic methods unfold throughout this exhibition, this urgency becomes fully apparent. “Cut hands” and “Changing hearts” are severed strips, phonic fragments from the lyrics which came to eventually be his song “Blackout” from the 1977 album Heroes – a body of work produced an amalgam of chaos, atmosphere, syth and reverb. This montage process exposes the necessity of experimentation, an alleviation from structure in the artist’s creative method, a way of making reconnections. The assemblage technique displays as well the intricate relationship between the literary and the auditory. It also exposes the artist’s inclination towards a corporal connection to his working material. Not only did he play and perform his songs, but what we gather from the cut-up technique is that he also embodied them through physical intervention in the song writing process.

Installation views. Photos courtesy of  Jonathan Dorado and Brooklyn Museum

The audio played throughout, which viewer’s experience privately through separate headsets, also mirrors the break from chronology and linear structure. Composed and mixed by Bowie’s long-time producer Tony Visconti, the mix is a configuring of cut and rearranged clips sourced from the artist’s best known singles. The process applies the artist’s cut-up technique with the show’s contemporary posture. This lone hearing also gestures at the irreplaceability of music’s sensory pull.

David Bowie using the cut-up method in “Blackout”

In a sea of recollections, with touches from designers, producers, photographers and poets, whose work interacted with the artist across several decades, Bowie’s legacy resounds ceaselessly into the present and promises it’s place in the future. This collection and its acutely detailed composition reveals Bowie as the apex of a creative storm, a force of perpetual reinvention and unrivaled boundary blurring.

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Angelica Villa is New York City Art Critic for Riot Material magazine. Ms. Villa is also an Appraisals Assistant at Christie’s and currently a Master’s student at New York University.