Bowie’s chambermaid is more chatelaine or cool adventuress than brooding, vengeful servant, but “the clothes are strewn” here too—a messy trail of sexual haste. “Don’t be afraid of the room,” he confidently sings, but this is whistling in the dark (shown by his rise to vulnerable falsetto), for she rules the womb-tomb of the female body. After the brisk fresh air of the peripatetic genie, we are in a dark sensory zone of intoxicating hormonal scents—cologne and “musky oil” from African civets. With her full breasts and impenetrable psyche, Lady Grinning Soul represents absolute sexual difference, not the misty, blurred ground of gender experiment that Bowie normally traverses. It is as if he has come face to face with Homer’s Circe or Calypso, in whose realms men shrink to swine or slaves. But she is also a series of other seductive femmes fatales—Carmen (suggested by the Spanish guitar), Gustav Klimt’s Judith (whose supercilious lolling head is mimicked by Bowie in his 1973 video of “Life on Mars”), and Alban Berg’s heartless Lulu. The female principle is shown as mysterious, elusive, ungraspable. “She will be your living end,” croons Bowie in the hypnotic, achingly elegiac refrain: pleasure and pain, love and death (as in Wagner’s Liebestod) are intertwined. Any man’s victory in sex with a woman is transient and illusory.
The genesis of “Lady Grinning Soul” may have been in the lyrics of a Jacques Brel song, “My Death,” a flawed translation of which Bowie had been singing on the Ziggy Stardust tour: “Angel or devil, I don’t care….My death waits there between your thighs.” Bowie turned it into a stark encounter with elemental realities, a descent to the underworld. “Lady Grinning Soul” has hauntingly immersive atmospherics and an incisive power that standard poetry written in English was losing in the 1970s. Indeed, in its hair-raising candor yet sardonic banter, the song bears comparison to Sylvia Plath’s savage Oedipal nursery rhyme, “Daddy” (written in England in 1962). “She comes, she goes”: Bowie’s restless, piratical traveler who trifles with men and has a way with cards sounds like a capricious, fortune-telling Muse, flooding the artist with ideas and then leaving him high and dry.
Art-rock, a genre that showed enormous promise but failed to develop and deliver over time, produced only two enduring masterpieces: the Doors’ 1967 Freudian-Jungian psychodrama, “The End,” and Bowie’s “Lady Grinning Soul” (which ends with virtually the same words as begin the Doors song). Crucially contributing to the late Romantic lyricism of “Lady Grinning Soul” is Mike Garson’s amazing piano work, a sumptuously florid improvisation that exposes the rifts, fractures, illusions, and turmoil of sexual desire. Beginning in an ominous mood of decadent Vienna and Berlin, Garson creates a compelling emotional world of anxiety and entrancement, tinged with panic and despair. With fistfuls of virtuoso runs and trills, he invokes the most flamboyant Romantic music-making from Liszt and Rachmaninoff to Liberace and Ferrante and Teicher—a style often used in classic movies such as the 1941 British film, Dangerous Moonlight, where Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto is played amid the rubble of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Nina Simone used the same rapid, rippling piano style to accompany herself on the 1966 album version of “Wild Is the Wind.” Bowie has reportedly never performed “Lady Grinning Soul” live—a testament perhaps to its excruciatingly sensitive material. After the infectious gaiety of “The Jean Genie,” this harrowing sojourn into the female boudoir, which is both burrow and palace, yields a Wildean revelation: men are simple, women complex.
Bowie’s theater of gender resembles the magic lantern shows or phantasmagoria that preceded the development of motion-picture projection. The multiplicity of his gender images was partly inspired by the rapid changes in modern art, which had begun with neoclassicism sweeping away rococo in the late eighteenth century and which reached a fever pitch before, during, and after World War One. Bowie told a TV interviewer in 1976, “I was always totally bedazzled by all the art forms of the twentieth century, and my interpretation comes out my way of these art forms from Expressionism to Dadaism.” “Even if the definition isn’t understood,” he tried to “break it down” to convey his own “feeling” to the audience.”15 One of Bowie’s leading achievements is his linkage of gender to the restless perpetual motion machine of modern culture. “I have no style loyalty,” he has declared.16 His signature style is syncretism—a fusion or “synthesising” (his word) of many styles that is characteristic of late phases such as the hybrid, polyglot Hellenistic era, when religions too seeped into one another.17 Bowie has in fact used the word “hybrid” to describe his approach.18 His stylistic eclecticism in performance genres—combining music hall, vaudeville, pantomime, movies, musical comedy, cabaret, theater of cruelty, modern dance, French chanson, and American blues, folk, rock, and soul—created countless new angles of perception and startling juxtapositions.
A superb example of the way Bowie brings art and gender into single focus was his adaptation of the mannequin style, a prototypical twentieth-century motif. As women were liberated in the Jazz Age, fashion sped up, promulgated by new media like high-budget movies and glossy magazines with vastly improved techniques of photographic printing. Mannequins as living models as well as department-store dummies became vivid cultural presences, as shown by the frequency of elaborate fashion-show sequences in prestige Hollywood films like The Women (1939). The way that the self-conscious mannequin style had been instantly absorbed by the new woman can be seen in Man Ray’s 1926 photograph of heiress Nancy Cunard with her arms robotically stacked with big African bangle bracelets and in August Sander’s 1931 photographs of a slender secretary with boyishly cropped hair at a West German radio station in Cologne. These two women with their penetrating eyes and steely emancipation capture the intersexual look of avant-garde modernism and eerily anticipate the classic androgyny of David Bowie himself. The mannequin theme is overt when Bowie calls his diamond dogs, on the title song of that album, “mannequins with kill appeal.” In the same lyric, the chillingly faceless “little hussy” of his alter ego Halloween Jack wears “a Dalí brooch,” recalling the jellied teardrop fixed to the collarbone of Aladdin Sane. Mannequins became automaton-like agents of what Bowie elsewhere called a “ritualizing of the body” in art that interested him.19
The Surrealists, who emerged from Dada, seized on the fashion mannequin as a symbol of modern personality—assertive and hard-contoured yet empty and paralyzed. They were partly following the precedent of the Metaphysical painter, Giorgio de Chirico, who showed genderless tailors’ dummies marooned in twilit deserted plazas. (Bowie explicitly voiced his admiration for de Chirico and later replicated his work, as well as that of the Surrealist René Magritte, in the hallucinatory sets for the 1985 video of “Loving the Alien.”)20 Mannequins were major players in the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, where the entry courtyard was dominated by Dalí’s installation, “Rainy Taxi,” with its nude mannequin seated amid 200 live snails on a bed of lettuce. Inside the building was an avenue of mannequins stationed like streetwalkers and festooned with symbolic regalia and outright junk. In 1945, the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, who had posed in drag as his alter ego Rrose Sélavy for Man Ray two decades before, inserted a headless, book-reading mannequin in a skimpy negligee into the window of New York’s Gotham Book Mart to advertise the latest release by André Breton, the father of Surrealism. In the age of abstraction, the plaster mannequin, so easily chipped and seedy, was the derelict heir of canonical life-size Western sculpture in marble or bronze. The mannequin was so artificial that it eventually became gender-neutral. Its spectral aura was well captured in “The After Hours” (1960) from the first season of The Twilight Zone, a TV series launched by America’s greatest native Surrealist, Rod Serling: here department-store mannequins are tracked as they roam, freeze, and frighteningly come alive again.
Bowie’s stunning variation on the Surrealist mannequin was that he became it: never before had a major male artist so completely submerged himself in a female objet de culte. Bowie’s genius for
using the camera as others use a paint brush or chisel—not from behind the camera but before it—was dramatized in The 1980 Floor Show, his last appearance as Ziggy Stardust. This cabaret-structured program was recorded over three nights in October 1973 at the Marquee Club in London and was broadcast on American TV the following month. (It was never aired in Britain, and the film footage was thought lost for many decades.) In one routine, Bowie wore a see-through black fishnet body suit (designed by him and Freddie Burretti) adorned with two gold-painted mannequin’s hands attached to his chest. A third hand affixed to the crotch had been scuttled after a battle royal with the NBC film crew, who also insisted that Bowie cover up his black jockstrap with gold semi-leggings. The two cupped hands formed a bizarre brassiere that made it seem as if Bowie had sprouted breasts. Yet given women’s swerve away from nail lacquer since the mid-1960s, the hands’ black varnished nails (a nihilist color not yet in the female arsenal) also suggested a man in drag: it was as if Bowie were being sexually pawed and clawed from behind by a raging queen in heat. Or was he split in gender and acrobatically embracing himself?—a trick (imitated by Bowie on tour) often employed in burlesque by strippers turning their backs to the audience. Furthermore, it seemed as if his body were being played like a piano—not unlike the way Man Ray turned the body of Kiki de Montparnasse into a sensuous violin. The eye was titillated and confounded by an optical illusion: Which of the multiple hands, including that on Bowie’s glitter-sheathed right arm, were the real ones?
David Bowie in his gold and black fishnet body suit, topped with a Surrealist brassiere of mannequin’s hands. The 1980 Floor Show, London, October 1973. Bowie’s last appearance as Ziggy Stardust.
Bowie’s mannequin masque was a tremendous tour de force, Dadaist in impulse and Surrealist in conception and execution. It fulfilled Baudelaire’s dictum in The Painter of Modern Life that fashion should be “a sublime deformation of nature.” In that one event, seen only by Americans, Bowie inserted himself permanently into the story of modern art. He instantly revived and renewed the Warhol legacy, which had been flagging since Warhol was shot and nearly killed in 1968, leaving him physically depleted and unable to advance beyond his set formulas. The Bowie broadcast on NBC’s late-night variety show, The Midnight Special, was electrifying in its direct address to Americans who had been following the sexual radicalism of Warhol and his circle since his pioneering short films of the 1960s—notably Harlot (1965), Warhol’s first sound film, starring Mario Montez as a charismatic blonde drag diva photographed with slow, ritualistic solemnity.
Bowie said that America had always been “a myth land” for him.21 The “idol” of his youth had been Little Richard, the gender-bending, high-wattage rock ’n’ roller whom he had seen in person at the Brixton Odeon.22 Andy Warhol and his coterie represented the next stage in Bowie’s Anglo-American artistic journey. His contacts with Warhol figures are well-documented. In August 1971, Bowie saw the London production of Pork, a self-satirizing farce by the Warhol coterie of Andy’s obsession with gossipy telephone calls. (The stage was adorned with two nude, fetchingly long-haired boys.) A slew of Pork personnel were immediately hired by Bowie, including Cherry Vanilla, Tony Zanetta, and Leee Black Childers. Bowie and Warhol met just once the following month in New York, an awkward and mutually diffident encounter from which survives a video of the long-haired Bowie in a raffish black hat doing a strangely self-disemboweling mime. In his song, “Andy Warhol” on Hunky Dory (released December 1971), Bowie hailed Warhol’s perverse, voyeuristic theatricality by envisioning him as an art gallery and “silver screen,” a “cinema” of the mind that he longed to emulate. However, the refrain “Andy Warhol looks a scream” upset and offended Warhol. Bowie would later use the dead Warhol’s own wig and eyeglasses to play him in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film, Basquiat. In 1975, Bowie co-produced Lou Reed’s only hit song, “Walk on the Wild Side,” with its litany of drag queens and hustlers from the Warhol Factory. Bowie gave one of them, Joe Dallesandro, a cameo role in his 1987 video, “Never Let Me Down,” directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.
In its brash humor and dreamlike fantasy, Pop Art, as is widely accepted, was the heir of Dada and Surrealism. But by embracing commercial popular culture, Pop ended the oppositional avant-garde tradition that had been born with Romanticism. The momentum of new art styles immediately slowed after Pop and soon stopped altogether. No one style has dominated any period since. Thus Bowie, with his protean multiplicity of styles, must be acknowledged as having taken the next important step in the fine arts after Warhol. He remains Warhol’s true successor. It is indisputable that Bowie, through his prolific work in the 1970s, was one of the principal creators of performance art, which would flood the cultural scene in the 1980s and ’90s. Another seminal figure in that movement, Eleanor Antin, who emerged from American radical theater and Conceptual Art after Fluxus, boldly declared Bowie “one of my favorite artists” in 1973, when he was still being dismissed by many critics as a flashy fad. She explicitly paralleled his creation of volatile, autonomous cross-dressing characters to her own (such as a bearded ballerina or a melancholy vagrant king modeled on Charles I). “Something is in the air,” Antin said. “Maybe it’s in the stars.”23
What Bowie and Antin were separately formulating was a theory of gender as representation or performance, antecedents for which can be found in Shakespeare’s plays, where theater becomes a master metaphor for life. Role-playing as constitutive of identity had been a basic premise of social psychology since the 1920s and had been most fully analyzed in the Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman’s highly influential 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which applied theater metaphors of acting, costume, props, script, setting, and stage to social behavior. (Goffman’s theory of the performative self was a primary source for Michel Foucault, to whom these ideas are often incorrectly attributed.) Gender roles were in flux from the mid-1960s well into the ’70s due to a convergence of dissident energies from the reawakened women’s movement in the U.S. and from a pop culture revolution that had started even earlier in England. The unisex crusade of the 1960s was born in Mod London and spread to the world—cropped haircuts, pinstriped trousers, and sailors’ pea coats for urchin girls; crimson satin, purple velvet, and flouncy Tom Jones shirts for peacock boys.
But transsexual impersonation of the kind undertaken by David Bowie and Eleanor Antin was something new and different—or rather something as old as Teiresias, the shaman and prophet who crossed into forbidden sexual terrain. Drag was a familiar quantity in British music hall, with its rambunctiously outspoken “pantomime dame,” whose roots were in the rigidly conformist Victorian era and who begot the immensely popular entertainer Danny La Rue. From the 1920s on in Britain, Germany, and the U.S., gay nightclubs featured drag queens doing campy parodies of glamorous Hollywood stars or lip-syncing to rousing cult classic songs. (By Bowie’s formative years, the international drag anthem was Shirley Bassey’s incendiary “Goldfinger,” perhaps the most terrifying manifestation of ruthless star power ever recorded.) Bowie never had a triumphalist view of sexual liberation or gender games. He told an American magazine in 2000 (in response to a question about the song “Boys Keep Swinging”), “I do not feel that there is anything remotely glorious about being either male or female.”24 On the contrary, he had always systematically experimented with disorienting suspensions of gender, as in his ode to the “Homo Superior,” “Oh! You Pretty Things” (on Hunky Dory), where sexually ambiguous boys and girls have shifted into an indeterminate “thing” state, like works of art.
Bowie’s shocking proclamation of his gayness to Melody Maker in 1972 was unprecedented for a major star at the height of his fame. It was a bold and even reckless career gamble. But the overall pattern of Bowie’s life has been bisexual, something paradoxically far more difficult for many gay activists to accept, then and now. His open marriage to the equally bisexual Angie Barnett (another of his American
alliances) went further toward bohemianism than did the communal ’60s hippie ménage typified by the Mamas & the Papas in Charlotte Amalie and Laurel Canyon. His loquacious wife, with her brazen verve, encouraged his androgyny and helped costume it, notably a propos his “man-dresses.”
Yet despite his pioneering stand, Bowie was on a trajectory diverging from that of both feminism and the gay liberation movement which sprang up after the 1969 riots at New York’s Stonewall Inn. Although black and Latino drag queens had been central in that first resistance to a routine police raid, the drag queen soon became persona non grata to gay men who wanted to distance themselves from the age-old imputation of effeminacy. Similarly, the women’s movement was hostile to drag queens for their supposed “mockery” of women. The flaming lipstick and rouge of glam rock flouted feminists’ mass flight from makeup: cosmetics were among the accoutrements of female oppression flung into a “Freedom Trash Can” on the boardwalk at the famous feminist protest at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City in 1968. Bowie’s orientation toward fashion, glamour, and Hollywood went completely against the feminist grain in the 1970s, when identity politics made a highly ideological landfall in academe. Although “lipstick lesbians” emerged in San Francisco in the late 1980s, the cult of beauty would not be restored to feminism until Madonna led the way in 1990 with her “Vogue” video glamorizing high fashion and Hollywood love goddesses.
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