Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes: David Bowie Is and the Stream of Warm Impermanence

 
Founded in 1852, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (the V&A) is an established museum of decorative art and design. Recently, and controversially, it has moved the focus of its major exhibitions away from shows made up from its massive permanent holdings (around 4.5 million objects) towards ones curated using external collections. These new shows have concentrated on contemporary or recent cultural phenomena that have popular appeal but that have developed out of elite, subcultural or avant-garde styles or movements. The “From Club to Catwalk” exhibition is one example; it aims to show the influence of ’80s British nightclub and street style on both haute couture and retail fashion.
 
In adopting its new exhibitions policy, the V&A is following a global cultural and business trend. Major museums operate in an ever more competitive international field in which income is key. They have to put on lucrative shows to afford their acquisitions, which have become increasingly expensive since the 1970s, when art prices began to boom. Museums now show artistic and/or cultural movements that not only have popular appeal (in film and television representations or on calendars, posters, and fridge magnets), but whose reach is also supplemented by an original elite or avant-garde cachet—impressionism, for example. The result is blockbuster exhibitions that exponentially increase financial and cultural capital. An early and important example was the hugely successful Royal Academy Monet exhibition of 1999, which turned the “R.A.” from a snooty if credible artists’ club and gallery into a major international museum player. Museums’ playoff of elite and popular, avant-garde and mainstream, subcultural and establishment elements can take many forms, as demonstrated by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent “Punk: Chaos to Couture” show. Economically, the strategy seems to have paid off. Like the international art market, the global museum market is booming. Yet the consequent enrichment is arguably less cultural than financial, as the following shows.
 
The museum-world context is important in reviewing David Bowie Is. On the face of it, Bowie looks like a perfect subject for a contemporary blockbuster art show. It’s hard to think of a popular musician who has been both as successful as Bowie and so patently influenced by a number of major ideas, movements, and techniques in modern and postmodern art. Bowie has, for example, worked in painting, installation art, video art, performance art, and digital art. He has often said that he sees himself as an “artist” rather than as a musician, and he has the canvases, costumes, and art world connections to prove it (he is an editor of Modern Painters). What’s more, Bowie has avant-garde and subcultural credentials. Many if not most of his popular creations have drawn on work that was or is countercultural, experimental, elite, or obscure. Examples of his influences include dada, surrealism, the theatre of alienation, fluxus, live art, beat writing, motorik music, and noise. When Bowie gave the V&A access to his archive, it must have seemed like a real gift, much of which was turned into David Bowie Is. The exhibition is a sell-out and its organizers are confident enough of its global appeal to have arranged a tour. After London, the show is visiting Ontario, São Paolo, Chicago, Paris, and Groningen. The public appears to be accepting enthusiastically, even gratefully, what they’ve been given.
 
Yet as Derrida has pointed out (as both Sartre and Genet did before him), gifts are never free; they always involve costs, or losses. The cost of David Bowie Is is partly financial, especially for the public. They’ve had to pay for expensive tickets, particularly if they’ve bought them from online agencies, “ticket touts,” or “scalpers,” who have increased face value prices by up to five hundred percent. There’s also an odd, uncanny loss implied in the show’s tour, which, like the show, comes in the wake of The Next Day (2013), Bowie’s first album in a decade. Album releases almost always precede concert tours by the musicians who have made them. Yet in this case, Bowie, who has a heart condition, will not be performing live shows (or giving interviews). His global audience will have to make do with a tour of his garments, recordings, icons, and relics in the conspicuous absence of the being who inhabited and/or created them.
 
There is a further cost to David Bowie Is that isn’t so much financial as cultural and critical. This is not to say that the show is low culture. It deals, in fact, with genuinely interesting and significant cultural phenomena, albeit inadequately. The exhibition doesn’t sufficiently explain or even show the important aesthetic, historical, and political dimensions of the field in which Bowie is engaged. In addition to the lack of cultural context and critical insight, the show lacks curatorial logic. It is stuffed – arguably overstuffed – with fascinating exhibits including Bowie’s drawings, paintings, song lyrics, costumes, posters, album covers and videos. Yet these aren’t arranged according to any clear narrative, critical perspective or sound topology. Instead, the exhibition collapses the two commonest curatorial strategies – historical and thematic – to no clear purpose. The effect is incoherence.1
 
The show is laid out in three main rooms (each containing sub-rooms, or cases). The first room tracks Bowie’s musical and stylistic development from the mid-’60s up to his first “hit,” Space Oddity, in 1969. Yet Bowie didn’t really “develop,” during this period, in which his influences and strategies were not so much eclectic as confused. He didn’t know whether he wanted to be a mod (he was better at designing the clothes than he was at playing R&B), a hippy (his silk kaftans and velvet loons were too flamboyant), a Buddhist (he was too ambitious to be egoless), or a folk singer (“a cockney Bob Dylan,” in his own disparaging words). Still, the mythic narrative of artistic development requires a cataloguing of influences, and the first room of the show is a reliquary of such in material form. Here, then, is Bowie’s Harptone acoustic guitar, his Grafton acrylic tenor saxophone, his sketches of what his imaginary bandmates might wear, and the Tibetan Buddhist print that graced his bedroom wall.
 
A second room jump-cuts from Bowie’s biography to his influences. This is a massive and irreducibly complex theme, as I show shortly. Suffice to say that Bowie’s “sources” are so numerous and various, yet so fundamental to his art and character as to be almost impossible to present in one way – let alone in one room. The popular 1950s entertainer Anthony Newley does not sit easily alongside Friedrich Nietzsche, and neither of them would be at home wearing Bowie’s “man-dresses” or his quilted, skintight, crotch-hugging, Clockwork Orange-influenced Buretti suits (with matching moon-boots). Yet here they all are, in a room containing objects whose interest is in inverse proportion to the coherence with which they’ve been arranged.
 
The final room “celebrates Bowie as a performer.” This facilitates some impressive spectacle, notably Mick Rock’s becoming-iconic “Jean Genie” video projected massively alongside a recently discovered live TV performance of the same song. Yet Bowie’s “performance” is presented without nuance, any sense of its ambiguity, its implication in the quotidian or passive, or its self-conscious inseparability from “life.” His performance, in other words, is presented independently of its “performativity.” But Bowie was smarter about this, and often indulged in anti-performance, or, as he would have called it, “anti-theatre,” which he discovered and practiced in Germany in the ’70s (as Fassbinder had in the ’60s). Hence the cover of his 1977 album Low, on which the title sits above a profile of the artist, producing a verbal/visual pun: “Low Profile.” On his subsequent world tour, Bowie performed much of the set dressed conservatively and standing stock still behind a synthesizer, often not singing. Both “events” are represented (via a photograph and a “live” video), but apparently without any sense of the performative contradiction they present. The contradiction presented by this “performance” room is inadvertent and relates to its implied narrative place in the show. It contains objects that are “later” than those in the first and second rooms (which have more objects from the ’60s and ’70s, respectively), and thus persists with the idea that the show has a clear telos that in fact it does not and that it can’t have sustained after the chaos of the second room. The third room thus represents a final and decisive instance of the curatorial illogic behind the exhibition.
 
Such illogic aside, there are two linked claims that David Bowie Is makes about its subject. Neither is unheard of, but both have slowly come to light as a result of increasing historical perspective and biographical and analytic work on Bowie. David Bowie Is makes one of these claims clearly and the other in an implicit and rather problematic fashion. The first claim is that Bowie is an artist in the broadest sense and not just a musician. Here are his sketches, drawings, paintings, woodcuts, journals, verbal experiments, costumes, mime performances, stage sets, film scripts, film performances, posters, album covers and even hairstyles to prove it (the music, of course, is here too). Bowie didn’t produce all these things on his own, but he did play a primary generative role in the creation of all of them. Sometimes this role was conceptual rather than practical (he got others to “work his ideas up”), so Bowie is partly a conceptual artist in the tradition that was begun (some would say continued) by Andy Warhol, whom Bowie admired (the admiration wasn’t reciprocated, although there’s a film record of their meeting on exhibit to confirm the influence). The second key claim of the show is that Bowie is “postmodern.” His work is multimedia, multifaceted, subversive, referential, self-conscious, trend-setting, and stylish. One can easily (indeed glibly) attribute all of these characteristics to postmodernism, a term that can describe most of Bowie’s output. Simply by collecting a lot of this output in three rooms, the V&A show demonstrates Bowie’s postmodern credentials. This isn’t an earth-shattering achievement, but it’s not an insignificant one. Indeed, the name of the show could have been credibly extended to David Bowie Is a Postmodern Artist, and Bowie is clearly worthy of consideration alongside others who have been granted this status. The book that accompanies the V&A exhibition states as much and the exhibition itself shows it (285).
 
Yet as indicated above, the exhibition doesn’t illustrate or explain Bowie’s postmodernism in detail or with any attention to what it might exactly amount to or mean. As readers of this journal know, “postmodernism” is contentious and difficult to pin down. Different definitions and periodizations of the term contradict as much as complement each other. The theoretical definition of postmodernism is tricky, and bears on its denominational, actual, and material instances: postmodern art, postmodern culture, David Bowie’s output, or whatever. The V&A exhibition doesn’t address this question of definition, or even raise it very clearly. Yet the question is unavoidable in so far as Bowie is postmodern, as the exhibition shows. Thus the problem of postmodernism besets both the exhibition and Bowie in crucial ways, dogging the show historically, aesthetically, and politically. The best way to reveal all this is to return to the show’s “narrative” (or lack thereof) and its exhibits.
 
For much of his career, Bowie has turned his diverse influences into coherent art by blending them into successive and distinctive personal audio-visual styles. Three well-known examples from one decade are the alien rock star of the early ’70s, the chic and decadent soulboy of the mid-’70s, and the arty and stylish minimalist of the late ’70s. These styles were embodied in theatrical personae inhabited and enacted by Bowie, the best-known of which is Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy was a mythical rock-god who was elevated and destroyed by fame. Bowie’s real-life models for him were Jimi Hendrix and Marc Bolan, representations of whom are unaccountably missing from the V&A show. Bowie borrowed Bolan’s camp and flash and Hendrix’s dandyism and showmanship. He added his own otherworldly androgyny, and Ziggy was born. Ziggy’s romantic and tragic story was recounted on the album that made Bowie famous: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972; see Bowie pictured with the Spiders from Mars here). In the album’s narrative, Ziggy becomes suddenly famous, but is disturbed by his fans’ impossible love for and expectations of him. His distress is compounded by his own hedonistic self-destruction, and all of this affects his eventual career suicide (and possibly his actual suicide). As well as telling this story on the Ziggy album, Bowie acted it out on stage on a year-long UK/US tour. He also acted it out hysterically in the real (in its strict Lacanian sense) through copious drug-use and bisexual sex. The elision between Bowie’s art, life, and performance was extreme. Bowie was living Ziggy’s fate as he narrated and performed it (he “killed off” Ziggy – and thus a part of himself – at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on 3 July 1973). Ziggy/Bowie’s degree of reflexivity was nothing if not postmodern, but the V&A exhibition shows this only inadvertently by containing some of the objects and images that contributed to Ziggy’s creation (and destruction). The postmodernism of this creation is not illustrated by the show’s curation or explained in its literature or captions. Apart from Bowie’s costumes from the period, the main Ziggy-item in the show is the original artwork for the album’s front cover – a Brian Ward photograph colorized by Terry Pastor. This is undoubtedly beautiful and unarguably iconic, but it says more about Bowie’s ability to make good aesthetic choices than it does about the postmodern “logic” of his art.
 
The reflexivity of postmodernism, first identified by Fredric Jameson, is far from the only aspect of it attributable to Bowie.2 Key features of postmodernism are also evident in Bowie’s collaborations. A common characteristic of postmodern culture is its fashioning by multiple hands and its concomitant irreducibility to any single author (thus feature film is often presented as prototypically and typically postmodern).3 Bowie’s art is no exception. The lynchpin of his Ziggy-era band (called, inevitably, The Spiders From Mars) was Mick Ronson, a prosaic but beautiful rocker from Hull whom Bowie forced into a silver catsuit and fluorescent makeup. Ronson was a skilled and exciting guitarist (and thus Bowie’s Hendrix-substitute), but also knew his way around a mixing desk. His production skills are only now being recognized as essential components of Ziggy and Bowie’s success. The V&A show doesn’t record this, but instead falls back on Mick Rock’s publicity shots of Bowie and Ronson, including a famous one of the former fellating the latter’s guitar. Rock’s shots are pioneering in pop photography for their use of both color-saturation and stark black and white. Yet they are presented here in the same mythologizing way in which they were made – as homage to Ziggy rather than as testament to his mutual creation by Bowie and others. This works to efface the way in which Bowie constantly “used” collaborators, including both Rock and Ronson, to perpetrate the various fictions on which his artistic career was built. Brian Eno’s collaboration with Bowie on his “Berlin Period” albums (Low, “Heroes,” Lodger [1977-9]) is better known, and the exhibition does devote a little space to it (a photo of Eno, his “oblique strategy” cards, and his AKS synthesizer are here), but in general the extent of Bowie’s collaboration was greater and more significant than David Bowie Is shows. This raises inevitable questions about the degree to which Bowie’s output was “his own.”
 
Such questions are of course familiar in debates about postmodernism, which approach it alternatively as informed and knowing or as unoriginal and inauthentic. On one side there is Charles Jencks’s celebration of the ironic, the informed, and the epistemologically plural character of postmodern architecture and art. For Jencks, postmodernism is diverse, cosmopolitan and playful. The fact that it draws on so many other sources is all to the good.4 On the other side is Jameson’s contention that postmodernism is pastiche, understood by him as a stylish but ultimately insignificant recycling of borrowed (or stolen) motifs. For Jameson, this lost significance is in part political; postmodern culture is commercial, superficial, and politically void. Depending on one’s preferences and prejudices, Bowie’s art can be placed on either side of this argument. Though the argument is worth having and may even be essential to Bowie, sadly David Bowie Is doesn’t engage in or even seem aware of it.
 
The general question of Bowie’s postmodernism and the particular questions of the originality and aesthetic and political significance of his art (or lack of same) are all apparent in his influences. Many of these influences are drawn from the modernist European avant-garde of the early twentieth century. For instance, many of Bowie’s sketches, drawings, stage-settings, and album covers are heavily influenced by German expressionist art and cinema. Notable examples include the cover of “Heroes” (1977), which is taken from a sketch by Bowie that resembles a woodcut by Emil Nolde; Derek Boshier’s cover for Lodger (1979; see Fig. 1 below), which is like a photographic reconstruction of a drawing by Egon Schiele (see Fig. 2 below); and the set for The Diamond Dogs tour (1974), which was inspired by the sets of Robert Wiener’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
 

 

 

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Fig. 1.

Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait Standing (1910) Creative Commons. Lodger album cover (1979)

© Derek Boshier. Used by permission.

Bowie’s own painting and drawings are specifically influenced by a key German Expressionist group – “Die Brücke” – of which Ludwig Kirchner was a founding member. The V&A exhibition includes a patently Kirchner-ish portrait by Bowie of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima (1977). Mishima wasn’t a participant in the first-wave of the early twentieth-century European avant-garde, but rather developed aspects of it outside Europe in the late twentieth century. Bowie’s painting thus not only reveals his knowledge of and interest in the culture of the avant-garde, but also its influence, extent, and dissemination – in a word, its history. As well as being aware of early European avant-gardism, he is au fait with the revival that took place in Japan and the US as well as Europe in the ’60s and ’70s, and is cognizant of the links between the proponents of this revival and their forbears. So, for example, he has drawn on the work of William Burroughs and Gilbert and George, but also understands what they have taken from surrealism and dada before them. Of course, in self-consciously integrating both the sources and the legacy of the avant-garde into his own art, Bowie is a sort of post-avant-garde artist himself.

 
This twentieth-century avant-garde influence on a post-avant-garde Bowie is implicit in some of the exhibits included in David Bowie Is. Yet little is made explicit and none of it is assessed, either through the arrangement of the exhibits or in their captioning. Some influences are even catalogued incorrectly in the show, for example, in its display of a “verbasizer”: a computer program that Bowie developed with Ty Roberts in 1995 (for use on his underrated Outside album of the same year). The programme is fed sentences from sources of any sort (news stories, journal entries, poetic musings) and then randomly rearranges the words it receives into new phrases that can be used to compose or inspire song lyrics. The process is a digitization of a technique Bowie had been employing for years: the “cut-up” method. This involved using material print sources (newspapers, advertisements, poems) that Bowie literally cut up and rearranged into new and random configurations. He copied the technique from Burroughs, who had taken it from his friend Brion Gysin, but who also recognized its origin in the collage techniques of Berlin dada. The V&A show includes a print interview between Bowie and Burroughs, but it doesn’t explain the “cut-up” link between them. It also misses the opportunity of showing Bowie creating a cut-up, as he does in Alan Yentob’s 1974 documentary Cracked Actor (another section of this documentary is used elsewhere in the show, to no great effect), and when the show does allude to “cut-up artists,” it wrongly includes James Joyce among them.
 

 

 
Click for larger view
 

Fig. 2.

David Bowie and William Burroughs (1974)

© Terry O’Neill. Used by permission.

 
It’s important that all these influences are accurately reflected, because judging Bowie’s art – and even his politics – depends on them. If Bowie’s art is merely the sum of his borrowed influences, then it is little more than the pastiche that Jameson abhors – a superficial, commercial and depoliticized popularisation of genuinely avant-garde sources. The most cynical version of this view holds that Bowie may know a lot about the avant-garde, but has an approach to it that is appropriative, exploitative, and disavowedly commercial. On this reading his attitude to artistic philosophies, movements, and styles is like his youthful attitude to his friends, which, according to Ronson, involved placing “blind faith in them for a year then dumping them” (Sandford 134-35).5 Michael Rother of the German experimental electronics band Neu! felt as if he were a victim of this sort of treatment after he worked with Eno in 1976, and then heard Eno and Bowie’s transposition of the “Motorik” sound he had pioneered on Low the following year. What he heard was a more accessible and commercial version of his own creation, but he never heard from Eno again. In a 2009 BBC documentary, both Rother and Dieter Moebius (Rother’s collaborator in the band Harmonia) imply that Bowie might have “used” them and their art cavalierly.6
 
Yet there is a strong counterargument to Bowie’s “exploitation” of the avant-garde. His creations have never been reducible to an overlay or series of plundered styles. They’ve always added something ingenious (and arguably genius) to the mix of influences that make them up. This something has often been “avant-garde” itself, as when Bowie appeared supine in a dress on the cover of the first UK release of The Man Who Sold The World (1971); he was self-consciously presenting himself as a sort of pre-Raphaelite transvestite.7 He played a variation on this theme a year later on the back cover of Hunky Dory, on which he assumed a pose copied from Greta Garbo. The shot was in black-and-white and evoked Garbo’s Northern-European and silent-movie heritage as well as her probable bisexuality. Bowie’s poses were about the most subversive imaginable in U.S.-influenced, denim-clad, masculinist, heterosexist, dick-and-guitar thrusting British rock culture of the early ’70s.8 He was being no less radical when, in the late ’70s, he embraced synthesized sound, minimalism, and electronic dance music just as Western pop was being purged by the noisy, analogic, rock-fundamentalism of punk (a movement that Bowie had helped to create in any case).
 
Despite, or rather, because of his avant-garde borrowings, Bowie was incredibly innovative and influential in the field of popular culture in the ’70s. His ’70s work continued to be a dominant influence in the ’80s. Cutting-edge white musicians frequently followed Bowie’s lead, whether they were groundbreaking and commercially successful (like Talking Heads or Human League) or experimental and cultic (like 23 Skidoo or The Screemers). The great resurgence of black musical forms (led by house and rap) in the popular musical mainstream of the ’80s and ’90s was less patently influenced by Bowie, though he at least prefigured it by giving his music over to Soul and R&B during the mid-’70s and by producing a best-selling dance album (Let’s Dance) in the early ’80s. Additional evidence of Bowie’s role as influential innovator of a specifically postmodern sort was provided in a recent V&A exhibition titled Postmodernism. The show was replete with “postmodern artists” who were (or are) self-consciously and declaredly influenced by Bowie, including Madonna, Damien Hirst, Alexander McQueen, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leigh Bowery, and Boy George. Thus Bowie’s postmodernism can be defended as a dynamic continuation of modernism. Its recycling of modernist motifs is informed, ingenious, and transformative, and generally corresponds with Jencks’s definition of the term as continuing and extending radical modernism, particularly its avant-garde sensibility. In this sense, it does exactly what Jean-François Lyotard (no less) thinks postmodernism should do.9 Of course, recognizing the reproductive ingenuity of Bowie’s artworks and/or the integrity of his avant-garde revivalism doesn’t automatically acquit him of the charge of having exploited people like Ronson and Rother. Yet it should be said in his defense that his biographers (including the non-hagiographic ones) nearly all represent him as someone who has become more decent, warm, generous, and attributive with age. Bowie seems increasingly to have paid his dues.10
 
These references to Bowie’s integrity, creativity, and influence defend him as a postmodern “hero” and respond to the charge that he is a postmodern dilettante and/or exploiter of modern sources and talent. But the difference of opinion about Bowie’s “postmodern worth” – about whether he is a good or a bad example of postmodernism and whether postmodernism as exemplified by him is a good or bad thing – is not entirely settled by explaining or justifying each side, nor even by evaluating his “art.” There is an obvious and important reason for this, as indicated above: the different views of Bowie’s postmodernism are predicated on a prior (and “deeper”) argument about postmodernism per se, one that is both theoretical and ontological. This argument precedes, instructs, and structures everything that might lead one to have any opinion about postmodernism at all, inclining Jameson to represent postmodernism as an abuse and exhaustion of modernism, and Jencks to cast it as a continuation and revivification of modernism. For Jencks, postmodernism is good because it is hyper-referential and multiply meaningful, whereas for Jameson it is bad because it is derivative and superficial. These oppositions furthermore underlie Jencks’s and Jameson’s accounts of what postmodernism is, and inform any consideration of postmodern phenomena that they might draw on; they also allow critics to cast Bowie as an agent of one or other of these forces. Because postmodernism is a good thing (for Jencks), Bowie can be seen as a creative, innovative, and “well-read” post-avant-garde exponent of it. Alternatively, because postmodernism is a bad thing (as Jameson describes it), Bowie can be seen as a plagiaristic, commercialising, superficial, apolitical, and insignificant postmodern artist. We are ostensibly free to choose between these different evaluations of both Bowie and postmodernism, but that choice can’t be entirely free (or impartial, or individual, or objective) because it will always already be instructed by the oppositions through which different accounts and evaluations of postmodernism are set up.
 
If we want to step away from (if not get beyond) this argument, we need to do more than assess its object (postmodernism) through its exemplar (Bowie). We must undo and re-think the oppositions that structure and sustain it; one way to do so is through a deconstruction of the term (and the “idea” of) postmodernism. What has been said so far here about “postmodernism” has taken the term to name something, whether an idea, a period, a movement, a historical phenomena, a style, a sensibility, or a business strategy. (This is all in keeping with the broadly ontological approaches to postmodernism identified above, which presume that it is a pre-existent phenomenon that can be named, even before it is explained). Whether the term postmodernism has been deployed to represent something rich or something derivative, it has been used to describe a thing. In other words, the term has been used in a “literal” way. Without dismissing or forgetting this approach, it’s worth employing another one that might treat “postmodernism” in a different (though not unrelated) manner, and that might begin to alter the structure of the argument in which it has become stuck. This approach involves treating the term postmodernism figuratively, and taking account of what figurative and literal treatments – including figurative and literal treatments of postmodernism – are and mean. Crucially, it means showing that such treatments aren’t just opposed to each other.
 
In his 1974 essay “White Mythology,” Jacques Derrida considers the general way in which metaphor is understood and the particular way in which the idea of it is articulated by philosophers.11 He notes that metaphor is often conceived as something “abstract” and associative. To take an example from the current text, we might describe Bowie as a “star.” To do so would be to use an abstract association between Bowie and an illuminated astral body, and to illustrate the qualities of the former with reference to the latter. The association is abstract because there are no literal and physical links between Bowie and any actual star. Yet it works to “enlighten” us about Bowie.12 Thus metaphor can have a particular sort of “use”: one of abstract enlightenment. Derrida points out that philosophers (including Anatole France and Aristotle) present this use as something that yields a metaphysical gain. A metaphor gives us an understanding that is more abstract, but that is also more precise and more resonant, both clearer and richer. In a number of respects, then, metaphors are ideal. They are more lucid and true. They are thus akin to ideas as conceived by Plato, which are pure and eternal in contrast to their mundane and imperfect embodiments or enactions. According to this sort of account, metaphor transcends the physical by going beyond it. It is metaphysical, as is its general description by philosophers.13
 
Yet as Derrida points out, philosophers also note other aspects of metaphor that are to do with its “use,” which is more ambiguous and troubling than it at first seems. Now it’s already been shown that metaphor has a metaphysical “use”: it enlightens things. This use depends upon an associative and abstract reference. The celebrity becomes transcendent by being referred to as something else: the star. Yet this reference is also to something material: the body in space. Philosophers worry that this material reference is effaced, that it is both hidden and “used up” in metaphorical reference. As the term “star” comes to mean celebrity rather than “illuminated body,” its latter and literal signification becomes increasingly forgotten and the term loses some of its meaning. Philosophers (like France) think that this explains why metaphors eventually become “over-used,” “dead,” or “worn out” like clichés or old coins that eventually cease to have value. Yet the metaphysical movement of metaphor also depends on the materiality it effaces. The metaphorical meaning of star could not exist without its literal derivation. Thus, as well as prioritizing and idealizing the former, philosophers harbor a guilty sense that metaphor “exploits” the latter. Just as one might “use” or “exploit” the energies and talent of a laborer (or indeed any other person) for financial or personal gain, one might “use” and diminish a metaphor’s literal reference (and hence something of its materiality) in realizing its metaphysical aim (enlightenment, clarity, transcendence). Philosophers overlook, disavow and/or “talk down” the extent and effect of such “exploitation” in their accounts of metaphoric formation, which allows them to idealize metaphor. Derrida first addresses this “issue” or “contradiction” by pointing it out: by subtly “exposing” it. He then reformulates the philosophical notion of metaphor such that it manifestly includes both and all aspect of its functioning, suggesting that metaphor not only involves an (ideal) gain, but also a (material) loss. It has a creditable “use” but also “uses” its literal other. This has to be so, because the literal has a necessary and supplementary relation to the metaphoric.14 One specific and important implication of this is that metaphor is always already literal. To sum up, metaphor is both effective and exploitative, involves both a gain and a loss, is both good and bad, and is literal as well as metaphoric.
 
Now if the term “postmodernism” can be used “metaphorically” or “figuratively” as well as literally, then the characteristics of metaphor – more exactly deconstructed metaphor – can be attributed to it. Neither Jameson nor Jencks come to this conclusion; although they describe postmodernism differently, they both only describe it “literally” as “something” that is one way or another. Were they able to think about it another way, they might do so “figuratively,” as something that is made meaningful by reference to something else or as something that is other than what it is. This is of course what a metaphor “does”: it gets its meaning abstractly and associatively, enlightening one thing by likening it to another. Postmodernism thought figuratively would thus not be one thing or another; it would be one thing with (or with reference to) another – one thing and another. Apart from anything else, this means it could have apparently opposite attributes. Postmodernism could be derivative and original, good and bad. And just as deconstructed metaphor is always already literal as well as metaphoric (and is conversely metaphorical as well as literal), so postmodernism thought “figuratively” would be both metaphorical and literal too. This is all in keeping with Derrida’s argument that deconstructed metaphor would register doubly: as literal and metaphoric, as useful and usurious, as good and bad, and so on. Of course, these registrations are multiple as well as double. It follows that postmodernism thought figuratively would be multiple and double too. One could thus claim that it is good and bad in a number of respects: original and imitative, mundane and transcendent, profound and superficial. In each case, furthermore, one could claim that postmodernism is the former because it is the latter and vice versa (original because imitative, imitative because original, mundane because transcendent, transcendent because mundane, and so on). This last point is not an insignificant one.
 
An important logical implication of the above is that postmodernism can be thought of as both derivative and innovative, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, a deconstruction of postmodernism by figural means allows that it is innovative because it is derivative. There is no better illustration of this than Bowie, or rather Bowie as influence. There are numerous examples of “original” artists who have been influenced by Bowie as well as by his influences (if unknowingly). Many of the dark, spiky, dance pop-bands of the ’80s (Pet Shop Boys, Blancmange, Soft Cell) and their contemporary alien techno-disco artists (Moroder, Eurhythmics, New Order) were self-conscious late twentieth-century Bowiephiles, but they were also (whether they knew it or not) channeling and extending an alienated expressionism that was conceived in Dresden in 1901. They were continuing this form because what they were doing derived from it, yet they were also making it new. This derivation was at one remove (it came via Bowie) and was fairly unrecognisable (even, quite often, to them); they were practicing a new “postmodern” expressionism.15 Without Bowie’s “original” borrowing from expressionism, these “new” derivations wouldn’t have happened in such a vital way. Bowie’s “imitators” were original because he was derivative, and derivative because he was original.
 
Now, this explanation is derived from a deconstruction of postmodernism that permits it to be thought of as “good” despite or because it is also conceivable as “bad.” More specifically, it demonstrates that “original” postmodern art may be so because it also isn’t so. Of course the properly deconstructive corollary to this “fact” is that postmodern art can be “bad” despite being good and that its “badness” could be connected – even intimately connected – to its goodness. This particular possibility is most apparent and “useful” in explaining the political aspect of Bowie’s art. Bowie’s politics have sometimes seemed questionable or even reprehensible; some of his views have even been reactionary. Others have seemed to display a “bad” postmodern attitude; they’ve seemed superficial, contradictory, or suspect. David Bowie Is neither challenges nor mentions many of Bowie’s questionable political views. This isn’t because Bowie’s politics are unquestioned or beyond question; it’s more the case that they’re not questioned now, which is partly Bowie’s doing. Although he has implicitly or explicitly adopted a number of quite different and sometimes extreme political positions throughout his career, his art and his commentary on the world have gradually (if irregularly) moved towards a liberal-democratic (rather than, say, neo-liberal or socially liberal) position, one that broadly advocates human freedom and equality. This sort of position amounts to a sort of liberal-democratic humanism and conforms with the default political consensus in the states in which Bowie lives and mostly works: the US, the UK, and Europe. It thus seems good or at least neutral in those territories, and so is largely uncontroversial there. This is why nobody mentions Bowie’s politics now.
 
Bowie’s current “political” position thus seems to have integrity, or at least it seems inoffensive. This appearance of integrity and acceptability is maintained as long as both Bowie and his celebrity “image” are “liked,” loved, and idealized. Right now, they are. A certain reduced, mythic, and uncritical representation of Bowie’s life and work currently holds sway in popular culture. This representation is sustained, even promoted by David Bowie Is, which presents him in the best possible light and even implies it is the light of genius. The world “music press” and media are happy to concur. They have a good new Bowie album to enthuse about, a major Bowie show to pore over, and thus an apparent Bowie “renaissance” from which to generate positive copy. This renaissance coincides nicely with a significant historical phenomenon: the hyper-mythologization of certain rock stars currently being undertaken by the Western media.16 Like a number of other continuing and/or returning late middle-aged rock stars – Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who – Bowie is now being idealized and canonized in order to take his confirmed and final place in popular music mythology before he dies.17 In both popular and “alternative” contemporary media, Bowie can do no wrong, even though he might have been deemed to have done so in the past (his ambitiousness, drug-taking, and sexual promiscuity are all grist to the myth-mill in this regard). Both Bowie and the industry will reap significant financial benefits from his mythologization. None of this is to say that he doesn’t deserve to be mythologized, but it is to stress that current representations of him are mythic and that they therefore erase all of the flaws and contradictions of his life, art, and career, including the political ones. The Bowie myth holds as long as one doesn’t subject it to any sort of meaningful critique, including and especially a historico-political critique. David Bowie Is fully accedes to this proviso, but what follows doesn’t.
 
As indicated above, Bowie has striven since the early ’80s to align himself with a sort of liberal humanism. This has involved a sort of cultural pluralism. 1983’s Let’s Dance (both the song and the video, if not the whole album) makes many references to non-Western cultures and is explicitly anti-racist. Yet this stance can be seen as having rescued his career in the wake of the bad publicity Bowie got for advocating fascism in the ’70s (the influential Rock Against Racism movement in the UK was formed partly in response to this).18 Since then, he and his apologists have downplayed his “fascist” tendencies, which they’ve attributed to historical, psychological, personal, or situational lapses. It’s claimed that in the mid-to-late-’70s, Bowie was poorly advised, naïve, mismanaged, misunderstood, confused, and suffering from cocaine addiction. All of this is true, but doesn’t quite get him off the hook. If we take Bowie’s artistic literacy seriously (and we should), we have to admit that he nurtured crypto-fascist influences from early on. He had been making lyrical references to the Nietzschean Übermensch since 1971, quite directly in the chorus of one of his best-known and most popular songs, “Oh You Pretty Thing” (from Hunky Dory), whose chorus contains the line “You gotta make way for the homo superior.” This reference is usually missed, but the active term in it – “homo superior” – has been taken to equate to the notion of the Übermensch. This notion is sometimes understood as having inspired the idea of the “strong man” or “strong leader” that was promoted by fascist groups in Europe during the early to mid-twentieth century, and that was particularly and obviously embraced by the Nazis in their submission to and idolization of Adolf Hitler. Bowie linked the idea of the “homo superior” to Nazi-era style and fantasized about being a “strong political leader” himself from about 1975 onwards. His “Thin White Duke” character – who embodied this style and who Bowie played onstage and in his albums of the period (particularly Station To Station and Low from 1976) – was later described by him as “a very nasty character indeed” (Sandford 243). What’s more, a number of the “narratives” that underpin Bowie’s ’70s albums (like Diamond Dogs) are dystopian ones that contain far-right ideas (this is also true about some non-’70s albums like Outside from 1995). Bowie’s ’70s art is certainly more of a product of far-right ideologies and fantasies than it is of left-liberal ones.19
 
David Bowie Is effects a massive repression of Bowie’s historic far-rightism and does so by not mentioning it. This repression turns to disavowal when inadvertent crypto-fascistic symbols show up among the exhibits. The worst example is John Rowlands’s 1976 photograph of Bowie in a Weimer-era (Ola Hudson) suit, one arm extended in a salute-like gesture, adopting the sort of neoclassical pose beloved of the Hitler Youth (a signed copy is available in the V&A bookshop). Bowie still suppresses, represses, disavows, or avoids any possible assignation of fascistic political beliefs to his current or previous work. The recently published list of his “100 Favourite Books” contains some revealing omissions in this regard. It doesn’t include any books by Nietzsche, even though Bowie was patently and declaredly influenced by him throughout the ’70s. Even more surprisingly, it leaves out Burroughs, who not only directly influenced Bowie’s ’70s’ work, but also inspired some of his most striking work of the ’90s, namely, the Outside album and “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” video that was made for a song from it (see Fig. 3 below). Burroughs advocated the genetic engineering of an all-male, anarchistic master race (precisely a homo superior) and the concomitant ridding of female and other “weak” elements from human association.20 By not mentioning him, Bowie’s booklist avoids evoking Burroughs’s extreme libertarian and part-fascistic beliefs. The list was elicited from Bowie by one of the curators of David Bowie Is and was displayed in the show in Toronto. By displaying the list and using it for publicity, the show is complicit (once again) in Bowie’s suppression/repression of his rightist past.21 This complicity might be excusable if inadvertent, but it would then be displaying an ignorance that compromises the credibility of the show. In other words, the curators of David Bowie Is either know about Bowie’s temporary fascism, in which case they’re suppressing it, or they don’t know, in which case they should.
 
Yet how is Bowie’s “fascism” best understood and how, particularly, can it be understood in relation to his postmodernism? Bowie’s engagement with “fascism” (and with related right-wing ideologies) is best described as a flirtation, understood in its full sense. This full sense is an ambiguous one, so it’s worth articulating carefully; in the process, the term flirtation will undergo a sort of deconstruction. Flirtation is something that is and isn’t serious. On the one hand, it is taken to be superficial or empty, and so it doesn’t really “mean” anything: to flirt with someone does not mean that one will have sex with them. On the other hand, flirtation signals desire, which can be very serious (for example, in a psychoanalytic sense); it drives human behavior and can have enormous destructive as well as creative effects on human and non-human life. We need only think of the desire for power or the “death drive” in this regard.22 Indeed, it is because flirtation is a manifestation of desire and because desire is so serious that one speaks of “flirting with danger” or even “flirting with death.” Thus Bowie’s flirtation with fascism was both serious and not. On the one hand, he genuinely thought England in the ’70s was in a state of decline that only a fascist government could allay. On the other hand, he liked the uniforms and the haircut suited him. His “fascism” operated in a “double” register that exactly corresponded with the deconstructed “postmodernism” attributed to him above: it was serious and superficial at the same time. This registration was not only double; it was also reversible. Bowie’s “fascism” was not only superficial as well as serious (and vice versa), but also superficial because it was serious (and vice versa). These last points need some explaining.
 
The double registration (one might say duplicity) of Bowie’s “fascism” can be traced to his influences once again, and to his knowledge about those influences (or lack thereof). It’s already been shown that he is very well versed in the European artistic avant-garde and its “postmodern” developments, particularly expressionism, post-expressionism, surrealism, and their legatees. Some of this knowledge came via Bowie’s high school education, in which he specialized in and was good at art. Yet much of it was acquired by him subsequently through his own interests and research.23 Bowie had no higher education. He is well-read, but (largely) self-educated. Although some of his interests have been well-informed, others haven’t: they’ve been apocryphal, populist, and mythological. This is especially true about the influence of fascism. Bowie never formally studied politics, philosophy, or history, and his early understanding of all of them was incomplete, inaccurate, or distorted. His references to and transpositions of Nietzsche’s ideas exemplify this. The term “homo superior” is not a good translation of Übermensch and is not used by Nietzsche’s respected translators. It is a popular term, most often been employed in science fiction and comic-book literature to designate genetically improved or highly evolved beings that have “superhuman” qualities (of which Superman is the best-known example). There is indeed some “Nietzscheanism” in the concatenation of ideas that have led to the imagination of such beings in popular art and literature, but it is mixed up with genetic and futuristic fantasies and other science-fictional notions of all sorts.24 Bowie’s own interests in Nietzsche and fascism coincided with his belief in UFOs, his fascination with and practice of the occult, and his love of sci-fi. All of these interests were contemporaneous with a psychotic breakdown he had around 1976-78. In the intellectual and psychological chaos and drama of this breakdown, he came to the conclusion that there was a plot against him involving his friends, his manager, and some aliens. He thought that he could only protect himself against this plot with occult practices. Alongside this, he came to some other conclusions: that Nietzsche was a fascist and that fascism was a good thing. He decided that it should be introduced in England and that he might be the person to lead its development there. Disastrously, he began to say all this – directly and indirectly – both to people around him and to the music press.
 
Bowie’s ’70s “fascism” is an example of how something serious can be spoken about in a shallow and wrong-headed way, and yet get exposure and have influence. For some commentators, it is precisely an example of what is wrong with postmodernism (namely, that superficial or naïve views held by uninformed celebrities can have real effects). Yet it is even more involved a phenomenon than this, one that shows that postmodernism is complex. Demonstrating this means extending the deconstruction of postmodernism begun above, to demonstrate the way that something “bad” (e.g., “fascism”) can come out of something that is (at least ostensibly) “good.”
 
Bowie’s enormous curiosity, imagination, and creativity fed his interest in the political and aesthetic ideas that led him to fascism. His energies had already been stimulated by an earlier ethos that was non-fascist and even anti-fascist: the hippy movement of the late ’60s. Initially, Bowie had strongly identified with this movement, including its left-liberalism and collectivism.25 When the movement “broke down” and “sold out” in the early ’70s, he tried to make sense of this in a serious-minded way (in songs like “The Man Who Sold The World” and “Memories of a Free Festival”). Yet he also did so in an ill-informed way, and the conclusions he eventually came to were wrong. By the mid-’70s he had substituted National Socialism for collectivism and lumped both together with other “alternatives” to collectivism that suffused hippyism: mysticism and individualism. The result was a misguided rightist mess that had serious concerns at its root, but that engaged with them superficially and ignorantly, especially from our contemporary perspective.26 Yet Bowie’s “fascism” didn’t just contradict his “good” hippy intentions and his fair-minded political beliefs; it was also a sort of inversion of them and thus “necessarily” came out of them. In other words, Bowie’s “fascism” was both a response to the failure of hippy ideals and a reversal of the precepts they embodied.27 The general principle exemplified by this particular reversal (which would be a “deconstructive principal” if there were such a thing) is that pernicious effects can follow from good intentions. This is because they are the consequence of a misjudgment of such intentions, and/or because they are always already implied or implicated in them. These two possibilities are related, as in the case of Bowie’s “fascism.” Bowie didn’t only flirt with fascism because he didn’t understand it, but also because he didn’t understand its exact relation to and difference from (that is, its implication in) collectivism. More exactly, he didn’t understand that National Socialism is like “liberal humanism” in being a form of collectivism, but also unlike it in being autocratic. He was thus able to replace the latter naïvely with the former.
 
What this analysis tells us about Bowie’s postmodernism (and indeed postmodernism per se) is that it is complex, but also explicable according to a deconstructive “logic.” It is neither abundantly meaningful (as Jencks would have it) nor merely superficial (as Jameson would have it), but rather both. What it tells us about Bowie’s politics, as they relate both to his “postmodernism” and to its deconstruction, is that they should be tracked through, and are ultimately emanations from his art. It’s worth reiterating that David Bowie Is avoids or brushes over all this, and that it fails to address another, related aspect of Bowie’s postmodernism: Bowie’s sexual politics. Like his social politics and his art, these are complex and are complexly related to his postmodernism (and to the deconstruction of his postmodernism). Treating Bowie’s sexual politics ideally requires an article in itself, and this piece won’t deal with these politics in great detail. However, they’re important enough that one shouldn’t ignore them or treat them cursorily, as does David Bowie Is.
 
From this point in history it would be easy to make a strong political defense – even a shining example – of Bowie’s sexual politics. Bowie declared his bisexuality in 1972 and deployed his sexuality in his art creatively and strategically thereafter. He was publicly bisexual throughout the ’70s, when homophobia was common in UK popular culture and mainstream society. Bisexuality was even doubly vilified at the time, as it was often mistrusted by gay rights groups (who took some time to become Lesbian and Gay groups and significantly longer to become Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender groups). In short, the “straight” world tended to see bisexuality as another form of homosexuality and treated bisexuals homophobically as a consequence. Conversely, the gay community tended to see bisexuality as a form of imposture, treating bisexuals as temporarily or partially gay (as what Freud called “contingent inverts”) who didn’t have trustworthy sexual inclinations or identities (46-48).28 Of course, all of these terms and prejudices would be problematized and worked through in the subsequent three decades, but in the 1970s (and much of the ’80s) they were firmly “in place,” as were the prejudices that surrounded them.29 To his credit, Bowie adopted a position in relation to his sexuality that didn’t fit any recognisable political identity at the time, whether it was conventional or “progressive.” His sexuality remained quite uncategorizable in terms of the prevailing political oppositions through which sexuality was represented, understood, and lived. In this respect, he was undoubtedly a sort of queer pioneer. The treatment of this crucial fact by David Bowie Is is woefully inadequate, comprising little more than a middle-sized projection of the “Boys Keep Swinging Video” (1979) and an interview with Gary Kemp (of all people) in which he briefly enthuses about Bowie’s adoption of “the boy/girl thing.”
 
In anticipating queer politics, Bowie’s ’70s sexuality is postmodern in a rather obvious way. Yet it is also postmodern in a non-obvious – that is, a complex – way that is once again consequent on a deconstruction. This deconstruction isn’t just of “postmodernism” but also of Bowie’s bisexuality, which was both superficial and profound in exactly the way his postmodernism was. If Bowie was a (profound) sexual misfit and a pioneer, it’s also true that in some sense his sexuality was superficial, even fashion-led. It’s little known that Bowie didn’t initially identify himself as bisexual in the ’70s, but as gay.30 In this respect, his sexuality looks as if it might have been opportunistic. He was straight when it was unacceptable for a pop star to be gay (in the late ’60s), gay when it was becoming more acceptable not to be heterosexual (in the early ’70s), and bisexual when it was fashionable in some circles to be so (bisexuality had been made chic by one or two stars before Bowie, like Bolan). This looks like the height of superficiality – altering one’s sexuality according to fashion and apparently doing so for career purposes. Yet to see Bowie’s sexuality as just fashionable would be to miss a crucial and crucially meaningful aspect of it. Outside of sexual categorizations, his sexuality was radical in being distinctly and visibly non-human. Bowie adopted the figure of the alien throughout his career, from Ziggy in 1972 to the paradoxically alien Earthling of 1997. He even played an alien successfully in a high profile film: Nicholas Roeg’s remarkable 1976 version of Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell To Earth. If this wasn’t enough, Bowie has even said that the main theme of his ’70s work was alienation. Thus Bowie’s sexuality was other to any mainstream or fashionable sexual identity at least as much as it was in conformance or opposed to it. It was precisely this sexual alterity that appealed to his fans, and that was its truly radical aspect.31 This is what a deconstruction of Bowie’s sexuality properly reveals: that it was other than sexual, rather than “bisexual.” His sexuality anticipated the vicissitudes of radical sexual identities and politics for decades to come.
 

 

 
Click for larger view
 

Fig. 3.

Still from “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” (1995). Music video. Dir. Samuel Bayer (1995).

 
If one wanted to sum up very provisionally what has been shown about Bowie’s life and career above, one could say that both have been various and complex. This variety and complexity is characteristically postmodern, but also superficially so, in so far as it accords with a postmodernism that is understood too generally in terms of its common descriptive features (variety, complexity, stylishness, etc.) and not by way of a deconstruction of the logic that underpins them. What such a deconstruction discloses is a subtle cultural history, one that exceeds Bowie as much as it is impelled by him, and one in which his ghosts come back to haunt him. In one possible reading of this history Bowie’s misdemeanors (if that’s what they are), including his ‘flirtation’ with ‘fascism,’ are explicable and are product of ignorance and circumstance as much as anything else. Yet this reading, even if it redeems Bowie, doesn’t justify David Bowie Is. The shortcomings of the exhibition have to do with its omissions: its inadequate treatment of Bowie’s postmodernism, its occlusion of his flaws, its complicity with his current mythologization. If one thinks that a major exhibition has a responsibility to make one think, or to offer some critical perspective on its subject (however minimal), then David Bowie Is doesn’t do so — despite its provision of ample material for continuing stimulation of the ‘strange fascination’ that Bowie has held for so many of us for so long. This phrase – ‘strange fascination’ – is taken from one of Bowie’s best-known songs: “Changes.” It was astutely chosen by David Buckley as the title of his well-regarded Bowie biography. Another phrase from “Changes” bears even more on one of the main points this review has been trying to make, and specifically illustrates the shortcomings of David Bowie Is just mentioned;32 the exhibition isn’t ahistorical, but it is insufficiently and inaccurately so. It offers Bowie fans the opportunity to immerse themselves in a version of his career that is beautiful and comfortable, one that corresponds with ‘the stream of warm impermanence’ that Bowie repudiated in “Changes” and that bears him (and us) along in the current (and currency) of his myth.