This week, ACMI will launch the comprehensive career retrospective, David Bowie is. The exhibition was first presented at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in early 2013. It stands as the fastest selling exhibition in the museum’s 163 year history, and it stayed unbelievably popular for the duration of its six-month run. London is David Bowie’s home, so perhaps this fervent popularity is to be expected. But over the last 18 months, the traveling exhibition has elicited a similarly crazed response around the world.
“It seems to be equally popular wherever it goes,” says co-curator Geoffrey Marsh. “Berlin, Paris, Canada, America, Brazil. They’re all very different countries and also I think have a very different relationship to rock music and to British/American music.”
As a massive Bowie fan, it’s tempting to describe him as a brilliant songwriter and unrivalled artistic chameleon. But as we know, there are no absolutes, particularly in the realm of popular culture. In any case, the exhibition isn’t simply targeted at fans.
“Even if you don’t like David Bowie, I think most people who’ve heard his music would recognise that within popular music he’s unique,” Marsh says. “Lots and lots of people try and imitate him, but really he is on a very distinct track, very different from anybody else. There’s a famous quote about William Blake, the artist, and it’s something like ‘Nobody preceded him, no one walked with him, and no one succeeded him.’ And I think that’s a bit true of Bowie.”
For fans of Bowie’s work, the affection tends to go way deep. He’s the sort of artist that invites obsession. Not only is his catalogue vast and immensely varied – spanning almost 50 years and 24 studio LPs – but he’s remained a fascinating enigma.
“Something that a lot of people wrote in the comments book was that they felt going to the exhibition was like revisiting their own lives,” says Marsh. “In other words, so many of Bowie’s songs coincided with when they met their first girlfriend, got married, had kids… A lot of people said, ‘It’s really odd, because I was walking around, and a lot of the time I was thinking not about Bowie, but about my own life.’ We never intended that, but I think it was something that came out of the exhibition and reflected the fact that he has had such a huge impact on people.”
Like many eager Bowie fans, I made the trip to London two years ago in order to see David Bowie is. The huge rush of inspiration it delivered was on par with the feeling generated by the paintings of the post-impressionists or Francis Bacon. It truly blurred the distinction between high art and popular art.
“Because we’re a museum of art, design and performance, what we were really exploring is the nature of creativity,” says Marsh. “We live in this environment now where we talk about the creative economy and that we’ve all got to work in being creative rather than making screwdrivers or whatever. I think that’s a tough thing actually, particularly for a lot of young people. This impression is given out; anyone can just go and they’ll be a star and win a Grammy within two years. But apart from the hard work of actually getting yourself noticed, it’s just incredibly hard work being creative. If it was easy, everyone would do it. That’s what we wanted to try and get over: the reason that he’s successful is because he works bloody hard.”
Although his track record isn’t unblemished, these days David Bowie is thought of with a sort of holy reverence. David Bowie is doesn’t just chronologically recount his career, but it does commence when he was a young man. Pre-fame, the exhibition shows him to have been a bit of a precocious dandy, as ambitious as he was eager.
“Clearly at a very young age – ten, 11, 12 – he just decided he wanted to be a success,” says Marsh. “I think initially he wasn’t that bothered what he was going to be. Of course then he got into music, and then songwriting. But a thing we tried to show in the exhibition as the thing that made him a success was when he trained as an actor. He realised that as an actor you can take people anywhere. Most rock music isn’t like that. It’s all about, ‘Friday night and I’ve gone down to the bar and I’m having a pint and I’m arguing with my girl.’ It’s all about sweat and grit and denim and authenticity. Of course, he flipped the other way.”
To compile David Bowie is, Marsh and fellow curator Victoria Broackes were given unrestricted access to Bowie’s private archive. It’s difficult to speak about Bowie without making reference to his amorphous identity. Over the course of his career, he’s executed comprehensive transformations into a range of alter egos. Something that’s less acknowledged, however, is that David Bowie himself is a creation. The man isn’t David Bowie, it’s David Jones.
“The archive itself is not about David Jones the person,” Marsh says. “I mean there’s a few pictures of when he was young, but there’s nothing about his personal life in it, about his marriage or his kids or anything like that. It’s an archive about an alter ego. It’s like if Picasso had created another person who was at arms length from him. Apart from not being a sort of ‘rock’n’roll’ thing to do, the idea of recording your own past is really weird. A lot of people, like Elton John, giveaway stuff or they auction stuff off for charity, but Bowie’s just kept it there. When I first saw it I couldn’t quite believe they were genuine.”
Along with displaying lyric sheets, hundreds of photographs, stage sets, memorabilia and over 50 costumes, the exhibition is distinguished by its unique audio component. Upon entry, patrons are given a premium quality headset, which plays appropriate audio – such as illuminating interviews and recordings of Bowie’s music – depending on where you are in the room.
“Although the technology has never been used in a museum before in that way, it’s not actually that sophisticated,” Marsh says. “But everybody is kind of knocked out by it. It tells you something about museums and galleries – that historically they’re very focused on things, 3D objects. Generally speaking, sound in museums is done really badly. Bowie’s obviously obsessed about sound on his records and when he’s performing, so we wanted to raise the whole quality threshold.
“In the late ‘90s, he said ‘I can imagine a world where sound around us is like air,’ and we sort of moved to that in the last 15 years. You know, everybody wanders around with headphones strapped to their head. There’s huge potential in it, because it’s such an affective medium. We wanted to use the technology like that, which linked to Bowie’s sound and vision.
“I have to be honest, it worked much better than I thought it was going to,” Marsh adds. “It was really only the day before when it started working and I thought, ‘Actually this is going to work really well.’ The only trouble is that everybody wants all music exhibitions to sound like that and it is quite expensive doing it. When we started on the exhibition we hadn’t really thought this through, and without that I think it would be a lot thinner and a lot less effective.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
