Leigh Bowery

An exploration of the life, artistic practice, social-historical context and cultural impact of Leigh Bowery. Vranou particularly considers Bowery's performative costuming and Live Art in relation to the ways they have influenced the broader spectrum of visual culture and the expanded field of performance studies.

Bowery’s cult status as an outrageously self-styled nightclub personality has obscured his significant contribution to performance studies and visual culture in favour of a justifiable discursive emphasis on his importance to fashion. The diversity of Bowery’s work and his marginality as an artist who emerged from a subcultural milieu complicated and thwarted his cultural value, hindering, as a consequence, his incorporation into art institutions and performance narratives.

Through close analysis of Bowery’s key looks and non-theatrical performances, the book examines the implications of his work in dominant histories of performance art and urgent discourses surrounding normativity, representations of illness, and body politics. It focuses on the performative dimension of Bowery’s costuming as an effective strategy for blurring the boundaries between art and life, reflecting his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire, his engagement in BDSM practices and the performance of extremity, and the posttranssexual ethos behind his hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language.