The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has introduced the opening of a brand new David Bowie Centre for the Performing Arts in 2025 at V&A East Storehouse in east London. This follows the news that the museum has acquired – by means of donation – the artist’s fabled archive.
This assortment of over 80,000 objects shaped the idea of the museum’s 2013 exhibition David Bowie Is. It consists of private correspondence, lyric sheets, pictures, costumes, set designs, music awards, movies, album art work, devices and plans for unrealised tasks.
The present’s curators, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, described it as “one of the most, if not the most, complete archive of any pop music artist” of all time,
In 2020, I used to be commissioned to edit The Cambridge Companion to David Bowie, having lengthy researched the artists’s (usually ghostly) presence in each up to date theatre and up to date cinema.
Here are my prime 5 Bowie treasures, with a playlist that sounds out his playful curiosity about how we occupy our our bodies and genders, his tender sense of our want for magnificence and his passionate respect for model.
1. Jockstrap
During the 1973 Ziggy Stardust tour, Masayoshi Sukita photographed a near-naked Bowie performing earlier than a joyously crazed Japanese crowd, sporting solely a jockstrap.
This piece of athletic package, so evocative of sport’s homosocial energies and of working-class tradition, creates an irreverent rigidity with the androgyny and strangeness of the costumes dressmaker Kansai Yamamoto created for that very same tour.
Bowie was at his most gloriously queer when trafficking in photos of iconic, conventional (and intensely susceptible) masculinity. Other notable equipment embody the crimson boxing gloves he wore throughout dwell performances of his 1973 observe Panic in Detroit and the darker gloves he sports activities on the duvet of 1983’s Let’s Dance.
2. The 1973 Hammersmith Odeon dressing desk
In Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, the 1973 Donn Alan Pennebaker documentary about Bowie’s closing Ziggy gig, we see the artist getting ready for the stage. As he sits in entrance of a mirrored dressing desk, his make-up artist applies rouge, eyeshadow and eyeliner, remodeling him from a pallid younger man into a female icon.
I’d like the brand new centre to recreate the dressing desk: the 2 bottles of wine (one opened), the white plastic cups, the containers of tissues, the big tin of hairspray, the container of Johnson’s baby-powder, the well-used inexperienced ashtray.
This light show of the mundane paraphernalia of Seventies femininity speaks to Bowie’s lifelong preoccupation with what English literature professional Shelton Walderp phrases an “aesthetics of self-invention”, stretching from Bowie again to Oscar Wilde, and past to Shakespeare and Japanese Kabuki theatre.
3. Bowie’s copy of George Orwell’s 1984 – and different books
One set up within the 2013 V&A present featured a faceless model with outstretched arms, excessive, excessive up within the house. It was draped in a cloak designed by Yamamoto in 1973, a white floor-length garment, made within the Japanese hikinuki custom and designed to be ripped off in a speedy onstage costume change. It is roofed in crimson and black kanji which translate as “one who spits out words in a fiery manner”.
Suspended round it within the V&A, like so many birds in flight, had been 20-odd books from Bowie’s private library by authors together with RD Laing, Vladimir Nabokov and Hubert Selby Jr.
I’d like to see Bowie’s copy of George Orwell’s 1984 function – a novel I learn, aged 12, after I had heard Bowie was writing a musical based mostly on it. Also, something he owned by French author Jean Genet, whose title impressed the title of the 1972 single, The Jean Genie, and whose closing ebook, Prisoner of Love (1986) impressed the eponymous track Bowie recorded with Tin Machine in 1989.
4. The Hedi Slimane three piece swimsuit – and different blue fits
On 1977’s Sound and Vision, Bowie famously sang:
This sentiment chimes with the filmmaker, Derek Jarman’s personal tackle the color (in Chroma: A Book of Colour):
Bowie tremendously admired Jarman, an extract of whose movie, Blue, was performed throughout the pre-show music for the 1995 Outside tour. Like Jarman, Bowie liked the color blue, perhaps, partially, as a result of he knew how good he regarded in it.
Like he did within the turquoise swimsuit Freddi Burretti designed for his 1973 Life on Mars? video, whose vivid hue echoed Bowie’s eye make-up; or the powder-blue swimsuit designed by Peter Hall that featured repeatedly on the 1983 Serious Moonlight tour; and the attractive petrol-blue three-piece, designed by Hedi Slimane, that he wore on his 2002 Heathen tour.
5. The white Supro guitar – and different devices
One of essentially the most compelling pictures within the David Bowie Is catalogue is of the white Supro 1961 Dual Tone electrical guitar that Bowie performed on his closing tour, in help of the 2003 Reality album. The picture stays emblematic of Bowie’s dogged dedication to the chances, and precise making of music.
Other devices of notice would come with the 12-string acoustic guitar he turned to all through his profession; the Japanese koto he performs on the 1977 observe Moss Garden; the saxophone he had performed since he was a young person; and the harmonicas that adopted him from 1969’s track Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed to 2016’s I Can’t Give Everything Away, the ultimate observe on Blackstar, his closing album.
Author: Denis Flannery – Associate Professor in American Literature, University of Leeds