About three years ago, the V&A was given permission to access the David Bowie Archive to select a variety of items to include in an exclusive exhibition called David Bowie is. The exhibition displays some of the most well-known attributes from Bowie’s several decades long career, some of the highlights, his influences and also a few relics from Bowie’s early days. Since the end of its original run at the Victoria and Albert museum in London, David Bowie is has been on a tour of big cities all over the world and has been in Toronto, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Chicago, Paris and Melbourne. The exhibition has been seen by over 1 million visitors worldwide. Last year it was announced that David Bowie is would set foot in Groningen, the northern Netherlands’ largest city and home of the Groninger Museum. On February 2nd, I decided to pay the exhibition a visit and see what it is all about.
The David
Bowie Is exhibition spans 50 years of the singer's life, from his
youth as plain old David Jones to the pioneering and influential musical genius
he’d grow up to be and who ended up being loved by millions. Instead of following a chronologically correct timeline, the
V&A decided to organize
David Bowie is thematically and to present
every single version of Bowie at once. The exhibition gives visitors the opportunity to experience his
mastermind, and shows how much of an impact his work had, and still has, on
people from all over the world. It demonstrates how Bowie’s
work has influenced and has been influenced by a wide range of artists and movements
in art, music, design, theatre and fashion. The exhibition focusses on his
creative processes, his shifting and ever-changing style in both music and
fashion, and his collaborative work with different designers and creative minds
in a variety of fields in the arts.
David
Bowie is took three years to make and features more than 300 unique objects from
Bowie’s own archive that were gathered across his extraordinary career by the
man himself and his personal full-time curator. The exhibition includes
items such as handwritten song lyrics, diary entries, letters, original
costumes and fashion,
photography, sketches, music videos, excerpts from films, interviews and live performances, set designs and several other rare materials.
It even features some of Bowie's own instruments, like the banjo he played onstage in Baal and an old synthesiser
from his Berlin days, and also toys and other items from his childhood and
youth. Upon entering the exhibition, the first thing visitors will see is a
mannequin wearing Kansai Yamamoto’s famous monochrome PVC bodysuit that David Bowie wore on his Aladdin Sane tour in
1973, and a Bowie quote that says “All art is unstable. Its meaning is not
necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There
are only multiple readings.” Amongst the 50 outfits and stage costumes that are
featured in the exhibition are also the Pierrot
costume from the Ashes to Ashes music video, the Union Jack Coat by Alexander
McQueen, his Thin White Duke suit, the Ziggy Stardust
jumpsuit that Bowie wore in 1972 on Top Of The Pops, the ice-blue suit that was
featured in the music video for “Life On Mars”, Kansai Yamamoto’s
Aladdin Sane knit bodysuit, and his white cloak that was decorated
with kanji characters.
In order to add more dimension to
the exhibition and give visitors the best possible experience, the V&A has worked in partnership with audio specialist
Sennheiser. Before entering the exhibition, visitors are given an audio guide
and headset that’s being triggered by sensors throughout the museum. This
causes David Bowie is to be more than
just visually overwhelming, and has visitors using all of their senses. As you
walk through the museum, the audio guide will automatically provide the right
music and soundtrack to fit whatever it is that you’re looking at. In one of
the first rooms of the exhibition you get to know more about young David Jones as the video for Lucille, a song by one of his
favorite artists Little Richard, plays in the background. It is also in this room
where you’ll see David Bowie’s very first interview with Cliff Michelmore on BBC Tonight, back when he was only 17 years old and the founder of ‘The Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men’. As you walk
along, you can step into sort of a makeshift studio with photos of the
recording process and hear an audio file of the singer’s scratchy recordings. Halfway
though the museum you’ll walk past a ‘wall’ of tv’s that play the video for the
first single of his final album Blackstar, while its haunting tunes fill your
ears. Amongst the multimedia aspects of the exhibition is also an excerpt from
promotional film ‘Love You till Tuesday’,
a video of a younger David performing a
mime act called ‘The Mask’. In this 5-minute long video he narrates the story of a man who puts on
a mask that makes him famous. In the end he discovers that he can no
longer remove the mask of fame, which in a way applies to David himself. It also sheds a light on a different form of art that he was
very interested in.What many people don’t know, is that Bowie was trained in
mime by Kate Bush's choreographer Lindsey Kemp, and even did a (disastrous) mime
act as a warm-up performance for T. Rex in 1969, back when they were still
called Tyrannosaurus Rex. The final part of the exhibition sees giant screens
that show some of his most important and famous video clips and live
performances. Behind some of these screens you´ll discover a couple of his most
iconic stage-costumes that were worn during these performances. With his music
playing loudly, people of all ages were seen dancing and singing along, which
almost gives you the feeling of being part of an actual David Bowie concert.
Besides being a versatile artist, David Bowie was also groundbreaking and revolutionary in terms of social impact. He was one of the
first artists to play with feminine traits and wear long hair, and after it
became fashionable for men to have long hair during the glamrock-era; he
chopped it all off. He was one of the first male artists to truly embrace his
femininity and androgyny, and often combined his art with at the time daring
and unique looks. He made it okay to be a little
bit weird, and inspired people to truly be themselves and be whoever it is
they wanted to be. His unforgettable and world-famous performance of his hit “Starman” on Top Of The Pops in 1972, a video that was also part of the exhibition, did a
lot to change general attitudes towards the lgbt+ community, and towards anyone
who didnt fit the mold or people who questioned who they were. During his career, he
challenged the peoples perception of gender stereotypes and sexual identities,
long before most people had even heard of the word ‘genderqueer’ and other non-binary identities.
One thing is for sure: David Bowie was a trendsetter, in
more ways than one. Many artists have stated that if it wasn’t for Bowie, maybe
they never would have started a career in music or the arts at all. Near the
end of the exhibition is a screen that displays photographs of the many ways that
David Bowie has inspired modern day artists and even some of the biggest
fashion labels, along with the sentence “David Bowie is all around you”. At the
very end of David Bowie is you walk
past a wall of photographs that were taken throughout his entire career. Above
these photographs it says: “David Bowie is forever now”, and I believe this to
be true. The exhibition attracted people of all ages, both women and men, who
were all touched by this wonderful artist, and each in their own way. While
this ‘Black Star’ may not ever shine again, his art was timeless and he will
forever be remembered and considered to be one of the greats.
The V&A have said that after the exhibition in Groningen
ends, the tour will continue, although it is currently only confirmed to travel
to Japan in 2017. ‘David Bowie is’ was originally supposed to stay at the
Groninger Museum until 13 March 2016. After his
death and a growing interest in the exhibition, it was extended by one month.
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