Leigh Bowery

Bol

A critical exploration of the creative practice, socio-historical context and cultural impact of multifaceted artist Leigh Bowery. Engaging with Bowery’s key looks and live art through a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou navigates costuming as a performative strategy that blurs the boundaries between art and life. Thought-provoking and enlightening, the study investigates his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire, and his fascination with extremity, hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language, establishing Bowery as a radical figure in contemporary performance and queer visual culture. Sofia Vranou holds a Ph.D. in performance and visual culture from Queen Mary University of London, UK. ‘Without dimming a trailblazing light, the book is bound to be a key source for studying the complexity and enduring influence of Leigh Bowery’s practice across live art, visual culture and queer studies.’ Stephen Farrier, Professor of Theatre and Performance, Rose Bruford College, UK ‘This is an essential read for anyone interested in the critical relationship between culture, art and material-corporeal expressive practices, where costume and performance serve as instrumental interventions in pressing social matters. Emerging against the background of the HIV/AIDS crisis, this study articulates a diverse and anti-disciplinary legacy of acceptance and difference.’ Donatella Barbieri, Reader in Critical Costume Practices and Cultures, London College of Fashion, UK Leigh Bowery: Performative Costuming and Live Art is a critical exploration of the creative practice, social-historical context, and cultural impact of the late London-based artist Leigh Bowery. The diversity of Bowery’s work and his marginality as an artist who emerged during the 1980s from a subcultural milieu complicated and thwarted his cultural value, hindering his incorporation into art institutions and performance art narratives for some time. Drawing on a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou seeks to historicize Bowery’s multifaceted body of work and critically situate it within the expanded fields of visual culture and performance studies. Through close analysis of Bowery’s key looks and non-theatrical performances, the book investigates the implications of his work in dominant histories of performance art and urgent discourses surrounding normativity, representations of illness, and identity politics. Thought-provoking and engaging, it focuses on Bowery’s costuming as a performative strategy that effectively blurs the boundaries between art and life; delves into his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire, reflects on his involvement with BDSM practices and the performance of extremity, and unpacks the posttranssexual ethos behind his hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language. Foreword by Boy George.

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Pages: 250, Hardcover, Intellect (UK)