Nicola Tyson’s Dancing #3, 2012
“You wouldn’t want to take them on,” Tyson recalls. “They had no limits. It was just the way they entertained themselves.” “Bowie Nights,” Tyson’s show, focuses on this look-at-me culture just before their poses were perfected. By the time clubs like White Trash, Blitz, Anarchy, and Taboo came along, the outfits were more deliberate, and the venues were conceived as a stage for creative display. “I was just as happy showing my films in nightclubs or at underground raves like Jeremy Healy’s the Circus,” Maybury says. “It seemed just as legitimate as an art gallery, if not more so.”
For Trojan and Bowery, makeup and costumes were a means of artistic expression. “Trojan’s ideas came straight from the canvas and onto the face,” says Muir. “So on one level, we’re staging the first serious show of a makeup artist.” Trojan, who described his art as “fights and fucks in nightclubs,” also took the first steps toward body modification as contemporary art. “He got pissed off at people copying his look, so he decided to cut his ear off to see if they followed that,” Maybury recalls. “He got through cutting half the lobe off before fainting. Later he would paint it with glossy lipstick to make it look like a fresh cut.” (Bowery also embraced the idea of body modification, making holes in his cheeks to affix a joke-shop smile with huge safety pins.)
If famous British artists from the nineties like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin were Thatcher’s children—well versed in ambition and careerism—then Tyson’s and Trojan’s exhibitions serve as a reminder that art and fashion can also thrive on the subversive edge of society. “We need to shake things up again,” Muir says. “A lot of people are starting to get worn out by art fairs and endless commercial exhibitions. It’s time to look elsewhere.”
“Nicola Tyson: Bowie Nights,” through December 8, whitecolumns.org; “Trojan: Works on Paper,” through November 18, ica.org.uk.
