'David Bowie Is' Exhibit Is A Spectacular Diary Of The Enigma's Life

Who is David Bowie? The Brit enigma was the first postmodern auteur pop star – a musician, actor, writer and visual artist, his career defined by flux, ambiguity and reinvention. He is whoever you want him to be.

 

ACMI is exclusively staging the expansive hit exhibition David Bowie is, facilitated by London's Victoria and Albert Museum, in Australia – Melbourne the seventh city on a world tour. It draws heavily on Bowie's personal collection (assistant curator Dr Kathryn Johnson called him a "hoarder" at Wednesday's huge media launch) – ironic considering the apparently transitory nature of his myriad phases and personas but, then again, perhaps not for a nostalgic metatexturalist. However, DBi isn't meant to be a "retrospective" – hence that use of the present tense. The spectacular encompasses Bowie's costumes, handwritten lyrics and scores, notes, design sketches, photos… which reveal his creative stimuli, process and control. In an old diary entry he enthuses about penning his US break-out Fame with John Lennon – and its professional significance ("Am happy," he states).

 

It's a trip to read Bowie's lyrics to the New Romantic Ashes To Ashes in red texta on foolscap, complete with scribbling-out ('junkie' to 'junky') – and then view his storyboarding for the spectral video and Pierrot costume. Most astonishing is DBi's minutiae. It's all so Warholian. Bowie actually saved a lipstick-blotted tissue from… 1974. The weirdest artefact? A cocaine spoon (!) Bowie carried in his pocket during the Diamond Dogs sessions. You can examine, too, the keys to his apartment in Germany, where he made the Krautrock-charged Berlin trilogy (Low/"Heroes"/Lodger). Musos will geek out over a Synthi AKS Brian Eno eventually returned. 

 

DBi is curated thematically, not chronologically. Occasionally it disconnects from the cultural icon's musical innovations. You see the Union Jack coat Bowie co-designed with an emerging Alexander McQueen for the cover of 1997's Earthling – but do casual fans realise that this was his symbolic entry into contemporary 'electronica' (jungle)? Patrons receive audio guide headsets, so as to experience DBi through sound (interviews, music, etc) and vision – yet, even before any intellectualising, that leads to sensory overload. And it doesn't acknowledge the influence Bowie's first wife Angie exerted over his early imaging as the glam rock Ziggy Stardust.