He looked like a sequinned blow-up sex doll by night and like a child molester by day. Leigh Bowery is someone not everyone has heard of, but who a lot of people would recognize on sight, especially as Leigh was always a ‘sight’. Australian born, Bowery moved to London in 1980 hoping to find more freedom to realise his extravagant and often shocking fashion designs than he had experienced whilst studying fashion at the Melbourne Institute of Technology.

He was intelligent, gay, plump and out to shock the world. The early eighties in London was the post-punk avant-garde new romantic period in which clubbers spent more time getting ready to go out than actually being out. Boy George was a part of that scene preceding his success with Culture Club and he is one of the many friends of Bowery’s interviewed in this documentary directed by Charles Atlas.

I suspect it’s a documentary for those interested in Bowery himself or that period in London as outsiders are unlikely to be enthralled by it and may simply be disgusted by some of Bowery’s more extravagant art performances (are enemas art?). But you never know, perhaps Bowery will win himself some more devoted fans?

Technically I felt the documentary was not very well made, which is a shame as the content deserves excellence. The interviews have been edited together purely based on sound, resulting in multiple jump cuts within interviews which I still hadn’t got used to by the end of the 80-minute film. Not that I’m opposed to the occasional jump cut, but this was more like a radio interview with all the “ums” and “ers” being edited out with complete disregard for the continuity of the picture. And the sound quality itself is not always up to par.

However much the editing bothered me, the original footage of Bowery still kept me riveted to the screen: footage of him dancing wildly at his club Taboo, wearing a flesh-coloured, full-body costume with “A CUNT” written on it; footage of him giving birth to his future wife Nicola (he was gay, but married her as it seemed like a “cool thing to do”); footage of him hanging upside down naked and being swung through a plate glass window. Besides this we also get to see his one-way mirror show at the Anthony D’Offay Gallery in 1987 and his modelling sessions for oil-painter Lucian Freud.

I was interested to learn more about Bowery and his art and this documentary certainly gave me that opportunity. He was an artist who used his own body as a canvas; painting it and sculpting it, not with surgical instruments but with gaffer tape – painfully pulling up his belly flab to give himself tits and even more painfully gaffer-taping his penis so he could cover it up with his pussy-wig. He was not ashamed to show off his ample flesh and it was his art to distort it almost beyond the recognition of a human form.

Bowery died on New Year’s Eve 1994 of complications from AIDS.

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