Sometime soon, should you find yourself backstage at the Museum of Contemporary Art, wandering its administrative offices, be sure to look for the pencil drawing of David Bowie as a banana. It is not an official curated piece of museum art; rather, it is an unsigned doodle taped to a hallway wall alongside a few dozen other works of office-space ephemera, all riffing on the only thing that anyone at the MCA is allowed to think about these days: David Bowie. There are concert photos of Bowie and fashion layouts of Bowie, a picture of President Barack Obama with a Ziggy Stardust-era lightning bolt across his face and a folksy cross-stich that reads: “David Bowie told me to do it in a dream.” It is the staff’s Great Wall of Bowie, inscribed across the top with:
“David Bowie Is.”
That’s the open-ended title of the $2 million, 400-piece Bowie retrospective exhibition opening Tuesday — the largest and most expensive show that the MCA has staged in its 47-year history, museum officials confirm. To take a cue from one of Bowie’s best songs, it is an exhibit steeped in sound and vision: SEE! a video screen so gigantic it wraps around three walls, its images synced with “Hollywood Squares”-ish display boxes. HEAR! a next-gen audio tour that, via sensors installed in the floor, responds digitally to wherever you are standing and plays the appropriate songs and contextual sound bites. ADMIRE! costumes created by the late and legendary designer Alexander McQueen. THRILL! to Bowie’s former cocaine spoon. But mostly …
CONTEMPLATE! an art show in which the artifacts are less vital than its portrait of an iconoclastic 50-year creative life — born in a crucible of grandiose rock opera, crunching guitars and sci-fi imagery (Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust) and transformed into an international pop stardom that took as its motif the ironies of international pop stardom (“Fame”), ultimately defined by an unwillingness to settle for one persona or medium.
And that Great Wall of Bowie?
One of several reminders of just how overriding a priority that “David Bowie Is” has been at the MCA for the past year and a half, ever since chief curator Michael Darling quickly phoned the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (the exhibition’s originators) and landed the only United States stop for the traveling blockbuster. Another reminder: The MCA’s extended hours during the show’s run. In anticipation of crazy-large crowds, the museum will stay open until 8 p.m. on Thursdays, 10 p.m. on Fridays. Another reminder: The MCA is selling separate tickets for the show, a first for the institution — and they are timed. Also: The Bowie hand fans floating around the MCA offices, remnants of a marketing blitz at the Chicago Pride Parade in June.
And, not far from the Great Wall of Bowie, one additional reminder: “Ground Control,” an event calendar, painted on the wall to convey its importance, with months of Bowie-centric dance performances, films, concerts, lectures …
“People have asked me: ‘What exactly goes into a David Bowie museum exhibit?'” Darling said. “Because they don’t know what to expect, because something like this show — well, it could go any number of ways.”
For a moment, it seemed he was saying: The success of a production this ambitious is far from predictable.
What he meant was: Any museum show about Bowie must grapple with a wildly long and varied career.
But both points are true.
At its initial exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in early 2013, “David Bowie Is” gathered acclaim and sold-out crowds, then repeated its success late last year in Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, where the show was extended three times and drew 150,000 viewers to a nine-week run. MCA curators expect similar results: If they can attract 150,000 to the 15-week Chicago run, that’s half of the museum’s average annual attendance of 300,000, for one exhibit. Asked if staff at the MCA was feeling full-court pressure, Erica Erdmann, senior preparer of exhibitions, said: “Everyone here loves David Bowie. No matter what.”
It’s a quip tinged with anxiety. Because even museum executives have wondered if Bowie, a core figure in English culture despite being largely out of the limelight for decades, has retained his mystique and popularity in the U.S., where he’s beloved and influential but rarely at the front of the popular imagination.
At the least, “you do wonder why the show isn’t in New York, Bowie’s home for the past 25 years,” said Simon Critchley, a British-born philosopher who teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York (and who is to appear at the MCA in November to discuss “Bowie,” his new book about the meaning of the British performer). “Or the Metropolitan Museum of Art (in New York, which has had popular shows on punk and fashion)? Plus, his reputation has always been less intense in the States, where he got traction later than in Europe — I do hope to God it works in Chicago.”
Even Darling, who made his name at the Seattle Art Museum with a show about artist reactions to Kurt Cobain, said he had wondered if Bowie was “too boomer rock” now. But then Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” was featured prominently in Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie. (Said Darling: “I elbowed my son: ‘Hear that? Bowie.'”) Moreover, when Darling visited the London and Toronto shows last year, “I found multigenerational crowds, which made me feel better. Still, I imagine my more purist colleagues saying it’s a vanity show, a sell-out, a stab at populism. But peel any layer off Bowie’s legacy — gender identity, say — and (the show) seems aligned with the mission of any contemporary art museum.”
Which brings us back to: How do you fit David Bowie into an art museum?
On an early September morning, while construction crews drilled and assembled — the show also marks the first time the MCA has hired lighting designers and made extensive use of outside architects — Darling walked excitedly though the exhibit, ticking off the wheres and whats. The curator, who arrived here in 2010, tasked with raising the museum’s profile, looks like an elongated Colin Firth, minus the dithering.
“You should see this,” he said, passing a wall label at the entrance that read “David Bowie Is … All Around You.” “The moment you enter, you receive a headset, then you move here and witness this very complicated video projection mapped onto this sculptural tableau, which provides a nice introduction to his influences and childhood … . Then, here, this is devoted to his first hit, ‘Space Oddity,’ and the context of the late 1960s. Then he changes, and this is about his album ‘Hunky Dory’ … . Then — and this is spectacular — a mirrored room with his costume from (the longtime British TV show) ‘Top of the Pops,’ which was over-the-top and wonderful, and then come to these Japanese-inspired costumes here and a giant coffin will be here, holding his costume from when he was calling himself Ziggy Stardust …
“Over here will be clothing from a period when he was pushing the limits of decency in England. And this room is devoted to his years in Berlin with (producer) Brian Eno, and it’s funny because he even kept his apartment keys, which are in the show … . Here, you get costumes inspired by the ’30s and ’40s, very Marlene Dietrich. And this whole section here is the recording process …
“Here is concept art from his tours and videos, paintings there. And here are pedestals where you see the costumes that go with each music video, which culminates here with Alexander McQueen’s clothes … . This diversion takes you into his film work. And then, the big moment, the video screen that wraps around walls, and the room is devoted to performance, which, in a way, addresses the theatricality of his entire career …
“Then you’re done, and you come out here, our satellite Bowie store.”
He said that last bit sheepishly, adding, “Besides, what art exhibit could compete with David Bowie, right?”
He wasn’t being ironic.
Even without everything in place, the show’s immense scale and flash were apparent, as was the feeling that “David Bowie Is,” like its subject, plays the long game, seeming less concerned with the quality of any individual piece than with the process it took to arrive at that multidisciplinary amalgamation called David Bowie. The idea is to throw everything at the gallery wall — but rather than see what sticks, the exhibition moves on, aping the slipperiness, restlessness and inherent vagueness of Bowie. What emerges is not a show about a singer or fashion icon but a show about how change itself can become a medium. It’s a portrait of an artist who, long before Jay Z had a fashion line or Justin Timberlake acted, never wanted to be just one kind of artist.
And so, in a splashy way, the exhibit is an argument that Bowie pioneered contemporary culture.
When I asked Nick Cave, the Chicago-based performance artist and sculptor — renowned for his own surreal, Bowie-like costumes — what he considered Bowie’s legacy to be, he said it was not concrete objects but “Bowie’s ideas for branding and identity. He came up in the early ’70s, at a time when artists — himself, George Clinton, Grace Jones — were reinventing themselves frequently, and pushing not just the envelope in music but in performance, design. Really, he is about the birth of cross-disciplinary artists.”
At the Art Gallery of Ontario, questions arose about “how to reconcile a man of so many changes” said museum director Michael Teitelbaum: “Finally, what compelled us (to take the show) was: Bowie made himself a work of art. It wasn’t the disparity of work that engaged us. It was the totality of the man.”
His synthesis of media. There’s Bowie the musician. Bowie the pan-sexual revolutionary. Bowie the actor. Bowie the changeling.
Consider that when I asked Brian Case of the Chicago band Disappears (which will cover Bowie’s “Low” at the MCA on Nov. 22) if he thought of Bowie as a musician, he said: “No, I think of him as an artist and stylist who worked with music.” Conversely, when I asked the same question to Chicago musician/novelist/filmmaker Tim Kinsella (covering “Hunky Dory” on Oct. 16), he said: “Even when I was first aware of Bowie as a child, I didn’t understand him as a musician because of his hair. His style is what registered, then, ‘Oh, and he’s a musician.'”
That cross-disciplinary-fluidity-as-an-artist’s-second-nature was ahead of its time in the 1970s — and these days, very on trend, said Peter Taub, the MCA’s esteemed director of performance programs. “It’s not even a museum decision to seek cross-disciplinary artists now because, increasingly, in the last five years, especially, we see artists who want to work in performance-based ways. They conceive for a (stage) proscenium as much as for a gallery, and vice versa. The point is not individual works but their path.”
Indeed, read every wall text and watch every clip in “David Bowie Is,” and a portrait of the artist as a blank slate takes hold: Bowie has been a painter, a designer, a mime, a cutting-edge musician with a voice like Anthony Newley, a fashion icon, a rallying figure for gay rights, a stage actor (“The Elephant Man”) and movie star (“The Man Who Fell to Earth”). Before he was a successful pop singer he had a publishing contact and worked in advertising. In the late ’90s, though his project was ultimately upended by the downturn in the music industry, Bowie took the shrewd move of issuing asset-backed security bonds against the current and future revenues of his music catalog, diversifying himself with a 21st-century savvy.
There is, however, one key difference between the cross-disciplinary Bowie in this show and the multitentacled artists like Kanye West or Beyonce who adopted the world that Bowie created: Bowie seemed to change, to try on new mediums with a habitual joy, more out of temperament than branding. Among the artifacts in the exhibition is the “Oblique Strategy” card deck that Eno and artist Peter Schmidt handed Bowie during his Berlin period. The idea was, choose a card and use its instructions as a kind of guiding stricture: “Abandon Normal Instruments,” “Give Way to Your Worst Impulse,” “Use Unqualified People,” and so forth.
Not that he needed it.
In a 1976 article by Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone, Bowie visits the hotel of Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. They sit around a while until Bowie confesses: “I’ve got nothing to do with the music.” Wood, bored until this admission, sits up: “Why did you get into rock ‘n’ roll then?” And Bowie, like a 19-year-old liberal arts major, replies: “It seemed like an enjoyable way of making my money … taking four or five years out to decide what I really wanted to do.” By the final room of MCA show, it’s clear: What Bowie always wanted to do, broadly, was perform. Bowie, belting “Rock and Roll Suicide,” washes over the gallery, the lines gathering intensity:
“Oh no love, you’re not alone/ No matter what or who you’ve been/ No matter when or where you’ve seen/ All the knives seem to lacerate your brain/ I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain/ You’re not alone!”
Jenn Dixon, a fashion designer who lives in Elgin, created the stage outfits for Bowie’s 2004 tour, and last year she flew to London for the show.
“To be honest, it was so overwhelming,” she said, “taking in his fashion, his visual art, his music, it became this very intimate personal vision, so by the time I got to that last room, which was so crowded, it was not like another art show. It was so emotional, I kind of sat on the floor and took it in.”
And that’s why Darling doesn’t want another art show to greet you at the exit of “David Bowie Is.”
He doesn’t do encores.
The origins of “David Bowie Is” are as mysterious as the man. In 2010, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, curators at the Victoria & Albert, received an unexpected call from Bowie’s management asking if the design museum, would be interested in seeing Bowie’s personal archives in Manhattan.
“I can’t say exactly where it is or how many (storage) spaces it is,” Broackes said in a phone interview, “but in some ways it was better put together than a lot of museum collections I know. It was a museum, really. But things were not on display. It had a full-time archivist, it was cataloged digitally, and it had the things you would expect a famous musician to have held on to — the concert suits, the photos — but it also had a lot of pieces that revealed the creative process and how far back Bowie was making this construction called David Bowie.”
Several of the most charming works in the show are a series of drawings that Bowie had made for one of his high school bands in the ’60s.
“A lot of teenagers would have been happy to get a gig,” Broackes said. “Bowie, though, he’s making costumes, stage sets.” Indeed, the photos that accompany those early days show a young artist already calculating how he appears, as self-possessed and poised as he would be years later. Bowie, who once described himself as a gay mime, also looks as chilly and arch as his later personas.
Broackes and Marsh were told that the artist himself would not be involved in “David Bowie Is,” and would not approve or disapprove of the show, but that they could interpret his archives however they wished. And so one of the themes that run through the exhibition is sincerity — can you be sincerely insincere?
Bowie asked this. He asked questions of male representations in rock, sexual identity and androgyny. He asked this in the early ’70s, at a moment in pop music when a self-satisfied insistence on authenticity had settled into rock.
“He hit right when the music was transitioning from a cottage industry into this cold, corporate thing,” said filmmaker Todd Haynes, whose 1998 Christian Bale film “Velvet Goldmine” was a tribute to Bowie and glam-rock (and who will be discussing Bowie with costume designer Sandy Powell on Oct. 5 at the MCA). “He became this dividing line, about what you were supposed to be versus what you could be as a star, then truly applied that to his career.” He over-sang verses, changed his look every album, “and gave fans so much to imitate, you could say one of the ways he was influential was he foretold interactive culture,” Haynes said.
That influence is so vast that “David Bowie Is,” cleverly, charts it with a mock periodic table of elements. Said David Getsy, chairman of the art history, theory and criticism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago: “To think of Bowie as influential in music and fashion is to not realize how catalytic he remains with performance artists, how key he is to the idea of performers adopting alter egos, or how useful of a reference point he was to the gay liberation movement, which, to some extent, is still looking to Bowie as a mass-culture version of the kind of revolution and reformation that they were hoping to enact.”
Even Tracy K. Smith, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her Bowie-influenced collection, “Life on Mars,” said: “I think the thing about Bowie that continues to influence and speak to us is the multiplicity of Bowie. Which is really that thing we all like about art itself — how it offers this lens into reinvention, and into showing us these ways of being things you never imagined you had interest in or anything to do with.”
Apply those ideas to a major arts institution like the MCA and you wonder if the museum — occasionally sleepy, often in the shadow of the behemoth Art Institute of Chicago — considers the exhibit itself to be a kind of step toward its own reinvention.
Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of the MCA, is quick to amend the question, to say it is an evolution, “an ideal bridge to connect different audiences.” And Darling sees the show’s themes of reinvention as very much in line with “Andy Warhol’s ideas about management of one’s identity, themes that haven’t really gone away lately.” (Indeed, Eric Shiner, the director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which would seem a better fit for the Bowie show than the MCA, said it was offered the show but ultimately turned down the opportunity: He said the show was great but Warhol and Bowie were not “particularly close to each other.”)
As for Bowie: For an artist whose only consistency is a hesitation to repeat himself, his past decade or so has been cloaked in nostalgia. He opened the post-9/11 Concert for New York seated cross-legged and alone on the stage, playing a dinky keyboard and singing Paul Simon’s “America,” albeit as an ode for a bygone nation. On his most recent album, “The Next Day,” he references his Berlin days, and the cover of the album is a play on his 1977 album “Heroes.” He seems to be looking back, at 67. But it’s hard to be sure. A couple of weeks ago, news broke of a 50-year retrospective music collection that includes two new songs. The MCA was not given a heads-up. Because the MCA, like the Victoria & Albert, is not in touch with Bowie. Broackes met the artist when he appeared with little warning last year at the show, but she hasn’t had a serious chat with him. She hasn’t had a chance to ask the obvious:
Why?
“If I ever sit him down, I will ask that very thing,” she said. “‘Why are you letting us do this show? Why now?’ I suspect it’s because he was a hoarder who became a genius. And because he didn’t throw anything away. In his early days he imagined himself as a successful person, and would draw himself successful — his first of many changes. But I do know that he likes the show. Rather, I heard. Anecdotally.”
“David Bowie Is” opens Tuesday and runs through Jan. 4 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave. For ticket information: mcachicago.org/bowie.
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