Entertainment

Bowie’s Space Oddities, and Much More

NEW YORK — David Bowie loved Little Richard. Many artists of his era did, of course, but Bowie was so enamored, the legend goes, that he brought a photograph of the flamboyant rock ‘n’ roll pioneer into the studio whenever he was recording.

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 Bowie’s Space Oddities, and Much More
By
MELENA RYZIK
, New York Times

NEW YORK — David Bowie loved Little Richard. Many artists of his era did, of course, but Bowie was so enamored, the legend goes, that he brought a photograph of the flamboyant rock ‘n’ roll pioneer into the studio whenever he was recording.

In 1982, when he made “Let’s Dance,” his biggest-selling album, he and his collaborator Nile Rodgers first spent a week going on “an artistic quest” to museums and record archives, Rodgers said, in search of inspiration. Then one day Bowie produced an image of Little Richard in a red suit getting into a red convertible. “Nile, darling, this is what I want my record to sound like,” he said.

“I stared at it for just a split second,” Rodgers, the Chic guitarist and producer, recalled in a phone interview. “And then he followed it with, ‘Nile, now that’s rock ‘n’ roll.’ And that was it.”

Transmuting visual cool into magnetic listening pleasure: That was Bowie’s hallmark for the length of his protean, nearly 55-year career. And it’s on electrifying display at the Brooklyn Museum in “David Bowie Is,” a far-reaching survey of his artistry, which includes music, costumes, sketches, stage props and videos.

Included are 100 or so new objects, some of which have never been publicly shown: a turquoise jumpsuit emblazoned with a lightning bolt that he wore once, in 1973; notebooks filled with ideas for his last album, “Blackstar,” released in 2016, two days before his death, at 69; the Polaroids that inspired his album covers. (There’s a framed photo of Little Richard, too.)

In the five years since the exhibition originated at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, it has been a record-setting blockbuster around the world. Brooklyn is its last stop, and given that New York was his home, it’s easy to imagine that Bowie wanted it so. The expectation for this finale was that it would be “next level,” said Matthew Yokobosky, the coordinating curator for the show. Yokobosky, in partnership with Victoria and Albert curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, aimed to oblige, scouring eBay for rare vinyl singles and programming the bubble lights that spell out BOWIE in the entrance to appear as they were last seen, in a series of pop-up concerts in New York in 2002. The material is culled from a collection of about 80,000 artifacts maintained by Bowie’s archivist, Sandra Hirshkowitz. Notable pieces like the delicate backdrop from his 1980 performance on Broadway in “The Elephant Man” and his large assemblage of fan art are both included in the exhibition.

It’s laid out first biographically — the early years of David Jones, his given name, with drawings he made of his parents, and the same kind of saxophone that was his first musical instrument — and then thematically, tracking Bowie, the stage name he gave himself in 1965, through his many evolutions, jumpsuit by mesmerizing jumpsuit. Yokobosky, also the director of exhibition design for the Brooklyn Museum, foregrounded the costumes and added sections focusing on Philadelphia, where Bowie recorded “Young Americans,” and New York, as well as flourishes like lighting in the shape of a lightning bolt.

As in previous stops, the exhibition is meant to be experienced with a soundtrack, heard over Sennheiser headphones and timed to visitors’ locations in the galleries. The audio segues from “Space Oddity” to a BBC interview with a shaggy 17-year-old Davy Jones, defending his newly formed “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Men With Long Hair,” to a conversation in his later years, describing how, as a young man, he bought jazz records that he didn’t understand. “I would listen to the damn things until I liked them,” he says, laughing.

Bowie’s commitment to fitting himself into the avant-garde never wavered. In the 1980s, he approached Laurie Anderson to cover her groundbreaking electronic track “O Superman,” and they became friends. “I liked him immediately, because he’s a troublemaker,” Anderson, who later married Bowie’s longtime collaborator Lou Reed, said in a phone interview. “He was one of the most outside insiders I’ve met.”

Here are recollections from Bowie’s friends and colleagues, whose joint projects are featured in the exhibition.

Tokyo Pop’ Jumpsuit and Red Boots by Kansai Yamamoto

Yamamoto, a Japanese designer, recalled getting a call in the middle of the night in Tokyo from a producer who was working with Bowie as he was staging his first concert in New York as Ziggy Stardust, in 1972 at Carnegie Hall. There’s something interesting going on here, the producer said. Come see it. Yamamoto flew in the next day and went directly to the show.

“When I saw him for the first time, I felt like his world or aesthetics were surging upon the whole theater,” Yamamoto wrote in an email, via a translator. They met soon after and collaborated for years, including on a one-legged knit “Ziggy Stardust” jumpsuit and an embroidered silk bikini and short kimono for “Aladdin Sane.”

The black-and-white jumpsuit with the bowed legs is stiffer and heavier-looking in person than it is in photographs: Bowie somehow wore it lightly. (It unsnaps along the sleeve and sides to go on.) “What I created was rather planar compared to European clothes,” Yamamoto said. “I designed them, figuring out a way so that he looked larger than his real size or more solid, like costumes of Noh or Kabuki.” His pieces were also created for Hikinuki, the Kabuki technique of a quick costume change onstage.

This meeting of Eastern and Western culture was rare then, he said. “I think a mysterious chemical reaction was triggered to occur in the mixture of the different natures. I don’t think the same thing would possibly happen again. It was,” he said, a “precious encounter.”

The Ziggy Stardust Era

Photographer Mick Rock chronicled Bowie’s rise in the ‘70s and beyond; he has more than 5,000 images of the star, he said, along with reams of film footage. “He didn’t have any bad angles,” Rock said in a phone interview. “I shot him every which way you want to name. David was just born extremely photogenic.”

Among Rock’s most famous snaps is one of Bowie with a metallic “astral ring” — created by makeup artist Pierre La Roche and inspired by one worn by an executive at Mercury Records — painted on his forehead. (The mannequin faces in the exhibition are based on a life mask made of Bowie in 1973.) In most cases Bowie did his own makeup. “I have loads of pictures of him backstage getting himself ready, in ridiculous extravagant costumes, having a drink in a plastic cup,” Rock said. After Bowie traveled to Japan and met Kabuki performers, “his makeup got even more exotic. This Japanese makeup was like little pots, there was a lot of little powders involved, all carefully laid out, ready to go,” before a show, “along with the cigarette packs and maybe a banana or two.”

He was “surprisingly organized. I remember one day up at his office, I was hanging out, and he showed me these rows of tapes that he had of his live shows. He was certainly doing it from the Ziggy days.” He added: “There was a certain lunacy, if you like, to his vision, but it turned out not to be so lunatic. Whatever it was that drove him inside, he was working well ahead of the pack, and he stayed there, right until the end.”

Line,’ Drawings by Bowie and Laurie Anderson

“David called me and he said, ‘I think you can read minds,'” Anderson said. “And I said, ‘I can’t read minds. I don’t know what you’re talking about.'”

He was always interested in hoaxes, she said. He instructed her to sit by her fax machine with a pen and a piece of paper, and when he called to put the phone down. They were to wordlessly draw for one minute, then fax the results to each other. (It was 1998.)

“I thought, this is a waste of time, but I really liked David a lot, so I was like, OK, I’ll do it,” Anderson said, “and the first one that came through was kind of breathtaking.” Their sketches had notable similarities, words and squiggles in the same place on the page. They each made 10 total.

“I kind of loved them,” Anderson said, “because they were really strange rhymes.”

“David was a really wonderful friend,” she added, and an “extremely perceptive person,” who gave her solace after Reed died in 2013.

“I think he understood happiness and pleasure really well,” she said, “and also, he wasn’t pushing difficult stuff away. As an artist, he loved stuff that had real pain in it. I thought of him as such a successful human being.”

The 1980 Floor Show’ Costumes

At the height of his Ziggy Stardust fame, Bowie claimed he was retiring. In the spring of 1973, Yokobosky said, he was invited to create an episode of a new NBC late-night program, “The Midnight Special.” “It was an experiment, to see if people would watch TV after Johnny Carson,” Yokobosky said. Bowie was in the midst of writing “what he hoped would be a musical version of ‘1984,'” although he never got the rights to Orwell’s book. So the title of Bowie’s variety special, “The 1980 Floor Show,” became a play on “1984.”

Natasha Korniloff’s threaded cobweb and gold bodysuit with the black-manicured hands cupping the chest, was originally skimpier: There was a jockstrap and a third hand at the crotch that was censored by NBC. Korniloff was the costume designer for “Pierrot in Turquoise,” an English stage show Bowie appeared in with his early mentor, mime and dancer Lindsay Kemp. Kemp later wrote that Bowie was simultaneously having an affair with both of them.

The white silk-and-satin suit is by Freddie Burretti, Bowie’s tailor, whom he met at a London gay club and who made many of Bowie’s most elegant ensembles — and the turquoise lightning bolt jumpsuit. Bowie’s sketches, from the scaffolding set to the piano player, were mostly realized in production. The show featured the British band the Troggs, a glam flamenco act and Marianne Faithfull, dressed as a nun, singing with Bowie, in feathers and PVC, on “I Got You Babe.”

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