Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When does art become art, if the artist doesn\u2019t self-declare as an artist? Leigh Bowery lived a life of constant performance, collaboration and provocation, rooted in nightlife. The Australian became known for his extreme, body-morphing looks, mostly made by himself on a shoestring. He was personable, funny, talented, restless, fabulous and broke.\u00a0Bowery arrived in the UK aged 19 in 1980, lured from the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine by London\u2019s punk scene. He was active in the city for just 14 years until his death at 33 from Aids-related causes. In that time, he became one of the most influential figures in late 20th-century global counterculture, working across art, fashion, music and dance.His life, work and impact are about to be celebrated with a major exhibition at Tate Modern. And yet Bowery himself did not exactly fit into the art world. \u201cHe refused the human tendency to define things,\u201d says Fiont\u00e1n Moran, the show\u2019s curator. \u201cHe would say, \u2018if you label me, you negate me\u2019.\u201dTall and imposing, Bowery made garments and outfits that exaggerated his frame and taunted propriety. He had studied fashion in Melbourne, yet fashion itself bored him \u2014 he had no patience for the behind-the-scenes production and sales needed to run a label. His garments were usually one-offs, at first fantastical subversions of jackets and dresses in shocking colours, designs that became increasingly more otherworldly and extreme. He wore what he made to clubs such as Cha Cha\u2019s, below Charing Cross Station and his own night, Taboo, on Leicester Square.\u00a0In 1983, he began making costumes for choreographer Michael Clark, eventually joining the company as a performer himself. The garments cut against presumptions of dress as much as Clark\u2019s choreography did against the traditions of ballet. A leotard with the buttocks cut out; a dancing teapot; a skullcap with lightbulbs attached: his ideas were like electric shocks, but the garments were always immaculately made, amplifying the movement of the dancer.Bowery was staging performances in an art context as early as 1984, at an event held in a church crypt organised by an artist collective, the Neo Naturists. That same year he was the subject of a work by British artist Stephen Willats, now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, expressing Bowery\u2019s character through a collage of photos, cosmetics and other artefacts.This set the path for the next 10 years, of making work and appearing in the work of others, including, most famously, in portraits painted by Lucian Freud. Bowery did so without playing the art world game: he was never represented by a gallery, and didn\u2019t produce art objects to sell. Bowery\u2019s practice was in stark contrast to a sudden arch commercialism among other young artists at the time, led by a student named Damien Hirst. His 1988 group exhibition Freeze, said to be the beginning of the YBA movement, was sponsored by property developers Olympia & York.\u00a0By the birth of the YBA movement, it was seven years into the Aids pandemic. Aids killed possibility: we cannot know what would have been made by those whose lives were cut short. Bowery\u2019s practice, of making without conforming to labels, had a lineage in punk and queer alternative lifestyles of the 1970s. By looking at his output, before his own life was lost to Aids, we can consider ways in which art-making could have evolved.\u00a0Because, of course, being inspired by Bowery does not necessarily mean emulating Bowery. My first memory of Leigh Bowery is from the January 1987 issue of The Face. I was 12 and had been buying the magazine for a few months. It featured a story on Trojan, Bowery\u2019s sometime flatmate and, briefly, boyfriend, but it was Bowery who jumped out at me, the whirl of this world that encapsulated nightlife, performance, art and pleasure. I wanted to be in it. It was the realisation that anyone could turn up and take part, if they had something to contribute.\u201cThey were just making things and were not thinking about its legacy or impact,\u201d says Moran. \u201cWhen you have meagre funds, anything you do is a miracle in a way, because you\u2019re creating art out of nothing. It\u2019s only in time that we see the significance.\u201dWith Bowery, that moment is now. For the past few months, many of his garments have been on show at Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London, an excellent exhibition at London\u2019s Fashion Textile Museum. A biography by Bowery\u2019s friend Sue Tilley, Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon, has just been republished. And Leigh Bowery! at the Tate Modern will place him fully in an art context.\u00a0Bowery\u2019s work asks us to accept the seriousness of what seems frivolous. In a 1988 appearance on the BBC\u2019s The Clothes Show, he modelled seven of his sequinned dresses, each with a full face-covering mask, during afternoon tea in The Georgian restaurant at Harrods. The clip is hilarious but also stark, Bowery versus the strait-laced world. It was the year that the UK government introduced Section 28, prohibiting local authorities from \u201cpromoting\u201d or \u201cteaching\u201d homosexuality. It was also the year Bowery discovered he was HIV-positive, a diagnosis he kept secret.\u00a0That same year, Bowery participated in a week-long residency at the Anthony d\u2019Offay Gallery in London. Each afternoon, he would perform behind a one-way mirror, striking poses on or around a chaise longue, a different outfit each day. Street noises were piped into the space, as well as different smells each day \u2014 banana or marshmallow.\u00a0The artist Cerith Wyn Evans filmed each performance. One day, he brought with him his friend Lucian Freud, whom Bowery had already met one night at Taboo. Six of Freud\u2019s subsequent portraits of Bowery will be in the Tate show. Bowery meant so much to Freud that, when he died, Freud paid for his body to be shipped back to Australia, so he could be buried next to his mother.Meanwhile, Bowery\u2019s work became more focused, more extreme.\u00a0In 1992, he debuted his \u201cBirth\u201d performance at the London club night Kinky Gerlinky. Bowery appeared onstage in a striped stretch cotton dress, his body padded below to form an extreme stomach. He was wearing a harness, into which was strapped his collaborator and eventual wife, Nicola Rainbird. He lay on his back, writhed as if in pain, then Rainbird emerged naked, in body paint as if covered in blood. Bowery would cut a cord attaching them, then carry her as if a newborn.They performed the routine often, at the Wigstock festival in New York or with Bowery\u2019s band Minty. The documentation of Bowery\u2019s work, as seen at Tate, allows us to clearly place him within the context of international performance art. His brilliance came from breaking boundaries.\u00a0\u201cHe was not scared of trying anything,\u201d says Moran. \u201cThat\u2019s what makes Bowery exciting to look at, because it\u2019s very much about living your fullest life, and embracing everything that\u2019s on offer, without being too concerned about what it means, how it can be sold or how it can be marketed. He was completely uninhibited.\u201d It\u2019s a lesson that many young artists, caught in the trap of a faltering art market, could heed today.February 27-August 31, tate.org.uk. Charlie Porter\u2019s novel \u2018Nova Scotia House\u2019 (Particular Books) is published on March 20Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When does art become art, if the artist doesn\u2019t self-declare as an artist? Leigh Bowery lived a life of constant performance, collaboration and provocation, rooted in nightlife. The Australian became known for his extreme, body-morphing looks, mostly made by himself on a shoestring. He<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":215036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215035"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215037,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215035\/revisions\/215037"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}