Leigh Bowery

Performative Costuming and Live Art

Sofia Vranou (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

266 Seiten

2025
Intellect Books (Verlag)
9781835951132 (ISBN)

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Leigh Bowery: Performative Costuming and Live Art is a critical exploration of the creative practice, social-historical context, and cultural impact of the late London-based artist Leigh Bowery. The diversity of Bowery’s work and his marginality as an artist who emerged during the 1980s from a subcultural milieu complicated and thwarted his cultural value, hindering his incorporation into art institutions and performance art narratives for some time. Drawing on a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou seeks to historicize Bowery’s multifaceted body of work and critically situate it within the expanded fields of visual culture and performance studies.

Through close analysis of Bowery’s key looks and non-theatrical performances, the book investigates the implications of his work in dominant histories of performance art and urgent discourses surrounding normativity, representations of illness, and identity politics. Thought-provoking and engaging, it focuses on Bowery’s costuming as a performative strategy that effectively blurs the boundaries between art and life; delves into his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire, reflects on his involvement with BDSM practices and the performance of extremity, and unpacks the posttranssexual ethos behind his hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language.

Foreword by Boy George.

Sofia Vranou holds a PhD from Queen Mary University of London. She has a background in art history and visual cultures, and a strong interest in live art, queer aesthetics, performative costuming, subcultural histories and marginal identities.

Foreword – Boy George

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Larger Than Life

Chapter 1 Performative Costuming: Merging Fashion, Art, and Life

Chapter 2 The Subcultural Freak: Narcissism and the Disruption of Normativity

Chapter 3 Fabulously Painful: BDSM and the Performance of Extremity

Chapter 4 Beyond Drag: Trans-Queer Embodiments and Repronormativity

Epilogue: Bowery Futures

Bibliography

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	13.05.2025
Zusatzinfo	24 Halftones, color; 24 Halftones, black and white
Sprache	englisch
Maße	148 x 210 mm
Gewicht	586 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
ISBN-13	9781835951132 / 9781835951132
Zustand	Neuware