Having opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art ( MCA ) Sept. 23, "David Bowie Is" offers audiences an intimate and immersive journey into the multifaceted personas and creations of an artist widely considered to be one of the most significant of his time and genre.
At a preview on Sept. 19, MCA chief curator Michael Darling was joined by Geoffrey Marsh—one of the original co-curators of the exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum ( V&A ) in London. "David Bowie Is" broke attendance records during its run there in 2013 before setting out on a world tour with stops in Canada, Germany, France, Brazil, Australia and the Netherlands.
"The MCA is thrilled to be the only United States venue," said the organization's Pritzker director, Madeline Grynsztejn. "So we join cities such as London, Berlin and Paris as contemporary art capitals."
Although Darling and his team managed to secure the exhibit by virtue of being the early bird in-calls to Marsh's office, Grynsztein said she believes that "David Bowie Is" is a natural fit for the MCA since the museum was founded and built in 1967 "on a multidisciplinary understanding of creativity."
"The combination of exhibitions, performance, live-arts and programs that we present reflects the wide-angled view of contemporary art and culture and most importantly of the artists it is our responsibility to follow and reflect," Grynsztein adde.
In order to follow and reflect upon Bowie, the MCA had to dedicate the entire fourth floor of its building. Yet Marsh said this represents only a tiny portion of the number of items he first discovered in Bowies archives housed in New York. "It's a few hundred objects from a collection of seventy [or] eighty thousand items," he said.
Marsh carefully selected pieces that would give audiences the ability to take an unimaginable tour through Bowie's mind.
To that end, patrons are each given a set of state-of-the-art headphones provided by the German audio technology firm Sennheiser. They are designed to automatically respond to each area of the exhibit where a visitor may walk. Via interviews and commentary recorded throughout his career, it is almost as if Bowie is standing beside them casually explaining what it is they are seeing at least in the context of how he views the world and his art.
Visually, Bowie is everywhere and in everything such as the writings and diary entries he scratched out on paper that looks like it was been torn from the same notebooks he used as a schoolboy named David Robert Jones. "Taking the present philosophical line, we don't expect our audience to necessarily seek an explanation from ourselves," one of them reads. "We assign that role to the listener and to culture."
There are the books that influenced Bowie during his teenage years such as the 1959 Colin MacInnes novel "Absolute Beginners" ( Bowie would eventually write the title song for the 1986 film adaptation ).
One of very musicians who could actually perform well on camera, fans of Bowie's movies can marvel at the wand he used as the character of Jareth in the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth. Beside it is a handwritten note from Henson. "The present shape of the script is still rough and needs quite a bit of polishing," it reads. "But you can see where we're going. You would be wonderful in the film."
Entire rooms and displays are dedicated to the creative process of Bowie's music—which he traditionally managed in every detail. The chord sheets to "Space Oddity" sit beside clippings from London Times reports of the Apollo missions. The lyrics Bowie handwrote when taking Major Tom from orbit to an all-time low in "Ashes to Ashes" clearly went through a number of revisions.
Portraits of Bowie are scattered throughout, whether via video or captured on camera such as his appearance in the loincloth he wore for the character of John Merrick in the Bernard Pomerance play The Elephant Man that opened at the Blackstone Theatre in Chicago in 1980. On the other hand, more conservative visitors will doubtless enjoy his "unflappable gaze" in a mug shot taken of Bowie during an arrest for marijuana possession four years earlier.
But the stars of the exhibit are the many costumes Bowie wore—each reflecting his message to the world to just "be yourself."
There are the Kansai Yamamoto designs for the Ziggy Stardust tour and the bodysuit that sent the BBC into apoplexy and opened a world of possibility for closeted British kids during Bowie's 1972 performance of "Starman" on Top of the Pops.
A man-dress he wore during his first visit to the United States one year earlier or the skirt set and poodle he donned for an appearance on Saturday Night Live perfectly characterize Bowie's sexual fluidity, while his attention to detail is engraved in his desire to be the "most beautiful clown in the circus" in the video of Ashes to Ashes.
Marsh pointed out that Bowie's waist is so small that, when model Kate Moss donned one of his costumes for a Vogue magazine photo shoot, she had to have it let out.
The journey ends in a massive room covered on all three sides by projections of Bowie's live concerts and a sound that puts visitors right on stage with him.
"It's a really good show," Marsh told Windy City Times when asked about his opinion of the Chicago presentation. "It's so different from the space at the V&A, but it fits really well here. It's such an extraordinary story, that it's always going to look good."
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