David Bowie, artist – La Nacion (Argentina)

From forefront. With the covers of their albums, your videos and your changing aesthetics, the British musician, who died a few days-ago left its mark on contemporary art

The White Duke

could have been a portrait of the 40 by Annemarie Heinrich and Grete Stern, but no. The image called The Archer (goalkeeper) was taken by photographer Robert Rowlands during the tour of the album Station to Station (1976). However, in his role as postmodern avant la lettre, Bowie could have the entire history of twentieth century art to be redesigned. In his mask White Duke (later a common way to call it back), Bowie assimilate the aesthetics of German expressionism as a prelude to his Berlin phase, a trilogy of albums that did talk to a popular way rock with language contemporary music. Thus, all images of the Duke White frames appear Walter Fritz Lang or Murnau dissolved in a pop concert. The Victoria & amp; Albert Museum in London showed this as part of the traveling exhibition David Bowie Is between 2013 and 2015.

Visual Experiment

Bowie closes most creative years and opens the 1980 with another visual brand. The advent of video as a promotional format allows you to open a new front of aesthetics expansion. In 1980 World TVs reproduce the video for “Ashes to Ashes” (picture) directed by David Millet cost a record 250,000 pounds. The steely blues sound is played on the image for a surreal collage where Bowie is renewed itself as a work of art recovered at Pierrot Lindsay Kemp (his master mime and theatrical consultant), cites his incarnations of the 70s and It left accompanied by a brand inspired by London’s subculture visuality: the New Romantics (Boy George). The images of “Ashes to ashes” marked the next twenty years the video clip as a popular form of visual experimentation. And it was the beginning of the remarkable videography Bowie reached the trembling choreography of “Lazarus” (2016).

The body as support

Exploiting his androgynous figure, a mix between post-sixties model Twiggy and pop tenor Scott Walker, David Bowie he made his body a support for the most radical designers widen the boundaries of design. The unisex style he was not so much a trend as a vanguard capable of vehiculizar images of high aesthetic impact as this photograph of Masayoshi Sukita an exclusive model that made him Kansai Yamamoto for the tour of 1973. In his role as alien mannequin deserves Bowie It is reviewed as one of the key names in performance art of the 70s, real bridge between Viennese Actionism and underground heroes 80s as extreme clown Leigh Bowery. From there inspired fashion eye (the designs by Jean Paul Gaultier, Kate Moss in Vogue posing as him) and mutant visual of pop stars (Madonna, Björk, Lady Gaga).

Selfportraits

reactualized as Internet meme (we saw the beam applied to Homer Simpson, Princess Leia of Star Wars), photography by Brian Duffy for the disc cover Alladin Sane (1973) reached the status decades of work of pop art. Not only because Bowie brought mass culture a cause of ancient art (the ray represented the fear of the unknown for many premodern cultures) but also because the makeup, the original mask Alladin Sane was appropriated just as the solarized images Andy Warhol or comic plot Roy Lichtenstein. As a Rembrandt or Frida electrified Bowie self-portrait made autonomously to radically change its character for each disk between 1972 and 1983, mostly. That gesture was replicated in contemporary art by French artist Orlan, who put his face in his hands surgery to undergo surgery again and again. In that sense, it could be said Bowie was Orlan bladeless.

Concept Art

The cover of the album The Next Day, his back 2013, is a piece of pure conceptual art. Bowie was visually interprets music streaming, without hardware, with this reflecting the death of cover art image. The image of the album is a ready made (the revolutionary idea of ​​Marcel Duchamp, 1919) of your hard Heroes (1977) that has been crossed out the name and which has blocked the central image (a photograph of Bowie playing the gesture of a portrait of Egon Schiele) with a white square, symbol of modernism. Bowie and his own work intervenes and creates an anti-image that is pure idea. The photo is veiled, the original Heroes, was the inspiration of the whole career of British enfant terrible Tracey Emin who, over the years, Bowie became one of his most fervent collectors.