David Bowie Is…. In Melbourne

David Bowie Is, a touring exhibition curated by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, has attracted blockbuster queues all the way from Paris to Chicago. And no wonder! This is the first international retrospective of David Bowie’s career spanning five extraordinary decades and including unprecedented access to Bowie’s own extensive archive. The exhibition, currently showing at the Australia Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, includes over 300 objects featuring everything from original costumes, photography and set designs to handwritten lyrics, album artwork, baby photos and Bowie’s carefully preserved cocaine spoon.

Interviewed by ABC ARTS, Dr Kathryn Johnson, one of the curators of the exhibition, says Bowie’s “genius has really been finding equally talented people to work with.” Musically, Bowie collaborated with everyone from Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed to Nile Rodgers, while his sartorial shape-shifting involved everyone from French design star Thierry Mugler to the avant-garde Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto.

Bowie was like a sponge, soaking up influences from all branches of the arts. His Ziggy Stardust alter-ego was an outrageous cocktail of what Bowie later described as “part Nijinsky and Woolworths.” His shock-orange hair was borrowed from a girls’ magazine, eye make-up from mime artist  Lindsay Kemp and his two-piece blue and red body suit and laced calf boots copied from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

---

---

Besides the iconic black waistcoat and dress shirt from the Station to Station tour and the gaudy Pierrot costume Bowie wore in the Ashes to Ashes video (see above), the exhibition also includes an interesting Thierry Mugler outfit from 1997. Mugler’s elegantly cut suit and collar-pinned suit is subtly accessorised with a pair of kitten heels, suggesting Bowie was still experimenting with androgyny decades after he squashed rumours of his bisexuality.

The curators have included some specifically Australian material for the Melbourne leg of the tour including photos from Bowie concerts in Melbourne and Adelaide, ticket stubs and promotional posters. permitted Bowie to make the one and only overtly political statement of his career with the video for Let’s Dance, which was shot on the same trip as China Girl, both in Sydney and in the remote New South Wales outback town of Carinda.

Bowie’s time in Australia is also the subject of a new documentary “Let’s Dance: Bowie Down Under” that premieres at the Melbourne International Film Festival tonight, Sunday, August 9th.

---

Listen: BBC Radio 2’s Mark Radcliffe interviews everyone from Jarvis Cocker to Annie Lennox and Boy George about Bowie’s enduring influence:

---