Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
When sorting through all the stories, it’s important to remember that Andy Warhol’s Factory had a certain underpinning of blue-collar conservatism. Warhol’s right-hand men, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey and Fred Hughes, were all Catholics, with the artist himself going to church every Sunday. When his boyfriend asked him what he prayed for, Warhol said, “Money.” There’s a scene in Bob Colacello’s memoir where the transgender Candy Darling is subjected to a lesbian sex show. “I’ve never seen anything so disgusting in my life,” she says. “Real ladies don’t behave this way.”
Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) broke as many taboos as any of Warhol’s superstars, with little evidence of any secret reactionism. His recently opened retrospective at the Tate Modern demonstrates his profound creativity and impact, with the official literature arguing persuasively that he inspired the likes of Alexander McQueen, Jeffrey Gibson, Anohni and Lady Gaga. The catalogue opens by noting that Bowery could be called a “fashion designer, club monster, performer, model, TV personality, musician and artist,” with the caveat that he personally resisted such classifications, saying “If you label me, you negate me.” (Candy Darling, for her part, wanted to be a legitimate Hollywood starlet.)
Bowery’s signature looks tended to land him somewhere between Ronald McDonald and Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. The harlequin makeup merged with the tragedy of the human body in the dripping shimmer he applied to his bald pate. It was joyous, but it looked like his head was sprouting something alien, or perhaps weeping glitter.
His best-known work was a performance in the window of Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988. For five days, Bowery occupied the space behind a two-way mirror—he could see his reflection, but not the passersby who ogled his voguing. It’s hard to overstate how ahead of its time this piece was. Yes, it was well before Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present (2010) at the Museum of Modern Art, but it has come to predict so much about our current reality, in which it’s fairly difficult not to become a preening creature in a hall of mirrors. There’s even something of OnlyFans culture in this piece, as the gallery’s proximity to SoHo had some contemporary onlookers describe others in the crowd as “a bit dodgy.”
But you can still look good in a narcotizing reflection world. Bowery did. One of the dresses worn in the mirror performance is on display at the Tate, a masked A-line dress with a cape, green satin with a salmon-pink lining. Capturing the remnants of a figure such as Bowery is difficult; luckily, he had many high-profile collaborators. The photography of Fergus Greer (b.1964) gave Bowery’s radical outfits the proper magazine cover treatment.
My favorite documentation of the Bowery body comes from Lucien Freud (1922-2011). Nude With Leg Up (Leigh Bowery) (1992) shows him sprawling. He is mostly off the bed, except for the elevated calf. Freud could do a lot for a person sitting in bed, but Bowery didn’t get to where he was by following the rules.
“Leigh Bowery!” is at Tate Modern through August 31, 2025.
The first time Maman appeared at the Tate Modern gallery in London, she wasn’t supposed to be the central attraction. Louise Bourgeois’s enormous bronze spider was part of a larger installation entitled “I Do, I Undo and I Redo,” commissioned to mark the opening of what has become one of the world’s most visited fine art galleries. Twenty-five years on and, while her creator may have gone—Bourgeois died in 2010—Maman is back with a sinister vengeance to mark Tate Modern’s quarter-century birthday.
Maman and the other elements of “I Do, I Undo and I Redo” were set up in the gallery’s Turbine Hall, so named because the original building was a power station and what is now the Tate Modern’s massive atrium and entrance hall once housed a water-driven turbine. Like London’s Fourth Plinth series, the Turbine Hall’s ongoing commission calendar has become a steady fixture of the U.K.’s art calendar. As with the Plinth artwork, the Turbine Hall commissions are temporary, staying in place for around six months. The main element of the “I Do, I Undo and I Redo” installation was actually a group of spiral staircases, but the sheer size and spookiness of the Bourgeois spider captivated cross-generational visitors. The most effective ensuing commissions were those that hit just as hard. Take Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 Turbine Hall commission, The Weather Project. Eliasson’s installation kit was simple: a bunch of mirrors, a sizeable half-circular screen, some lights and one of those machines that spray out artificial mist. The lights directed at the screen bounced off the mirrors to produce an intense, orange sun. The mist added a steamy, tropical vibe, and visitors took to spreading themselves out to bathe in the mock sun’s intense glow. Over two million people saw the piece, and one highlight came courtesy of a group of activists who lay on the floor and arranged their bodies into letters to spell out the phrase “Bush Go Home” in protest against George W.’s 2003 U.K. state visit.
Carsten Höller’s slides in 2006 continued the interactive larks. Named Test Site, the Swedish artist’s Turbine Hall installation consisted of five transparent, floor-to-ceiling slides that members of the public joyfully whizzed down, shrieking and waving to friends and family on the way. The following year, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth introduced a sense of disconcertion. Visitors entering the Turbine Hall spotted a hairline crack in the space’s concrete floor. The further the crack traveled into the hall, the longer, wider and deeper it became, until it revealed its entire 167-meter length and was big enough to swallow up anyone who wasn’t watching what they were doing.
Ai Weiwei’s 2010 commission, Sunflower Seeds, was a testament to his ability to use art to communicate ideas in accessible ways. The 100 million sunflower seeds that covered the Turbine Hall’s floor were made of porcelain in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, and visitors were encouraged to walk across the shifting carpet the seeds created. Unfortunately (and unintentionally), the seeds arrived covered in dust, and the gallery decided to cordon off the installation to stop visitors from inhaling porcelain motes.
The original Tate gallery was founded with money donated by Henry Tate, a nineteenth-century sugar trader and one-half of the sweetmeat manufacturer, Tate and Lyle. In 2018, several British institutions came under scrutiny for their potential involvement in the slave trade, and the Tate organization was put under the microscope. Research led to absolution—a statement noted Henry Tate and Abram Lyle were twelve and fourteen years old, respectively, when slavery was abolished in 1833. However, the scrutiny shone fresh light on just how many of the Turbine Hall commissions were addressing human rights and environmental issues. Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth was a comment on migration and immigration, for example, the depths of the crack revealing the darkness of racism. Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds addressed mass consumption and racial stereotypes. Far from the commonly-held perceptions of cheapness and poor quality associated with the “Made in China” label, the installation’s seeds were handmade by gifted craftspeople living in an area of China renowned for its exquisite porcelain pottery.
When Cuban artist Tania Bruguera was invited to create a Turbine Hall commission in 2018, she also used the chance to confront attitudes around immigration. Bruguera placed a heat-sensitive layer over the hall’s floor; the longer people laid upon it, the more a blown-up portrait of a young Syrian refugee called Yousef began to emerge beneath them. Yousef had fled Syria for London, and the presence of corporeal warmth unveiled the potential organic empathy of human kindness—a lesson on how to make a fellow mortal feel seen. Anyone left unmoved by the piece could visit a crying room, wherein a harmless vapor was pumped into a space next to the floor, forcing tears from visitors’ eyes as if they were peeling an onion. The title of Bruguera’s commission—10 148 451—came from the number of people who migrated from their country in 2017 added to the number of migrant deaths in 2018 at the time when the project was installed. That number has been increasing ever since.
U.S. artist Kara Walker’s 2019 Turbine Hall commission elegantly addressed the horrors of the British Empire. Entitled Fons Americanus, the installation’s central focus was a thirteen-meter-high fountain based on the Victoria Memorial stationed in front of Buckingham Palace. British colonialism accelerated under Queen Victoria’s reign, and the original memorial is a pompous, overblown statue intended to honor the period. For Walker’s remix, the memorial became a fountain, and the water gushing out of the figure at its top (and various others around its sides) referenced the seas traveled by nineteenth-century British slave traders as they dragged their human cargo into the hell of new worlds. Details sculpted into the fountain’s structure included a noose hanging off a tree’s branch and a military captain representing the brave Black individuals who fought against the slave trade.
Last year’s commission, El Anatsui’s Behind the Red Moon, also centered around interrogations of slavery. The Ghana-born, Nigeria-based artist and his team linked, knitted and entwined old bottle tops and discarded ephemera into huge flapping banners and meshes. By using the kind of flotsam that washes up along coastlines worldwide, El Anatsui was also underscoring how our oceans were (and still are) used to transport and abandon trafficked human beings.
The next Turbine Hall commission will be taken on by Máret Ánne Sara. Born in the ancient Sápmi territory that stretches across Norway, Finland, Sweden and parts of Russia, Sara’s work confronts the obliteration of traditional cultural values in the face of present-day colonialism. Much like the citizens of Greenland, the people of Sápmi never asked for their lives to be changed without their permission. Long may the good work enabled by the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall commissions continue.
Twenty-fifth anniversary events are taking place at the Tate Modern throughout 2025. Máret Ánne Sara’s Turbine Hall commission runs from October 14 this year through April 6, 2026.
