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But they pull it off. Beautifully.<\/p>\n
Bowie has always been like a distantly freakish but much-loved uncle to me. I first got into his music by raiding other people’s parents’ record collections in the ’90s, and although I didn’t understand most of it, it stuck with me and shaped my tastes. I can’t claim to know much about him – I just enjoy the spectacle.<\/p>\n
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And spectacle is what the V&A provides, introducing you to the sensibly-suited Bromley boy who “just wanted to be known” all the way through to a cavern of screens\u00a0displaying a gigantic gyrating Bowie flanked by mannequins displaying a career’s worth of costumes.\u00a0The effect is like entering the temple of a strange, glamorous god, compounded by signs reading “David Bowie is watching you”.\u00a0(We liked the less-worrying Warholian “David Bowie is thirsty – head to the cafe for orange juice or coffee!”)\u00a0Would museum-goers accept such a gargantuan display from anyone else?<\/p>\n
Laid out like the relics of saints,\u00a0it’s thrilling to get within arm’s length of the tiny-waisted suits of The Thin White Duke and the dusty Regency pirate chic of Screaming Lord Byron. This\u00a0collection of characters, each with a unique wardrobe, sound, and method of movement gives the impression of all the Bowies being present at once – a cast of personas that make you wonder who and where the actual David is. Or if he exists at all.<\/p>\n
David Bowie Is Leaving Clues Everywhere<\/strong><\/p>\n It was interesting to see evidence of Bowie’s consciousness that no art is fixed to its author’s intentions. Once it’s out there, it becomes a link in a chain of reactions, visualised in ‘The Periodic Table of Bowie’ by Paul Robertson\u00a0\u00a0at the exhibition’s end, filing high-profile fans like Morrissey under “fly my pretties fly”.<\/p>\n We get tantalising scraps of Bowie’s multimedia consumption, of bits and pieces ransacked from culture modern and antique.\u00a0He remarks he may well have ended up as a novelist, and you see the mingling of the musical\/literary\/cinematic in the storyboarding for Hunger City with its echoes of A Clockwork Orange<\/em> and Todd Browning’s Freaks<\/em>. The wordplay in Future Legend is decidedly Mervyn Peake:<\/p>\n