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Franz Pomassl
The Bowie Case
Pan Sonic

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In retrospective view of his seminal accomplishments as a rock star, the Englishman David Bowie, a former arts student, asserts that he and other glam-pioneers like Roxy Music wanted to transcend the borders of rock, with their activity. This should remind you of the rhetoric of German artist Joseph Beuys[i]. A quote from Bowie: “We were trying to include certain visual aspects in our music, grown out of the fine arts and real theatrical and cinematic leanings - in brief, everything which was on the exterior of rock. As far as I was concerned, I introduced elements of Dada, and an enormous amount of elements borrowed from Japanese culture. I think we took ourselves for avant-garde explorers, the representatives of an embryonic form of post-modernism.” It is actually surprising how easily Bowie identifies himself with the avant-garde. The lexis of the triumphant rock musician develops the notes implying a major shift in concepts of pop and avant-garde. When speaking of dada, Bowie has basically Duchamp in mind. The calculating attitude in his author’s position, the absence of political platform, the hedonist individualism, playfulness and irony and the use of assumed names is characteristic to both of them. It would be much to the point to remember, in this connection the character of Rrose Selavy, created by Duchamp, as his own alter ego, whose name is inferential of a wordplay: Eros c’est la vie. Rrose Selavy is, in the history of arts the first conceptually sustained play with the androgynous double Ego, the presentation of drag-theme, by now hackneyed to insipidity. At this point, a link from Duchamp to Bowie would beg itself. Yet, one cannot help speaking of Warhol, his Factory and his role as producer of Velvet Underground. As a matter of fact, Bowie never stopped referring to Warhol; that morsel of America was of utmost importance to him. When an opportunity presents itself, you should hear out Bowie’s “Andy Warhol”.

In his survey of the magazine “The Face”, the sociologist Dick Hebdidge asserts that the said publication “capitulates symbolically to the empire of signs, robots, computers, miniaturisation and auto-mobiles – to Japan, which has served as the first home of flatness for a long line of Second World orientalists including Roland Barthes[ii], Noel Birch, Chris Marker, David Bowie [iii] and, of course, the group Japan.The pages of The Face, like a series of masks in occidental Noh Play act out the farce on the decline of the British Empire. Name of the production: “[I think] I am going Japanese...”.” In his article Hebdidge reflects upon the First and the Second World. The First World, whose figurative equivalent is the British Empire, signifies the modern world, displaying fixed hierarchies of symbolising. The Second World, Japan, marks the arbitrariness of symbolisation in the post-modern culture. “The Face” magazine never attempts to peddle to the reader the authorised versions of the past, the drab party policy, or to bolster up the illusion of communal integrity. All is but a play, where everybody is outdoing each other, following the counterpart with ever‑starker pictures.

We are far from suggesting that Bowie was the hero, who single‑handedly pushed through all those shifts in the concepts of pop and avant-garde, which “The Face” personified in the beginning of 80s. Still, this change in the operative area of arts first strikes the eye in case of Bowie. It is therefore no wonder that besides Barthes, he has been held an icon of post‑modernism. Bowie had recourse to the incipient cultural industry, directors-producers of the identities’ factory. It was the musical industry which was the first to manifest itself, in the postmodernist situation in economy – from means of production, at the centre of Marxist thought, to the marketing and branding, at the centre of contemporary system.

The inception of 70s brought into stage, in Bowie’s performance, of the fictional character Ziggy Stardust. Stardust’s story is one of an androgynous pop star, able to establish contact through wireless with the extraterrestrial powers, assuming the messianic role, by treating the messages coming through as a spiritual redemption. Whereas the UFOs make use of him, as a channel for invasion, through whom they would destroy the world. This is the theme of the 1972 record “Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from The Mars” and the Bowie’s updated supra-theatrical image. Bowie claims that Ziggy was the name of a tailor’s shop, which he happened to travel past, perchance. “It had that Iggy connotation, but it was a tailor's shop, and I thought, well this whole thing is gonna be about clothes anyway.”

After the LP “Space Oddity” (1969) it was yet another two-three years until the contradictory personality of Bowie met with recognition, says Valter Ojakäär, an Estonian historian of pop-music writing in the early eighties. “Decisive in this connection was not his theatrical eccentricity (pink hair, long false eyelashes, fantastic make-up, transvestism), but the poetical and musical weight of his songs and the high quality play of his ensemble “The Spiders”.” It is touching to ascertain that even in case of a phenomenon, as image centred as glam-rock, Ojakäär does not quit his rhetoric of pure art.

Ziggy Stardust actually was quite a lot of things, but seemingly Bowie was borrowing most of all from a 2^nd rate rocker Vince Taylor, who found his market niche as “the French Elvis”. The young Bowie, meeting Taylor in London in 1966, was charmed by the latter’s freaky behaviour[iv]: “He used to carry maps of Europe around with him, and I remember very distinctly him opening a map out on Charing Cross Road, outside the tube station, putting it on the pavement and kneeling down with a magnifying glass. I got down there with him, and he was pointing out all the sites where UFOs were going to be landing over the next few months. He had a firm conviction that there was a very strong connection between himself, aliens and Jesus Christ." Taylor’s perception of reality tended to get lost, ever more frequently. The stress of his vigorously active life, precariously balancing on the verge of clinical insanity was compounded with wine, speed and LSD. His performances in France were source of legends, until he, as expressed by Bowie, “came out on stage in white robes and said that the whole thing about rock had been a lie, that in fact he was Jesus Christ - and it was the end of Vince, his career and everything else. It was this story which really became one of the essential elements of Ziggy and his world-view.” Whereas the messianic guitar hero Ziggy Stardust, intercommunicating with the Great Beyond, was an excellent candidate to parody the clichéd tragic star myths of the end 60s. The best examples are evidently Jim Morrisson, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Those interested in rock may remember, in connection with this also Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green, the latter a rock player acting as a lesser calibre messiah, before long making his eclipse from the stage, due to a worsening mental condition.

As an arts student, Bowie is a sincere fan of the types coming from the back‑country of America (his idols are Iggy Pop and Lou Reed), who live the clichés of romantic creative insanity, in the clef of rock.[v] Bowie understands that he would never achieve such unmitigated and unadulterated naïvely desperate self-perception of white trash. Unable to act like a non compos mentis nut, he presents the same topic from the meta-level. As declared by rock criticism, it was “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from the Mars” album, which did 60s in.

Parody and the element of double entendre was important, in case of Bowie, however it was also curious to look, how the borrowed playful elements are absorbed and assimilated by his own life. For a while in late 1972 and early 1973 Bowie and Ziggy were practically indistinguishable from one another. Part of the album's enduring mystique is that the self-mythologizing pretensions of the songs themselves (l could make a transformation as a rock 'n' roll star, so inviting, so enticing to play the part") operate as a parallel enactment of the process that simultaneously launched Bowie himself as a major artist./.../ This appropriation of a specific set of behavioural conventions in order to manipulate the real world would become a template for Bowie's career.” Bowie’s story is about how UFOs commandeered Ziggy Stardust. However, soon Ziggy Stardust commandeered Bowie, in much the same way, grabbing the initiative, for a long time. For a certain period Bowie fully identifies himself with his scenic persona, the play becoming, all of a sudden quite problematic. Quite a few years later, in 1997 when the film “Velvet Goldmine” was being shot, that was still a painful topic to Bowie – he never gave his consent to the authors of the film to use his songs. Bowie’s author’s position is consummate post-modern self-awareness in post-modern culture. There is a motive of schizophrenia as non-pathological self-concept of a post-modern subject, or of the pathology, as a new post-modern norm.

“He fell in love with the image of himself and suddenly the picture was distorted”, is what sings Kraftwerk in the tune dating from end 70s “The Hall of Mirrors”, a beautiful representation of style in pop music, of the topic of star. The words of that song would enable us to reach the subtleties of Jacques Lacan’s identity-theory. To put it roughly, Lacan’s idea is that a sucker becomes man at the moment it recognises its picture in mirror and acquires simultaneously the rudiments of the human language. It is through the mirror that one enters the symbolic space. Quite naturally, Lacan’s discourse of mirror is figurative. However it assumes larger dimensions when we understand that whatever object can be the mirror of a desire. Quote: “Every picture is the Ego-Image of the Subject.”  The motive used – mirror as the shackles of an ideal self-concept – is not accidental, by far in case of Kraftwerk. The argument that one should be able to freely elect, create, and purchase one’s identity – an allegation at the centre of post-modern culture – is precisely gained through the model of star. Pathos of the star-model, presented in a nutshell, is therefore – don’t worry, guys, if the Oedipus is up your ass, order to yourself a new mirror phase! Stars, in the given case Bowie and Kraftwerk, are peddling to us, for hard currency the illusion, borrowed from post-modernist culture theory, of complete commutation of identities, and provide to fans an opportunity to new identification, on the other side of the ordered mirror phase.

Anyway, the topic of star tends to conceptualise at beginning 70s, like all other things. While acting themselves, the stars are all there to play with self-presentation and self-reflecting, bringing the topic of star also into the performing art. Member of the performance group active in 70s Coum Transmissions and band Throbbing Gristle, Genesis-P-Orridge described the situation as follows: “It seems to be a general trend among the younger artists that they take interest in the rock-scene, as if it were the same kind of art medium as colours. Some of the artists act as fame-art-objects, they have themselves become a medium and and their medium is to be famous.” “The key to entertainment is style and the key to style is the perfect pose,” assures us also Bruce McLean, the leading figure of the active in 1972–1975 performance group Nice Style, The World’s First Pose Band. In modern art the pop poses are taken as something quite natural, we have become accustomed to them. For instance, the band Owadda may be considered a conceptual work of the winner of the past year’s Turner Prize, Martin Creed. Illuminatingly, the Young British Art’s generational credo sayed out by Matthew Collings is: Hey western civilisation, artist deserves the fame of the rock star, let’s start with me.