In 2024, artists like Leigh Bowery and Mike Kelley hit new heights of popularity – that’s a good thing, but it can’t come at the expense of ‘the piss and shit of it all’
On December 31, 2023, Keith Haring’s “Unfinished Painting” was finished. “The story behind this painting is so sad!” wrote a user on X at the time, in reference to the purposeful abandonment of the 1989 artwork, to represent the lives cut short by Aids (including Haring’s own). “Now using AI we can complete what he couldn’t finish!” They proceeded to share their “completed” version, which plastered over Haring’s purple paint drips and blank canvas with a series of nonsensical shapes. Squint, and you could just about believe it was the real thing. Straight away, it seemed pretty clear that this was a joke, but that didn’t stop it sparking a wave of backlash to ring in the new year. “If you actually knew the context of the actual art you’d delete this shit right now,” reads one response. “I hope his estate sues you,” reads another. Joke or not, the discourse didn’t bode well for the issue of artistic legacy in 2024 (or our declining media literacy).
In April 2024, the real “Unfinished Painting” was displayed in a major exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody. At this point, it’s not surprising to see the graffiti-turned-Pop artist – who died in 1990 – given so much space on a gallery wall. Along with the likes of Basquiat and Frida Kahlo, his work has long escaped the hallowed and pompous halls of the ‘Art World’, appearing everywhere from Uniqlo collabs to official chess sets. As much as this commercialisation can be criticised, to an extent it makes sense; graffiti culture is built around getting your art in front of as many eyeballs as possible. As Olivia Laing wrote about Basquiat in 2017: “Isn’t it what he wanted, to colour every surface with his runes?” After years in the spotlight, though, any artist’s appeal can start to wear thin. Luckily for galleries and their visitors, there’s a whole load of dead artists whose legacies are sitting there, just waiting to be mined.
In 2024, London’s Tate Modern Gallery launched a major retrospective of works by the late artist and “blue collar anarchist” Mike Kelley. Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, his first major exhibition in the UK, presents work created across the course of his career, from the late 70s until just before his death in 2012. Irreverent video artworks – from 1983’s suggestive The Banana Man, to psychoanalytical satires on youth subcultures – sit alongside perverse stuffed toys, bawdy and scatological sketches, and Sublevel, a model recreation of the CalArts basement where he studied in the 70s, featuring pockets of forgotten (or repressed) space lined with pink crystals. “Over a decade since his passing, Kelley’s reflections on identity and memory continue to resonate,” reads the gallery’s description of the show, which is set to run until March 2025.
Also on display is Kelley’s “Ahh...Youth!” (1991), AKA the photo series that spawned the cover of Sonic Youth’s Dirty in 1992. For many, this was their first encounter with Kelley’s art. “I got the CD when I was a teenager, from a mail-order CD service,” says the Canadian filmmaker Kevin Hegge, whose 2022 documentary Tramps! celebrates artists of the late 70s and 80s (notably sidestepping the biggest household names). The original Dirty artwork, taken from a Kelley performance work, had to be censored, says Hegge. “People were naked, rolling around in this substance with stuffed animals. I was like, what the fuck, is that poo?” Looking back, he adds, the encounter had a “profound impact” on his interest in contemporary art – partly because it was so shocking. As John Waters (who’s also experienced a renaissance in recent years, even if he still can’t get a film financed) said of Kelley, he was the “ultimate bad boy”.
After years of art world notoriety and cult acclaim, Leigh Bowery also recently broke into the mainstream cultural consciousness (yes, you’ve known about the boundary-pushing club kid for ages, but now your mum does too – maybe even your grandma). In 2024, Bowery and his legendary Taboo nightclub were the subject of an exhibition at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum. To celebrate, Dylan Jones penned a self-congratulatory ode to the “small-time pop star [and] genuinely influential gender warrior” for the Standard. And, in the biggest news for the artist’s public image, Tate Modern announced a major retrospective, Leigh Bowery!, coming in February 2025.
Mike Kelley was shocking and scatological for his time, but Bowery took things even further. His live performances often involved simulated births, nudity, blood and vomiting. One of his most memorable moments (especially for the guests in the front row) involved spraying an enema toward the audience at an Aids benefit show. He’s quoted as saying: “If I have to ask, ‘Is this idea too sick?’ I know I am on the right track.”
To be clear: it’s good news that subversive artists of the 80s are being recognised for their work, which remains relevant to this day. “Mainstreaming the often-challenging work of artists like Kelley and Bowery can provoke fruitful dialogue and debate about urgent sociopolitical issues surrounding identity formation, morality, trauma, or gender expression, to name a few,” says Sofia Vranou, academic and author of an upcoming book on Leigh Bowery’s creative practice and cultural impact. “Their works challenge normative narratives in different ways, fostering diversity, inclusivity and the visibility of marginalised voices.” The same could be said of Peter Hujar’s increasing visibility, be it through gallery exhibitions or an upcoming film starring Ben Whishaw, or David Wojnarowicz, whose legacy was recently celebrated on what would have been his 70th birthday.
A theme is emerging here. Of the artists mentioned above, all died young, and mostly of Aids-related illnesses. Unsurprisingly, then, curators and critics alike place emphasis on their position in queer history, their role in the fight for LGBTQ+ liberation, and their intimate personal struggles with identity and acceptance. These conversations are important. But why are they exploding into the limelight right now, all at once? Did everyone just decide, independently, that the time is right? Or does it point to a well-established mechanism of the art world (and the art market): to jump on a trend and run with it, whether it revolves around a specific style, medium or facet of ‘identity politics’. In his controversial Harper’s essay “The Painted Protest” this year, the art critic Dean Kissick seemed to suggest that something similar is happening in contemporary art, where curators are increasingly interested in the identity of the artist over the quality of the work they produce. “If an artwork’s affective power derives from the artist’s biography rather than the work,” Kissick writes, “then self-expression is redundant; when the self is more important than the expression, true culture becomes impossible.”
The power of Leigh Bowery’s self-expression – or Mike Kelley’s, or David Wojnarowicz’s – is unquestionable, of course. But now, the problem of presenting their life and work lies with their estates, the curators of their shows, or the directors of their biopics. This requires some tricky negotiations. For example, does a gallery choose to represent an artist in their entirety, including the works that haven’t aged so well? (Some of Bowery’s less talked-about provocations included swastika motifs, blackface and titles like “P*kis from Outer Space”). Or does the gallery choose to omit those works deemed problematic in the mid-2020s? Does it tailor its exhibition to current art world trends? Who gets to decide what gets left out?
If I have to ask, ‘Is this idea too sick?’ I know I am on the right track – Leigh Bowery
“It certainly is a concern,” says Vranou, “how art deemed provocative can be best presented in [a] public space without losing its critical edge, considering at the same time potential problematic aspects of the work, or ethical implications that might arise.” The tricky part, she suggests, is how to present this “sensitive work while avoiding sensationalism or causing offence”. This is especially difficult with artists like Bowery or Kelley, where offence and sensation was often the name of the game.
Hegge thought about these issues a lot while making Tramps!, and it shows – the film is purposefully “anti-nostalgic” in its portrayal of London’s clubs and squats, resulting in an honest historical document that also speaks to more modern issues of creativity, class, and identity. Of Leigh Bowery’s career, he says: “I wish the world saw that beautiful thing for how ugly it was.” But there’s always going to be some tricky decisions when navigating a dead artist’s legacy, especially one as motley and ironic as Bowery’s. “I really struggle with my fetishisation and celebration of myth, my interest in these constructed personalities,” Hegge says. “I celebrate the fantasy of it all, but I wonder if I’m contributing to the remix[ing] of the reality of that time.” The only way he can be sure of a truthful depiction is through feedback from the people who were actually there. “But that doesn’t happen until the thing’s done, and then you’re screwed.”
Like Bowery, Mike Kelley is a particularly difficult case for curators. “A practice as profuse and many-angled as was Kelley’s [...] can, as Andy Warhol’s proved, be made without much distortion to speak to successive eras,” writes the critic Martin Herbert in an ArtReview article on the 2024 Tate exhibition. This is useful for curators who want to ‘adapt’ Kelley for contemporary audiences, but if the intent is to educate their audience on the whole scope of his life and work, things get more complicated. In the catalogue for Ghost and Spirit, notes Herbert, artists and writers “[build] a context for Kelley that figures him, in various ways and however he might have felt about it, as something of a multidirectional ally”. This is despite Kelley’s confrontation of the “current victim culture” in 2005, potentially echoing contemporary conversations (and criticisms) of political correctness. It’s impossible to say what Kelley might have thought of the conversation about politics and identity today, more than a decade after his death, but here lies the problem.
The curation of Kelley’s work for mainstream audiences is also driven by a more banal commercial impulse, suggests Hegge: “the fear of alienating a potential ticket buyer”. Partly driven by funding cuts and wider economic precarity, everyone from emerging artists to mega-galleries are less inclined to take risks than they used to be. Behind the scenes, a lot of energy is spent on getting visitors in the door. Emphasis is placed on interactive elements primed for Instagram, or churning out Brat memes, rather than challenging the viewer or making them feel uncomfortable. “You have these desperate institutions trying to mine something edgy to bring in young people, and get them off their phones and into the gallery space or whatever,” says Hegge, but their “capitalistic intentions” prevent them from truly pushing the boundaries of acceptability. “I know that there are curators out there, working within those institutions, where the piss and shit of it all is very much the point,” he adds, “but those conversations don’t get very far.”
I wish the world saw that beautiful thing for how ugly it was – Kevin Hegge [on Leigh Bowery]
The effort to make difficult or ‘problematic’ artists more palatable can range from “actively burying anything aggressive or confrontational” in an artist’s past, to a simple language choice, like the renaming of the 2020 David Wojnarowicz film Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker, to simply Wojnarowicz. A few years back, Wojnarowicz’s 1984 collage “Fuck You Faggot Fucker” also appeared at the Met Gala, repurposed by Loewe for a suit worn by actor Dan Levy; again, though, it was edited for public consumption, omitting the black-and-white nudes and titular graffiti that surround the central motif of two men kissing, patterned with a map of North America. As the writer Sam Moore wrote in Frieze: “Levy’s Wojnarowicz look extracted only the parts that most easily fit with mainstream narratives of LGBT+ acceptance.”
There’s a more optimistic line of thought that says mainstream narratives about LGBTQ+ acceptance have simply expanded over the last few decades – that artists like Bowery, Wojnarowicz, Hujar, and Derek Jarman helped shift the Overton Window in a meaningful way. Is that why we’re not so shocked any more? Is it possible that 40 years later we’ve come to accept what once seemed unacceptable? Probably not. Your mum might enjoy Leigh Bowery’s outfits, but only as long as they’re not side-by-side with a large-scale print of his squirting enema. The conversation hasn’t changed that much. Hegge agrees. “The dominant culture... she’s dominating,” he says. “If you’re saying people made this challenging work, and we’ve actually absorbed it and learned from it as a species, I think across the board the answer is, ‘No.’ It’s a really depressing thing.”
The question is, he goes on, is it now too late for the kind of radical art that came out of the 80s to “fuck us up” the way it once did? Are artists and galleries even willing to take the necessary risks? Right now, the answer is: doubtful. Yes, we might see more “radical artists” on cinema screens, social media feeds, and gallery walls. Maybe Leigh Bowery’s yolk-spattered face will start appearing on t-shirts at Uniqlo, like all the Keith Haring and Basquiat artworks before him. But it’s all for nothing if it comes at the expense of “the piss and shit of it all”.