![]() You might note I’ve said little about the content. You can’t play it on Apple Music or watch it on Netflix. Given Bowie’s significance as an artist, it is woefully underexposed. And, along with a separate video made just before his death, “Lazarus” was his great coda. Yet Bowie was removed from Jones right from the start.Ĭonscious artifice from the beginning. ![]() Even Prince only became a symbol late in life, once these themes had consumed his creative interest in maturity. Most young artists don’t do that because they are too busy dealing with all it takes to make a living and find an audience. Moreover, you have to have been creating your alter ego from the beginning. For another, you have to be able to deal with that truth on an artistic level, as distinct, say, from the usual deathbed refocusing on family and self, or even on the determination to go on living. (Or so one imagines.)įor one thing, you have to know you’re going to die imminently. Even fewer have the stunning amount of courage it takes. More importantly, he decided to kill off David Bowie before Jones died himself. That’s true, but Bowie was a true interdisciplinary creature, whose work encompassed music, theater, film, fashion, art, literature, photography, whatever creative outlet existed. No big deal there, you might say, perhaps referencing Madonna or Prince or Andy Warhol or some other sophisticated artist when it comes to the manipulation of identity (it’s worth noting here the prescience of what Bowie/Jones was exploring in years well before the great political rise of performative living). To understand what I am trying to say here, you have to buy into the idea that Bowie’s artistic life was a work of performance art and his artistic choices all subservient to this fictive, if flexible, entity. The streaming show will be from the musical's London production. Sophia Anne Caruso in the original "Lazarus" run at the New York Theatre Workshop. It was put together too soon to answer its own question. Fabulous as it was, “David Bowie Is” did not have the revelatory benefit of Bowie’s death. And I include “David Bowie Is,” the blockbuster exhibit that ran at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2014. It explains him and his art, better than anything else. Of all the pandemic silver linings, in terms of access to previously hidden content, this is one is among the brightest. ![]() Remarkably, the subsequent (and similar) London staging of “Lazarus” is streaming this weekend, in honor of both his birthday and the fifth anniversary of his death, and this weekend only. Why should all this matter in the middle of a pandemic that has made so many of us better aware of our fragility and mortality? But the demise of Jones and his alter ego were, of course, related. We failed to see that the death of David Bowie wasn’t the same thing as the death of the man born David Robert Jones, which occurred about a month later, from liver cancer, two days after his 69th birthday. And yet David Bowie, we all thought, was still alive. In actual fact, this show was both announcing and facilitating the death of David Bowie.
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