Eccentric and Quite Mad
Bowie’s Occult Art, and the Enigma of the Monster
An excerpt from MASKS: Bowie & Artists of Artifice, published by Intellect Books. Available now.
Art is an act. This has two contradictory meanings, but in this case, they are unified. “An action, in the world, real” and “a performance”. Real and a performance, particularly when we are under its spell. Brian Eno, one of Bowie’s most distinctive creative collaborators, had this to say on the subject, ‘The question, “What does it mean?” really asks, “What does it symbolize?” Well, my notion is that art does something, not that it means something. Its meaning is what it does’. That meaning is always multiple, never entirely fixed.
The crux of this quote lies at the heart of one of Bowie’s chief artistic obsessions, the mutual antipathy and dependence between artifice and authenticity — possibly the most rudimentary form of “the mask”, as a metaphor. Dealing as it does with abstraction, theory is unlike life in a similar manner to art, and possesses its own form of seduction. The basis of this connection is well established. For instance, Simon Reynolds wrote that ‘Bowie’s entire career is predicted […] with Wilde’s rhetorical question: “Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method whereby we can multiply our personalities”’.
Indeed, much of Oscar Wilde’s work seems to presage his career, by establishing a dialectic between the supposed grand illusion and reality of life. These become inextricably tangled in any number of ways, even at times mutually subverted, so a painting might absorb malignancies, or truth itself could be carved in granite through a means as insubstantial as speech. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is a document that puts forward a theory of art, and is more remarkable for us on that account than as a novel in the typical sense.
Therein, as if in contradiction to the idea of art as an act, the character of Lord Henry says, ‘Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame’. But we know how The Picture of Dorian Grey ends. Lord Henry is quite wrong.
While all mediums of communication employ a trick of light or sound, even the most artificial methods of representation can affect the most vital parts of ourselves. Embodiment created by a successful illusion — for instance, the image of a dead actor, brought back to life on a movie screen — is the most obvious, and the most mechanical sense of the artifice in art, conveyed through the extension of whatever medium is at hand. Each has its own grammar, but we can refer to them all collectively as “art”, even if different mediums lend themselves to different modalities: space for painting, time for music and so on.
Not all of us are artists, however. The more difficulty we have communicating through the regular means, the more likely we are to use the ‘rarified terms’ of art. Everyone dissembles, but many artists make a career out of it. We separate the roles we play within a piece of art or theatre, and the lives we lead otherwise, but do so mostly through consideration of the social context and frame within which a performance takes place. To an extent, this is as it should be. An actor who plays a murderer is not guilty of murder. But these lines can become muddled the closer we look at them, and we are reminded of this whenever we find ourselves thrown off by the reprehensible actions of an actor, so that their characters seem tainted. We don’t blame an actor for Macbeth’s misdeeds, but we have an understandably hard time accepting Cliff Huxtable, knowing what we do now.
There’s nothing fixed behind our masks, nothing pure and articulated by its distinction, but that doesn’t free us from culpability for our actions. Someone pulls the trigger, or not. So what if the fixed self is a construct? At the basis of this construction is a useful illusion. We can see in our acts what kind of person we actually were, because actions in the world create a record, even if its author and interpreter’s justifications are always somewhat suspect.
Whenever we’re asked to interpret raw emotion or experience in a narrative, we confront this choice — what was concealed, what was revealed, what was concealed as pretext — such as when people are on a date, trying to speak of anything at all except what is really on their minds . Narrative is always a type of mask, requiring the construction of a facsimile in our process of interpretation. Like the process of constructing a plaster mask from a copy, it can be repeated forever. There’s nothing necessarily sinister in the guises we adopt, but it’s no surprise that a desire should arise to distinguish real from fake.
Unfortunately, the simplicity of the real being clearly articulated from the fake is purely constrained to the realm of art. We know it’s art when we put a frame around it that defines it as such. In life, we never have such assurances. Conversely, “it felt like a movie” is an oft-repeated suggestion of the surreality that arises when the reality of our social expectations is ruptured, such as during a violent act.
Most believe life isn’t art, precisely because it lacks the mediation of artifice; “real” comes to mean “unplanned”. And therein lies our self-deception. In Goffman Erving’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, most social roles are established in a manner virtually indistinguishable from those embodied by artists. More accurately, life isn’t art because life doesn’t require the mediation of artifice to exist on its own terms. Our engagement and immersion in life will always introduce this element of suspicion in anyone self-conscious enough to recognize it. As Nietzsche claimed, ‘no artist tolerates reality’.
An artist had best prefer the lie that tells the truth, over the truth that could never lie well enough to be of any artistic use. Bowie instructed artists to steal well and lie better, and the young Bowie in particular saw absolutely nothing as outside the realm of “source material” for his appropriation. His genuine enthusiasm, and consuming interest in the artifice of art goes a long way towards forgiving at least some of his “Warholishness”, but it raises a good question of how we determine what is “off limits” for author or artist. Some of this is attributed to style. Truman Capote’s willingness to cross these lines was legendary; much of the so-called “gang that wouldn’t write straight”, New Journalists like Tom Wolfe and most especially Hunter S. Thompson, hardly acknowledged there was a line at all.
Art is a pretence nearly by definition. High art often draws a line between itself and “reality” precisely by calling that line into question, into making fun of itself, or employing ironic distance to the extent of self-abnegation. Ironic distance only defends us so much, as Oscar Wilde himself discovered, and we may wonder at the austere aesthetic purity claimed by Vladimir Nabokov echoing that old rallying cry, ‘art for art’s sake’.
All such claims can be placed beside equally true contradictions. At best, this may intend to trick us into recognizing not only the reality of art, but also the reality of our immanent experience. It can transform us, if we happen to catch just the right work of art at just the right moment in our lives. If not, it makes most people back away.
Pretence should have a purpose. Especially in America, there is a pervasive attitude outside the walled off enclaves of art world and academia that “intellectual” is a synonym for “ineffectual”. Art itself becomes a shibboleth used to distinguish high and low culture, but it often comes off as an empty charade, or a performance entirely for class or financial status. Few artists have been so successful as Bowie was at playing both sides against each other.
Those who turn their persona into the very artifice that drives their art are frequently mythologized beyond recognition; eventually fans, friends, lovers and even the artist themselves can be deceived by their mask, mistaking it for themselves.
How clearly can we see ourselves, given the vast unknown unknowns of the subconscious? It seems inevitable the lines should blur, between the so-called fact and fiction. The therapeutic possibilities in approaching art in this way are obvious, but doing it in public, and becoming famous through that is, at best, potent alchemy, and at worst, a devil’s bargain. The artist’s crisis of identity is admittedly a well-trod theme, possibly one of the key themes of the twenty-first-century mythology — postmodernist proscenium breaking deriving itself from an infinite regress, seeking a final authority and finding it nowhere.
These same questions of authenticity and authority lurk in the background of nearly all of Bowie’s work, for all those who can hear, or witness, the momentary cracks in the facade during interviews. In the mid-1970s especially, he really was The Man Who Fell to Earth. For this, arguably Bowie’s best acting role, he got the gig based on how he presented himself in the 1975 television documentary Cracked Actor. He appears fairly lucid, despite his copious, memory-blotting drug intake by that point. On the track by the same title, he sings ‘show me you’re real’, an obvious pun on the ‘reels’ of film. Which of these was the “real” Bowie? None, of course. And yet …
Compartmentalization between performance and performer can never be absolute, as the one invariably informs the other, even if the relationship between artist and art, fiction and fact is as mysterious or as downright misleading as history itself. Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition, ‘The masks do not hide anything but other masks […] The same thing is both disguising, and disguised’. Repetition and difference aren’t the enemy, they’re the basis of evolution. Yet we can’t help searching for the single truth, waiting to be unveiled beneath the mask:
Like the old woman in the story who described the world as resting on a rock,
and then explained that rock to be supported by another rock, and finally when pushed with questions said it was ‘rocks all the way down’, he who believes this to be a radically moral universe must hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate should or on a series of shoulds ‘all the way down’. — William James, ‘Rationality, Activity and Faith.’
Why are we so hung up on being original? We assert ourselves in what we contribute to the endless song, adding our voice for a time, and then disappearing; our voice now a permanent part of the assemblage, to be remixed tomorrow. Simon Critchley summarizes Bowie’s artistic method in this way, ‘Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and re-enactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live, and confronts us with the reality of illusion’.
True originality would be a form of madness.
Ziggy, arguably Bowie’s premiere “character,” had been constructed instinctively, collage and pastiche style out of the fantasies he could lift from the counterculture, among other frequently cited pieces: Nietzsche’s ubermensch and Dionysus, Jesus Christ and aliens. This fusion amalgamated into an ever-present archetype of the charismatic rock star turned cult leader. According to Chris O’Leary in his book Rebel Rebel, a case of mistaken identity would be the initial basis of this career-defining character. At a Velvet Underground gig Bowie mistook Doug Yule for Lou Reed, and upon realizing the switch-up, ‘considered that he’d enjoyed meeting the “fake” Reed as much as he would have the real one’. Still searching for the superstar status that had thus far eluded him, Bowie began to wonder if the power of celebrity might even be conferred by accident.
But the real power of Ziggy Stardust resided not in this concept, which is admittedly somewhat threadbare, not even in the music, but in the participatory nature of performance. Nietzsche wrote that:
Greek tragedy in its earliest form had for its sole theme the suffering of Dionysus and […] for a long time the only stage hero was Dionysus himself. […] [U]ntil Euripides, Dionysus never ceased to be the tragic hero […] [A]ll the celebrated figures of the Greek stage — Prometheus, Oedipus, etc. — are mere masks of this original hero, Dionysus. […] [B]ehind all these masks there is a deity, that is one essential reason for the typical “ideality” of these famous figures which has caused so much astonishment. — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
The same might be said of Ziggy.
But the seed idea isn’t just an explicit extension of the Ziggy mythos. It was a recurring theme, a form of irony and nihilism that was “in the air” in the 1970s, as the counterculture failed to live up to its ideals. The Young Americans track ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ was a sketch along these lines, as Chris O’Leary details, inspired in part by The Immortal, ‘a novel about an ambitious, amoral method actor who dies young and creates a death cult’. Somewhat similarly, The Wall, Pink Floyd’s epic disco-dystopian concept album and movie by the same name, deals with the psychology of authoritarianism and cult of personality around a rock star. In the real world this “trope” played out many times, from the Manson family to Jim Jones, and later, Scientology, the Heaven’s Gate cult and so on.
As Rene Girard points out in Violence and the Sacred, Dionysus isn’t the good guy. As he puts it:
Only the quixotic masochism of our own age, the result of a long immunity to
the violence that threatens primitive societies, allows us to see anything attractive in the Dionysus of The Bacchae. […] And if he later appears as the god of wine, that is probably a more sedate version of his original designation as the god of homicidal fury.
Dionysus serves to expose what is true, but repressed. In any Freudian reading, such as Girard’s, this libidinal energy is violent and dangerous. Jung was more sunny in his interpretation, as with the countercultures that were to follow in his spiritualist footsteps. Within the context of the 1960s and subsequent countercultural movements, in which Jungian ideas show considerable popularity, Dionysus, Lilith and even Lucifer himself all became soldiers for the oppressed, the underdog, the individual. Bowie rightly intuited that Dionysus — specifically ‘the Dionysus of The Bacchae’ — was the archetypal mould of a rock star.
At least in regard to “the squares”, a rock star is some kind of ‘monster’. Who could be more “square” than Pentheus? He is “the Man”.
Eventually the so-called pretender’s work finds itself in the canon of Important Works of Art, and the folk devil becomes the icon of rebellion, celebrated for sticking it to The Man. […] Musician David Bowie recalled that ‘in the 1960s nobody thought I would be successful because I was too avant-garde’. Today, Bowie is a British national treasure. — Dan Fox, Pretentiousness: Why It Matters.
‘Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media in this spectacle?’ Baudrillard asks in Simulacra and Simulation. He was referring to “the Media”, but it remains equally relevant to our enquiry — if we can collectively share a meaningful relationship with a fiction such as Ziggy, from where does that fascination derive? Where does the myth live?
Every artist with a measure of mainstream success has to wrestle with the sheer force of fame, their personal likeness turned into an archetype in the minds of millions. In Jung’s sense, an archetype pre-exists this association. Whatever Ziggy tapped into already exists in our psyche, somewhat analogous to a butterfly that has evolved a specific proboscis in accordance to the shape of an orchid that grows nearby. Artists generally develop these postures in relation to the conditions in and around us, and some of these coincidentally happen to fit, key-and-lock like, with others who share a sympathetic composition. “Bowie is an outsider, just like us”.
How does a person become a symbol? As Bowie put it in 1972, ‘The artist doesn’t exist. He’s strictly a figment of the public’s imagination. None of us exist. We’re in the twilight zone. We’ll all go to hell, ’cause we set ourselves up as gods’.
A passage from Aleister Crowley’s aphoristic and similarly grandiose Book of Lies has resonance here, ‘I am not I; I am but an hollow tube to bring down Fire from Heaven’. There is a tendency for artists to speak as if a form of possession is involved. This isn’t only a figure of speech. Trance-state research on artists and shamans alike indicate substantial, noticeable changes. But no matter how many personæ, they’re all riding in the same body, drawing on the same lived history.
When you embody a double like Ziggy, and people actually buy into the act and re-enforce it, while it remains play, the ammunition is live. It is a consequence of the philosophy of masks presented here that the figurative and literal become irrevocably tangled. They were always so, but members of a society also carry a responsibility for the roles they play in that world. This also raises a pointed question: if we’re all characters in each other’s minds, characters constructed of fears and desires projected atop the thinnest veneer of reality, then how can a celebrity “be themselves”?
Bowie was well aware of this dilemma even early in his career. In 1968, Bowie wrote ‘The Mirror’, a song for Pierrot in Turquoise, and a year later, in Love You Till Tuesday, a self-promotional talent showcase, a short entitled ‘The Mask’ appears as an interstitial. Bowie can be seen performing his mime routine in white face-paint, but it is surprisingly striking, in retrospect. Simon Reynolds concludes, ‘“The Mask” is an astonishingly self-aware preview of the cost of stardom and the psychological dislocation caused by having a public image. Not that rehearsing the process […] did anything to deflect Bowie from ardently pursuing his destiny’.
When Ziggy “came to America” in the form of Aladdin Sane, Bowie focused even more on this theme. The following year, Bowie’s surprise hit ‘Fame’ captured the strutting claustrophobia of being strapped into this ride that’s become bigger than you are. Get big enough, and a new generation of actors can compete for the chance to play you in the Hollywood biopic.
Fame is sustained by inhumanity. No one is ready for it, even if they hunger for it. It can be an utterly alienating experience — the public thinks they know you, they think they want to know you, and you’re stuck in the role they’ve cast you in. Those who become famous must face a paradoxical form of loneliness: all our internal lives, which feel most intimately real to us, are least real to everyone else. A star is “known” to all, as a facsimile of themselves. The more that myth grows, the more it eclipses that person — for the public, even sometimes for the artist. According to Reynolds, ‘Glam idols like Bowie […] espoused the notion that the figure who appeared onstage or on record wasn’t a real person but a constructed persona, one that didn’t necessarily have any correlation with the performer’s actual self’. An artist must become intimately familiar with their mask, or at any rate, the one they wear when they’re playing themselves in public. This is the counterweight against Maskenfreiheit, the freedom in wearing masks an artist may experience while on stage.
The concept of kayfabe, familiar to most wrestling aficionados, is a 24/7 factor in the lives of many celebrities. Nick Rogers explains in a 2017 New York Times op-ed:
[F]or at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.
[…] The artifice is not only understood but appreciated: The performer cares
enough about the viewer’s emotions to want to influence them. Kayfabe isn’t
about factual verifiability; it’s about emotional fidelity.
The relationship of kayfabe, camp and irony is difficult to map out in any precise terms, but they surely all play significant roles in the social phenomenon of “Bowie”, as well as most of the social and artistic movements Bowie appropriated his inspiration from. Most of us understand the Bowie we know is a construct, but our relationship remains “authentic” nevertheless.
As it turned out, the transformation of some bloke from Brixton into a rock god wasn’t really that out there, after all.
By the time he reached Los Angeles several years later, Bowie’s study of the occult became more overt, and he turned further inward. He stated that his ‘overriding interest’ during this period ‘was in Cabbala and Crowleyism’. ‘[M]ore recently’, he said in 1995, ‘I’ve been interested in the Gnostics’. In truth, a gnostic current runs through much of his work before and since, arising from the idea that we are utterly changeable in our inner nature, that there is only a costume and this too can be changed.
The popular take on Aleister Crowley is that he was a charlatan or con man. But he was very (post)modern in his sensibility about the power of image, a first-rate troll in the modern sense of the word, recognizing the function of outrage to disseminate that image. In today’s world, he might have made a killing as an advertising exec or political consultant. There are many levels he appealed to Bowie on, though overall Bowie seemed to maintain a form of ambivalence, or even indifference, in regard to Crowley.
Nevertheless, Crowley’s anecdote about the true nature of ‘magick’ in Magick Book 4 is especially instructive in regard to Bowie’s work, and may present the only sense in which he was ever truly ‘immersed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery’:
There is a story of the American in the train who saw another American carrying a basket of unusual shape. His curiosity mastered him, and he leant across and said: ‘Say, stranger, what you got in that bag?’
The other, lantern-jawed and taciturn, replied: ‘Mongoose’.
The first man was rather baffled, as he had never heard of a mongoose. After a pause he pursued, at the risk of a rebuff: ‘But say, what is a mongoose?’
‘Mongoose eat snakes’, replied the other.
This was another poser, but he pursued; ‘What in hell do you want a Mongoose for?’
‘Well, you see’, said the second man (in a confidential whisper), ‘my brother
sees snakes’.
The first man was more puzzled than ever; but after a long think, he continued rather pathetically: ‘But say, them ain’t real snakes’.
‘Sure’, said the man with the basket, ‘but this Mongoose ain’t real either’. — Aleister Crowley, Book 4.
The occult lyrics to Bowie’s oft-cited ‘Quicksand’ seem to otherwise be a bit of a put on, as by the turn of the century, the surrealist approach to occultism was more akin to Bowie’s creative output than Crowley’s brand — a formalized, Victorian mishmash of “orientalism” and Golden Dawn doctrine. These themes appear alternately in songs and interviews going back as far as The Man Who Sold the World (1970). Bowie’s interest corresponded with the most recent occult revival. Despite Bowie’s reputation for always being ahead of the curve, he was in fact commenting on a movement that was already dying out. The prior revival began in the fin de siècle, to some degree influenced by Crowley, along with Éliphas Lévi, one of his primary sources, and Dion Fortune, one of Bowie’s. Occult revivals are modern (1875–present), counter-cultural events, which is to say, they appear as a dialectical counterbalance against fears of the dehumanizing effects of industry, science and logic, and the transformation of the sacred into the profane. Much of what was being “rediscovered” was created through the loose interpretation of a surprisingly diverse range of esoteric sources. Surrealism presented an alternate expression of similar impulses: a means of re-engaging with the primal forces of the unconscious.
In the years to follow, Bowie maintained a posture of surrealist occultism that blended seamlessly with the Warholian sense of commodity in art — deification of commodity as a means of revolutionizing it, expressing itself in Bowie’s simultaneous embrace of pop culture and the avant garde, and the idea of the magical power conveyed by the mesmerizing effects of media. In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard writes that ‘the work of art joins fashion, advertising, the “fantasy of the code” — the work of art sparking in its banality, its mobility, irreferential effects, hazards and vertigo — a pure object of marvelous commutability because with all causes gone, all effects are possible and virtually equivalent’. This speaks more to Bowie’s “occultism” than anything we might find in a dusty grimoire. But neither was his method purely advertising glitz and the illusion of glam.
As Barthes indicates in Mythologies, myth is an added level “above” sign and symbol, an armature of shared referents that in an intersubjective sense exists beyond any one of the people engaging with it. Myth is participatory, otherwise how would it germinate and spread? Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke, and Ziggy Stardust were all the costume of choice for countless Halloween parties, and also characters that influenced several generations of fans who felt a kinship with these fictions. In truth, these characters are all co-created. By embodying a myth artist’s engage with energies that are not altogether under their control.
This magic is something Bowie offered his audience, that they too could don a new outer skin, and eventually find themselves changed inwardly — a potentially dangerous alchemy, as his life story demonstrates. One is reminded of the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, Goethe’s famous poem which reappears in Disney’s Fantasia, among other places. In it, the apprentice calls up the forces to animate brooms to clean for him, but they quickly move beyond his control. In The Case of Charles Chester Ward, H. P. Lovecraft wrote what might serve as a potent aphorism in this context, ‘Never call up what you cannot put down’.
Take off a mask, and a child may laugh. But if the face revealed beneath is another mask, it turns to shrieks of terror. Sacred clowns are often not very funny. Our feelings about the line between the sacred and the profane is challenged by border play, by the liminality of the transition between opposites, and so, we might recognize artists that exemplify this precisely by their ability to arouse this particular disquiet, a sort of neurosis that lies in the back of our minds. This is like an occult version of deconstruction, ‘which itself combines the “constructed” and the “destructured” in an ambiguous balance, Derrida’s work takes pleasure and power from the in-between, and from terms and concepts that undermine binary oppositions’.
But, in delving into this realm, The Thin White Duke was increasingly showing the fraying seams of Bowie’s connection with reality. His aristocratic leanings, his metaphysical desire to return to ‘the source’, the various conflicting fragments of lyric and interview where the character came to be — all of these can be read as an escape on his part, into himself. Indeed, he had become nearly an utter recluse at that stage in his career.
Art can be a form of force, in the same sense that it is an act. Along these lines, we would do well to remember the basis of Nazi attacks on modernist art as degenerate: this idea was sold on aesthetic grounds, at least on its face. The persecution of Jews was promoted atop the message that ‘degenerate’ abstract philosophy, cultural criticism and modernist art were a direct attack on German ideals of beauty, virtue and tradition. The Nazis hated the ‘Weimar decadence’, and it was only a step further to pin this to an entirely mythological racial character. Before the books were burned in May 1933, Goebbels said, ‘The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit’.
Should we doubt the power and value of art, we need only look to how quickly it is controlled under authoritarian or fascist rule. Change the images we valourize, and in short order, you change the people — through the cultural force of this mass image, as means to collectivize and motivate, by and through an aesthetic mythology. We are all reconstructions of image and myth.
For all of that, as J. F. Martel discusses in his book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, in the time since the Second World War, the social value of art has been eroded, that vacuum increasingly occupied by propagandic entertainment, or not at all. Benjamin’s observation is equally well taken, ‘the logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life’.
The Nazis lost, but capitalism didn’t. The conditions for fascist aesthetics to serve as propaganda as well as parody already exist. An attention economy is perfectly suited to the marketing strategy of opportunist, vulgar nihilism. You need believe in nothing save the dollar and the image.
We see what’s happened within the context of the so-called alt-right:
[C]riticism, analogy, and metaphor are insufficient tools for combating neo-fascism; however the aesthetic nature of contemporary fascism is, in a sense, an undeniable affirmation of the power of propagandic images in today’s visual culture. The right has outpaced the left in terms of how deftly they have used these images and have thus built a coalition of large swaths of voters in the US and Europe. Thus, the knife is probably not the best tool either; the most optimal tool for combating neo-fascism is the image, the algorithmic sorting mechanism, and the narrative, all of which can be employed as a means of redirecting society from performances towards politics.
Cronenberg’s Videodrome has surprisingly lasting salience precisely because of this sense of recursion between the perceiver and the perceived, materially and organically, beyond whatever overt messages may seem to be of significance. ‘The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye, therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain’. Looking outwards at the screen, we can only but look inward upon ourselves. It is through aesthetic that ideology can first reassert itself, though the nature of our imitation and amplification is mutable, and its motivations are mysterious.
Re-appropriation is one example of the many powerful propagandic tools available to anyone with a mind to find a new use for an old idea. Symbols have no one single specific meaning, no one specific purpose, but they can have many guises and uses. They’re like a coat-rack for personal and collective identity. The character of a cartoon frog was appropriated by nihilistic racists much as the swastika was re-purposed by the Nazis, but that does not make cartoon frogs or swastikas inherently racist. Symbols aren’t just ripe for appropriation, they are a means for it. We believe symbols refer to something — this is the same form of faith that supports our belief in judges and police officers, presidents and so on — and yet the meaning we hold in mind of the whole can change as we collectively wrestle over what the significance of that reference actually is.
What is the meaning of the slogans and memes that propagate such ideas? How about the poetic nonsense of the best rock lyrics, or the banal nonsense of politicians? It’s as if a nation stands in attendance in front of a television but the screen isn’t on. A fixed and certain meaning is never the point of what we sing and chant.
Consider that, taken out of context, re-appropriation and collage go a surprising distance in typifying Bowie’s art. His poetic nonsense holds sway because it remains open-ended, transparent, and yet contains little more than allusion in itself. Nevertheless, through this he effected a participatory ritual. This premise — playing at becoming a wild mutation, a rock God, and thereby having it happen retroactively as if by magic — was performed, and later elaborated on quite consciously.
Much of Bowie’s ‘eccentric and quite mad’ musing during the subsequent period of his career would later be written off by saying ‘cocaine is a hell of a drug’, but that’s dodging a key issue, and it is one that has increasing relevance to the politics of the present. So let’s face it head on.
Bowie was for a time fascinated with the aesthetics of fascist mythology, how they manage to mesmerize even those who find the ideology monstrous. His fixation on the Grail and the whole weird and mostly invented mythology that had developed around Nazi UFOs, Himmler exploring the hollow earth, and so on, had no apparent political purpose whatsoever, thus forgetting the rule about nature abhorring a vacuum. It was almost as if he took to it because he liked how it looked with his ensemble. In his words, ‘The main thing I was functioning on, as far as the whole thing about Hitler and Rightism was concerned, was mythology. […] And naively, politically, I didn’t think about what they had done’.
Bowie’s gnostic quest/cocaine binge was, for a time, the same strange fascination that drove his own mass celebrity, cult-worship. Or so his self-mythologization goes, which is maybe not the same thing. In an interview with Rolling Stone in 1976, Bowie said:
Everybody was convincing me that I was a Messiah, especially on that first
American tour. I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy. I could have been Hitler in
England. […] I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I’d be an excellent dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.
In a sense, Bowie’s conclusion that Hitler was a ‘rock star’, a failed artist and soldier who tried — and thankfully, also ultimately failed — to write a myth for the entire world, is essentially true, but it speaks to his degree of dissociation that the real world implications passed him by. Perhaps he spun occult fascist fantasies for himself alone in hotel rooms, and worked his way out of that trap walking the streets of Berlin. This is Ian Macdonald’s take in ‘White Lines Black Magic’, one of the better essays available on the transition that occurred between the high occultism of Station to Station and the muted, otherworldly weirdness of Low, where he says it was sincere rather than performance. ‘In Berlin, the sons of real SS men sorted his head out. In Berlin, he saw neo-nazis beat up Turkish immigrants. In Berlin, low in the aftermath of heavy drugs and Hollywood glamour, he forced himself to live like an everyday person, buying his own groceries’.
Whatever the true story, there is certain truth in the statement that Bowie was no fascist. Rarified occult mythology isn’t necessary to bring about fascist ends, however, and this is what we need be most wary of in our present predicament. The fascination of mass aesthetics emanates from a corner both far more visceral and less obscure than the synergistic cocaine fantasies of rock stars. The real and performance are often inextricably intertwined. The inevitable ambiguity and fascination of the image can take many guises, and can serve a multiplicity of ideological ends. The ascendancy of Donald Trump, a brand far more than a human being, is ample demonstration of this effect. Fascism is an art movement gone horribly wrong. The form of nihilism that arises in crumbling empires may turn out to be no less virulent.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely
able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to
destroy us. Every angel is terrible. — Rainer Maria Rilke
There’s a reason we are so fascinated by monsters. They break the frame of our world, or seek to write a new one by force. Ultimately that ambiguity seeks some kind of resolution in the real. Even nihilistic irony and the aesthetic of fascism (as performed by Bowie, or for that matter Laibach, or Rammstein, or Death in June, or …) could theoretically further any end
goal, serving as vanguard for any potential ethic. Yet, that same fascination runs through many horror or Nazi movies. We might consider Inglorious Basterds or 300 as a call for critical engagement with cinema, and our own complicity in fascist ideas. Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was a form of argument, but not via syllogism.
In 1975, Susan Sontag wrote, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, a momentous essay dealing with the then-recent release of a book of Riefenstahl’s photography. This begins by exploring the whitewashing done both by Riefenstahl and those who have sought to remarket her work. One of the most incisive lines of enquiry deals with how Triumph of the Will is ostensibly not propaganda, because it lacks a narrative voice, it is Cinéma vérité. ‘Not a single scene is staged’, Riefenstahl said. ‘Everything is genuine. And there is no tendentious commentary for the simple reason that there is no commentary at all. It is history — pure history’.
Sontag goes on to observe that the ‘Triumph of the Will represents an already achieved and radical transformation of reality: history become theater. […] The document (the image) is no longer simply the record of reality; “reality” has been constructed to serve the image’.
As the argument for the moralistic evaluation of art at face value goes, first an artist may ironically attack social conventions as every artist should. Next thing you know, the fans have started an ultra-nationalist private militia, or they’re showing up with Nazi swastikas on their jackets, as was common throughout the punk scene in the 1970s. Maybe they should all be kicked out of the Republic, after all.
This paradox is implied in Nietzsche’s ‘Transformations of the Spirit’ in Thus Spake Zarathustra; only when we act outside the sphere of social convention, as ‘A wheel rolling out of its own center’, can we speak of ethics that are other than an aesthetic shell game. There is an equally strong tendency for those moved by this passage to forget the transformations which must precede it. Ethics aren’t irrelevant, but neither are they self-supporting. They fall under our responsibility to uphold. The centre of that wheel is in ourselves, not society or natural law, and we can count on neither to set things “right” of their own accord.
There remains an open question as to what ideological effects our fascination otherwise renders. Taboo politics and postures remain a performance, too, despite their inevitable re-entry into the real. The adoption of what Slavoj Žižek describes in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema as the ‘libidinal power of fascism’ on the part of acts like Rammstein or Bowie do not, in themselves, a fascist make. One can be drawn by the taboo or the carnival spectacle of libidinal power and cannot have it resolved into death camps, same as we shouldn’t expect horror fans to take up a meat cleaver.
There should always be a space for transgression in art. But it should be specifically placed within the context of art as an exorcism, a form of banishment. We leave room for cruelty in art so that we might exorcise it from our lives. This demands actual engagement; it can’t be done by rote. Our only alternative is to be consumed by the real monsters we create from our fantasies.
Nabokov once said, ‘Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade — demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out’. This wasn’t a stage that Bowie could set until the mid-1990s, as we have already seen. For the artist, the lesson here is clear: Always Be Banishing. Don’t make idols out of discarded masks.
But when it comes to audiences, who cannot just telepathically ascertain artist’s intentions, the matter is more murky. The amount of misconception that remains around works like Lolita, for instance, the transformation of Lolita from gangly, child-like and spiteful ‘nymphette’ to filmic sex symbol, the general difficulty evinced by the public in distinguishing bad faith from high art, and the literal from the figurative are not at all reassuring. The whittling away of cultural capital in the form of trained and respected authorities, touted since the late 1990s as “leveling the playing field”, may have benefits — we’ve all become artist, audience and critic — but the depth and subtlety of criticism may often be lacking.
Nevertheless, it is left to each of us to find the meaning in the noise, and to stand up for it. Who else?
