David Bowie profile: still the master of reinvention

This month Bowie will be cascading through the media landscape he helped invent. On March 11 he will release The Next Day, the new album no one saw coming, not even those who might consider themselves colleagues or even close collaborators. Twelve days later, David Bowie Is opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The exhibition – which has sold nearly 30,000 advance tickets, more than any previous show at the V&A – is an examination of the way he randomly and precisely changed as speculative pop star and culture-scanning cut-and-paste artist. The album summons up in both ghostly and antic fashion the greatest elements of Bowie’s finest 20th-century music and his compelling mental agility. It’s a riveting blend of the obvious and the cryptic, of rock’s classically comforting emotional power and its stranger, more disturbing qualities. It’s a Bowie from the present remembering a Bowie from the past imagining a Bowie from the future leading to a brand new Bowie, pretending to keep it secret, and effortlessly reaching everyone who is interested.

This album comes with defiant, poignant Dylan-esque potency late in his life. Indeed it comes much later than we might have expected that life to last back in 1972 when he was dolled-up, half-naked skin-and-bone Ziggy Stardust. He went on to become other crazed, disintegrating characters, lived in artistic exile in attractively unstable Berlin, and apparently rejected the conventional pop stardom he had until then seemed to crave, channelling abstract electronic music and insistent minimalism and part-inventing all sorts of techniques and genres for others to plunder in the way he shrewdly, showily plundered, parodied and distorted his own sources.

The title of the V&A exhibition, curated by Geoffrey Marsh and Victoria Broaches, is in fact my responsibility. David Bowie Is was the title of a series of texts, slogans, manifestos and impressions I contributed that have since been fragmented and strewn throughout the exhibition, its merchandise and marketing.

David Bowie Is highlights the fact that though the exhibition naturally goes back in time – and elegantly simplifies his dramatic progress through the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and beyond – for me everything he has done makes more sense now, as history, as theory, and as music, than it ever did back then. We can now see how much David Bowie defines what follows, not just musically but as an arranger of wider cultural attitude, setting numerous precedents for how to locate, organise and distribute information and define the self.

Along with the name of his album, The Next Day, the title of the exhibition suggests that for all the looking back, for all his own borrowing and raiding of the past, he is very much about the now, and what comes next. That is a realm as tricky and dangerous as self-conscious futurists like Bowie predicted it would be. Yet even as the “make it new” modernist mantra gets chewed up and scrambled in the pseudo-democratic, oddly cautious and fearful, babbling internet era, Bowie maintains an optimistic loyalty to the purist idea of progress, and the importance of distinctive, disobedient imaginative action.

I felt flattered and excited, as a fan for more than 40 years and writer about him for almost as long, that I was asked to be involved in the exhibition, even though at no point was it ever made clear if Bowie himself had asked for me to contribute, or if it just seemed that way, because I wanted it to be true that Bowie had requested my involvement. It was never denied or confirmed that he was pleased or not pleased with the direction the show was taking or not taking, whether he sanctioned the exhibition title and the subsequent effect it had on the shape of the show, or even if he really cared. His charm works in mysterious ways. I like to think, though, that he taught me well.

He has not curated the V&A exhibition, as much as the museum hoped he would, articulating his own questing history from the inside. But he has made available his personal archive, detailed evidence he has kept about what he has been up to since he was a teenager plotting an escape from traditional post-war suburban limitations. The fact he has kept just about everything from invoices, articles, sketches and blueprints to glitter jumpsuits and stage plans for arena tours shows how much he organised his own destiny and anticipated – willed into being – its importance.

The contents of his vast archive provide raw material for all kinds of biographical interpretation; Broackes and Marsh, with the support of a few fantasists like me, have made their selection and presented their view. The exhibition contains hundreds of clues about who and what he is. These should be satisfying to those who love Bowie because he was a mind-changing, sex-changing, species-changing glam-rock star determined to make a world-changing impression, but also to those intrigued if not entirely convinced by Bowie because he was a hyperactive, self-assertive, unashamedly pretentious performance artist with a potentially alienating, even self-indulgent, taste for the avant garde.

Whatever thoughts he himself had on the exhibition came filtered through a series of friends, intermediaries and members of his creative and business team, which somehow meant there was a greater weight to what seemed, possibly, in code, to be his views than if he had been more directly involved. There was no single entity named David Bowie coordinating or influencing proceedings, but somehow he made his presence felt, and those of us working towards producing an exhibition that was all at once an introduction, explanation and amplification of David Bowie, a fixed but still fluid, institutionally sanctioned version of his life and work, were working on instinct, guessing what he would approve of, estimating his own reasons for wanting such an exhibition, an important element in his own continuing invention of identity and presence, and then appearing to view it as a kind of irritating, embarrassing distraction.

While the exhibition presents one set of Bowies, some of them more familiar than others, some of them so exciting the true fan will hyperventilate, the album is Bowie confessing as directly as he ever does what he thinks he is. Now. He is offering his own alternative to the established, over-the-top, moonstruck and repetitive view, and makes a case that while to some extent he can be neatly fixed into place in a scholarly gallery, the story is still moving forward, and changing. Indeed, the history itself is still changing, and in his own way, he is ensuring that it turns out as he would like.

There will be the Bowie on show inside the exhibition, endlessly discussed and dissected, and simultaneously another Bowie, outside, operating independently, offering his own opinion on the exhibition by appearing to ignore it, as if all that history is something to cover up with new thinking, just as he used to move further into the future by leaping impatiently from project to project. The whole point is that he never stayed put in one place for long, and now, just as all that movement is placed inside the staid air of a museum, as if his time is all but over, he practically and symbolically reanimates that core intellectual restlessness.

He establishes a fabulous, counterintuitive absence, using the album’s art work and associated propaganda campaign, designed with long-time art director Jonathan Barnbrook, to support a sense that even as the exhibition goes out of its way reveal him, he is covering up his tracks, and resisting the dreary modern tendency for overexposure and banal reduction. He seems to retreat from the very sort of diminishing hype and hoopla he helped invent, and yet with just the raising of an eyebrow, the issuing of a suggestion, the uncanny appearance of a video, he can generate immense publicity – created, selected, and processed by others, but all based on him, and his appearance, and disappearance, his songs and, most of all, his voluptuous imagination. The world of fame has changed considerably in the past 40 years, but Bowie still knows how to order, and disorder, his part in it.

The exhibition is about the fantastic momentum he has created over the years, based on a collective response to his work that he continues to manipulate. Ultimately his contribution to the exhibition was to add unexpected fresh momentum by releasing, of all things, new music. He has timed the release of singles and an album to regenerate the reputation of

David Bowie, so that this would not be merely an exhibition romanticising a star in decline, a celebration of a grand, faded myth, the expected accessible stack of image, effect and anecdote. He re-materialised as an up-to-date version of the original transcendent, didactic star that ended up deserving such epic attention in the first place, still in control as everything slips out of control.

David Bowie is knowing what to do next.

David Bowie Is opens at the V&A, London SW7 (020 7942 2000), on March 23. The Next Day will be released by RCA on March 11. Read Neil McCormick’s review of the album.