Leigh Bowery.

LEIGH BOWERY DIDN'T LIVE LONG ENOUGH to become famous in America. But before he died of AIDS-related complications in 1994, the outrageous performance artist and costume designer cut a unique swath through London's post-punk scene. Now Americans can sample his life and art thanks to Leigh Bowery, a sumptuous new collection of photographs and personal recollections from such acquaintances as Boy George, Hilton Als, and Lucian Freud. The following essay, by Richard Martin of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, offers a glimpse of Bowery's anarchic legacy.

Leigh Bowery (1959-1994) was gargantuan and grotesque. No garden-variety drag queen channeling or emulating Liza or Barbra, he was his own demonic diva. Even drag queen is too easy a description for this visual artist of costume, body, identity, and movement, the touchstones of avant-garde 1980s art. Bowery's humongous belly protruded even from upholstered costumes; his shrieking leather outfit with prosthetic leg was a monstrosity; and later his mountainous and pocked flesh became fields of paint for artist Lucian Freud. Yet for all this physical mass, Bowery was a visual artist of self-transfiguration, a Cindy Sherman or a Yasumasa Morimura for club stages. The one model for Bowery's exceptional art is Divine, whose manic theatricality, scatology, and art implications Bowery admired.

The Australian-born Bowery trained as a fashion designer and used those skills in costuming but increasingly became known for creating performance art in London clubs, especially the legendary Taboo of the 1980s, and also for the stage and the art world. Bowery made himself hideous and mesmerizing. His art was classic commedia dell'arte, invented, spontaneous, and affronting. For conceptual artists, he was a Milton Berle among theorists and as physically menacing as a freak show or sideshow among philosophers. For performers seeking audiences he was the costumer for choreographer Michael Clark's exquisite dances who finally overwhelmed all elegance by his own stampeding, mannered, egotistic presence. He could not keep himself from being the center of attention: Everyone else on the stage was swept aside by the obsessive energy Bowery put into performance. He would urinate or defecate onstage just to capture our attention. There was nothing ingratiating about this artist; he wasn't setting out to please us with a gender illusion, instead preferring to confuse all sensibilities with a freakish, sometimes humiliating gender fuck made even more threatening by Bowery's shamanistic infliction of pain on himself: His costumes, cheek piercing, and preshow enemas made performance extremism not an illusion but a painful reality.

Bowery was never politically correct. His racist and sexist acts were his downfall with Clark; his corsetry and masks with bulging flesh could always seem insensitive; and his 1993 Wigstock performance, as vividly recounted by Hilton Als, cast the pall of a bloody birth scene in the midst of cavorting drag queens. He was always odd freak out.

Excessive and aberrational, one of the most vivid image makers of our time, Bowery remains an enigma. Is his contribution "art," a post-Dada with lots of scatology, or is he one of those transgressive, hard-to-like popular-culture figures who lives only in cult recognition, later to achieve vast acceptance for representing the trenchant issues of the time? Even with the wonderful compendium of images contained in Leigh Bowery, one cannot be sure whether it's art or life that propels this energetic work into our susceptible hearts and our vulnerable bodies. Aghast at what first appears to be ugly and crude, we are finally overwhelmed by Bowery's innate beauty and his ability, despite our superficial first impressions, to make us look for beauty.

Martin is curator of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.