Simon Critchley will present his book Bowie published in Russian as part of the joint publishing program of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and Ad Marginem Press. After the lecture, the documentary David Bowie: Five Years will be shown.
Published several years before Bowie’s death, Simon Critchley’s collection of essays analyzing his lyrics portrays the pop star as a melancholic hermit, who ‘disciplined himself into becoming a <…> massively creative nothing that could assume new faces, generate new illusions, and create new forms.’
The fluid, discrete, and fragile quality of human identity is one of the first discoveries Simon Critchley made at the age of twelve when he saw Bowie perform Starman on one of Britain’s most popular shows Top of the Pops. ‘…he occupied a variety of identities,’ Critchley remembers. ‘His brilliance was to become someone else for the length of a song, sometimes for a whole album, or even a tour.’ To the youth of 1970s English suburbia, Bowie’s utopia of constant transformation was an antidote to everything that made the everyday of their parents. Instead of watching football, TV dramas, and reading tabloids, the new generation of ‘space boys and girls’ was reading sci-fi novels, stealing Ziggy Stardust records from music shops (as did Critchley), and dreaming of brave new worlds to come. Bowie, Critchley writes, ‘freed them to become some other kind of self, something freer, more queer, more honest, more open, and more exciting.’
After the lecture, the documentary David Bowie: Five Years will be shown. Boasting rare archive footage and recent recordings by Bowie’s collaborators, this BBC documentary focuses on the most important years in Bowie’s career.
Francis Whately’s documentary is centered on five key episodes in what many consider to be the best years of David Bowie’s career—the period from 1971 to 1983. With previously unseen footage from French and German television and BBC archives, the film features interviews with Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Nile Rogers, and other influential musicians of the 1970s and 1980s who collaborated with Bowie on various projects.
