MASKS: Bowie and Artists of Artifice

By James Curcio

This interdisciplinary anthology explores the complex relationships in an artist’s life between fact and fiction, presentation and existence, and critique and creation, and examines the work that ultimately results from these tensions.
 
Using a combination of critical and personal essays and interviews, MASKS presents Bowie as the key exemplifier of the concept of the 'mask', then further applies the same framework to other liminal artists and thinkers who challenged the established boundaries of the art/pop academic worlds, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Søren Kierkegaard, Yukio Mishima and Hunter S. Thompson. Featuring contributions from John Gray and Slavoj Žižek and interviews with Gary Lachman and Davide De Angelis, this book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural criticism, aesthetics and the philosophy of art; practising artists; and fans of Bowie and other artists whose work enacts experiments in identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jan 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789381092

Book preview

Masks All the Way Down

James Curcio

Art/Artifice?

The magic of the theater – to give people the illusion of life’s noblest moments and the apparition of beauty on earth – began to corrupt my heart. Or was it that I grudged being an alienated playwright? Theater, where a false blood runs in the floodlights, can perhaps move and enrich people with much more forceful and profound experiences than anything in real life.¹

— Yukio Mishima

Bowie and Mishima. Before engaging with either of these theatrical artists directly, it will serve us best to begin with the issue of their obsession, the mutual antipathy and dependence between artifice and authenticity – possibly the most rudimentary form of the mask, as a metaphor – recognizing that this claim is complicated more by the subtleties of social life than any particular demand of theory. 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’.² The same is clearly true of Mishima.

Indeed, much of Oscar Wilde’s work seems to presage both of their careers, 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.

One conclusion we can draw from it is that 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. Therein, as if in contradiction to this, 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’.³ But we know how The Picture of Dorian Grey ends. Lord Henry is quite wrong.

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’.⁴

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.⁵ 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’.⁶

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.

How can any of us ever know who we are outside the social context we are always-already engaging with? For example, go to court and refuse to address the judge as your honour. Is your contempt charge for refusing the judge’s pretence art, or life? This question is a thematic cornerstone of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, especially the first and second books: the difference between a king and a beggar, a soldier and a murderer remains in the realm of performance, a kind of farcical mummers trick that we agree to play along with, if often unconsciously. Despite being a fantasy, this theme is essentially true to life. The reality of these fictions is established through history, this is the cycle of reification; even if only through the myths that codify our societies, and the way history recapitulates itself in the present through the assumptions we have built through growing up in a society based on those narratives.

This wry passage in Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation paints a fine point on the almost thaumaturgic power of performance:

Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation. […] Simulate a robbery in a large store: how to persuade security that it is a simulated robbery?

There is no objective difference: the gestures, the signs are the same as for a real robbery, the signs do not lean to one side or another. To the established order they are always of the order of the real.

Organize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the criminal).

Demand a ransom, and make it so that the operation creates as much commotion as possible – in short, remain close to the truth, in order to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. You won’t be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack; one will actually pay you the phony ransom), in short, you will immediately find yourself once again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour any attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to the real – that is, to the established order itself, well before institutions and justice come into play.⁷

A policeman seems distinct from someone merely playing at being a policeman, though it should be evident that the only difference lies in our social constructs. Certainly, there are institutional codes of conduct, but these amount to nothing more than a structure of agreement about those beliefs, which never plays out quite to spec in the real world. Art is both a form of play, and dead serious. The same might be said of our lives, and deaths. It all becomes a matter of perspective, and of ‘framing’.⁸ Hardly anyone would consider a policeman or a judge an artist, but the role is established in more or less the same way – symbols and manner of behaviour which are imbued with social significance. We can’t unearth hard and fast dichotomies without playing artist with the truth.

We may believe in a mask, precisely because of how we are centralized by it. And who is to say otherwise, really? There is no urtext of our True Self that we can refer to for reference. This claim is provided within the context of Buddhism, and may pose some small part of Bowie’s nearly career long interest, his persistent sense that the self is transient, ‘the thinnest of membranes masking a profound emptiness’.⁹ We’ve turned natta into a general maxim, ‘no Self’, an insight backed up by recent research in cognitive science. Even authenticity can be a form of affectation.

The most startling truths can be revealed by engaging in play with masks. In his Something Like an Autobiography, famed director Akira Kurosawa wrote:

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.¹⁰

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.

In Leland de la Durantaye’s book Style Is Matter, we find the ethical dimension of Nabokov’s aesthetics presented with great sensitivity. Despite the relevance of the entirety of his argument to our line of thought here, it bears mentioning that Nabokov’s expressed view is strictly opposed to those of our subjects – he hid within the particulars, and was allergic to symbol and allegory, whereas Bowie and Mishima hid in the myth, seeming to regard even the particulars of their own lives as the building blocks for a grand deception. All that bears scrutiny towards our present subject regarding the equivalence of art and reality through the farce of artifices present in either milieu, whether encountered in a theatre or in front of an iPhone. And yet Nabokov’s reflection seems quite to my point, where he said, ‘The reality of art? It is an artificial, a created reality that is only reality within the novel’.¹¹

Then we get his following line, and it turns everything on its head. ‘I do not believe in such a thing as objective reality’. Indeed, it would seem that ‘Nabokov’s greatest problem with the expression art for art’s sake was that it was not of his own crafting’.¹²

The artifice of art concerned Plato deeply, as a pretence that leads people astray from the search for reality. It challenged the very essentialist forms on which his philosophy was based, and indeed, any serious aesthetic theory founded in an endless recursion of masks must be a form of nominalism. Such things bother philosophers more often than artists, historically.

Most people just don’t want to be called pretentious. Caught in the act. Dan Fox explores the challenging issues that arise between pretence and authenticity, including those of class and culture, in critical detail in his brief but poignant Pretentiousness: Why It Matters. He states, ‘authenticity is a form of authority; a legitimacy of speech […] It promises a ticket to the truth’.¹³ Authenticity relies on a form of intuition, a feeling about a feeling, requiring not reality but rather an incongruence, a disparity between how someone actually is and how we see them. Fox continues, ‘the original meaning of the word prestige was illusion or conjuring trick, from the Latin praestigium – a delusion’. Pretence, pretending to be what you may not be, is something most artists embrace, whether they realize or not.

An authentic ‘ticket to the truth’ may not be the truth. Though we’re constrained to our interpretation, we can at least imagine an objective record, a canister of film, sitting unwatched in the cabinet.

The power of performance depends on a form of faith, mixed with a sense of unsettlement because of the artifice that distinguishes it from the mundane. The carnivalesque is more contagious; the philosophical purity of true cinéma vérité is often paid for with our boredom and confusion later. All appearances, whether on a computer screen or before our eyes, maintain some semblance of authenticity, even of reality. It is left to us to determine.

This shouldn’t be news to performing artists, though we still seem surprised when we see the toll it can take. Playing the real you up on that stage is just another dangerous proposition for anyone who must simultaneously identify themselves with all the pressures that will be heaped on the Icarus gambit of risking an artistic career – cultural, psychological, financial, to name just a few.

At the same time, the mask can also turn into a ward, even a kind of salvation against the trap of fame, if not the prying eyes of the paparazzi. The bad reviews aren’t about you, they’re about the artist you play on TV.

Many artists shrink from the pressures of this doubling – the history of modern art presents many case studies of just this, artists who attempt to remove themselves to create something pure. They try to erase themselves from their work entirely, manifesting a need to vanish that is often as obsessive as the need for attention amongst those who centre themselves in their work. That vacuity of ego investment can become a sort of paradoxical ever-presence. Continuing to bear witness, the artist hopes to become a camera, a subject devoid of identity or judgement. This can produce interesting results, but precisely because of their human futility.

Stylistic variations notwithstanding, the simplification of art is a key component of its artifice, and also the key to its arresting power, just as the simplification found in science or mathematics is essentially a heuristic approach applied to make sense of apparent chaos – only that which is essential to make the model (a synthetic mask of reality) produce results analogous to the real. The same seems to be true of all our senses, in their apparent optimization for efficiency over accuracy. No matter how layered or complicated, much is always omitted in the construction of an appealing or useful narrative.

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.¹⁴ 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’.¹⁵ 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’.¹⁶

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’.¹⁷

True originality would be a form of madness.

***

Most of us would insist to a rich interior life that is more than our surface presentation in the world. But no one else is ever privy to that life. For each other, we are always a sort of mask. This is the first work of fiction, to grant mimesis, the similitude of reality. Self-awareness is some variety of a maintained illusion, a simulation run by the brain in which we are a being within a world. When we look in a mirror, it is only through our image in that mirror that we see ourselves, but we do not generally therefore think that projected image is us. Folklore of various sorts centre around this inversion – mirror images that come to life, vampires unable to cast a reflection, the primitive belief that cameras will capture our soul.

The very motive force of the mask depends on this illusion, and so mimesis is tantamount to art.¹⁸ James Ley’s essay ‘The Tyranny of the Literal’ ¹⁹ deals with this through the lens of several different writers, for instance in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello:

We used to believe that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water’, there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them. But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken irreparably, it seems. […] There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts. The bottom has dropped out.²⁰

Masks create an uncanny valley, since we are so deeply primed to recognize and respond to faces. Their effect is often surreal, especially when used in a ritualized art performance like Noh. The mask is distinguished not by concealing, but by revealing a single, static image. A lie that tells the truth. How much more uncomfortable is it to realize there is no way to be in public and not wear one?

They transform an organ that is arguably identical to our identity. This discomfort underscores a fascinating passage in Kobe Abe’s The Face of Another:

‘But it isn’t particularly strange to respect content more than appearance, is it?’

‘Do you mean respecting contents that have no container? I have no faith in that. As far as I’m concerned I firmly believe that man’s soul is housed in his skin’.

‘Metaphorically speaking, of course ...’

‘It’s no metaphor ...’, he continued soothingly, but in a conclusive tone.

‘Man’s soul is in his skin. I believe that to the letter’.²¹

Identity is tattooed on emptiness; a series of potentials, variations on a theme. Many iterations, simulacra blindly wandering in an orbit around the black sun, that locus of the unseen and unheard, the subconscious of surrealists and land of the dead, Burrough’s ‘Western Lands’. But what gods (and demons), we can invent from our reflections.

Stiff On My Legend

I always had a repulsive sort of need to be something more than human. I felt very very puny as a human. I thought, ‘Fuck that. I want to be a superman’.²²

— David Bowie

The disposition of an artist factors into their work even if audience participation plays an equally important role, as interpretation is a part of creation. This disposition is uniquely matched to the circumstances an artist arises within, as we say, they were men of their times. Mishima and Bowie were both reactive, reacting against the times that came before, with a yearning aesthetic vision that was at once both archaic and futurist. They challenged comfortable illusions, labels and definitions.

The fact that they were men might be indicative of the sexist selection bias in our halls of artistic and philosophical heroes, but in their specific case there is another layer: the role in their work of gender ambiguity, their bisexuality, at times avowed and others disavowed, and their presentation of masculinity as a performance. There’s an implicit support in their presentation – that is, within the body of their work – of Judith Butler’s general thesis that gender is performative, which contrary to popular opinion does not mean it is without basis in reality. (‘Performative’ isn’t pejorative, it is merely a condition of social reality.)

As William T. Vollman examines in his book Kissing the Mask, the ambivalence of masks is the ambivalence of gender. He explores this first through Noh, observing in essence that it is no more clear, ultimately, what makes a man wearing a wooden mask a woman, than what ultimately makes a woman a woman. Despite his expressed desire to find an essential feminine nature, all he manages to come up with are variations of performance, and a sense of mystery. That is because there is no essential feminine nature. History and experience are what reify those performances, rather than some universal arbiter, or essence.

The double is one of these masks, in the performative sense, but it also became a public identity, Foucault’s ‘author-function’.²³ There is a difference between Yukio Mishima and Kimitake Hiroaka, David Bowie and David Jones. They are not merely a pen name or pseudonym, nor are they a representational copy of an original. Instead, they are simulacra that dwell in a kind of collective vision. They wore fiction suits that at once served as deflection and locus for attention. This has real life repercussions and ramifications, as we will see.

Their narrative arcs could not have been more different, though it is evident that there was a striking common element in the nature of their fixations. Bowie found a sort of stalemate, whereas Mishima had absolutely no desire to do so. To the contrary, enacting this fantasy death in reality was the only way he knew how to justify his life. In a 1966 issue of Life, Mishima’s then-translator John Nathan wrote, ‘Reading a Mishima novel can be like going to an exhibition of the world’s most lavish and ornate picture frames’. The implication – that it was an elaborate frame around nothing – did not sit well with Mishima, and it drove a wedge between them. But the same might be said of Bowie’s best work.

***

Their deaths serve as a narrative capstone, from which we can derive retroactive meaning, and so it seems sensible to begin with their ends. From teleology emerges mythology.

On 25 November 1970, Yukio Mishima woke for the last time. Along with four members of the Tatenokai, an ultranationalist corps he’d founded numbering a hundred or so men, he prepared for a coup d’etat. This bloody day has been the subject of much speculation in the years since, generally running in four directions: the literary (the culmination of his lifelong mythology), the psychological (his childhood reads like the backstory for a serial killer), the political (that it was as they said, an attempted coup first and foremost) and the personal (that it was some sort of obscured lover’s suicide).

The first explanation is at once the most appealing, and the most likely to be subject to his own Romantic justifications. Writing was quite simply how he entered the world, although something in him seemed to resent it. He desperately wanted to realize his mask in the flesh. This process started even before Mishima’s semi-autobiographical Confessions of a Mask. Though there will always be debate about what ultimately caused his radicalization, there is little ambiguity about how deeply death was a part of his lifelong self-mythologization. ‘I want to make a poem of my life’,²⁴ he once said, and indeed, the madness and repeated failures surrounding his suicide maintained a kind of literary perfection. His final act was in many ways prefigured within the artful lie, as he wrote, ‘What people regarded as a pose on my part was actually an expression of my need to assert my own true nature and […] it was precisely what people regarded as my true self which was a masquerade. It was this unwilling masquerade that made me say: Let’s play war’.²⁵ As we will later see, splitting this into opposed explanations may be misleading. It was in some measure all four at once, and in this, I ultimately intend to underscore how central aesthetics are in our personal and political lives.

Nearly fifty years after Mishima’s suicide, David Bowie died of liver cancer. He left us all with the questions he came in with, refined and perfected through a full career. Or we could say that his chief preoccupations stayed with him to the end. A manner of compulsion dominates the video for one of Bowie’s final performances: ‘Oh, I’ll be free – ain’t that just like me?’ he sings on ‘Lazarus’, yet shortly after delivering that line, he rushes to connect and scribble down those last few ideas, before his body is consigned to the dustbin forever.

Then, ‘I can’t give everything away’, on the final track, as if in apology for his inability to go on performing Bowie for us forever, for the need to keep some inner experience to himself. Similarly, the ambivalence of ‘Lazarus’ – freedom from the confinement of performance, some ‘drama that can’t be stolen’, contrasting the desperate need for the show to go on – makes sense in the context he’s provided. The descriptions he’s given over the years of his creative process makes it seem more like midwifery at gunpoint. For example, in conversation with Charlie Rose in 1998, he extemporized:

For me, to be quite frank, it’s finishing it so that I can get on to something else. It’s getting through it – it’s the process – there’s something in it, that it just turns me to jelly, my heart, my mind just become […] I can’t explain it. It’s a very strange feeling. It’s not particularly pleasant, either. I can’t really say that I enjoy music or painting […] I mean it’s not like sex or something, which you can kind of really enjoy!²⁶

Yet even his death was grist for this mill, a means to further immortalize his art in an eight-track swan song that in many ways encapsulated the arc of his prolific career. He continued working on Blackstar and the Musical production of Lazarus through the pain of illness, and managed to keep it secret from all but his closest confidants. It is also typical of his myth-making that the meaning of that work should have a proper frame only retroactively, birthing the Minotaur after already having constructed his Labyrinth.

In 1974, he had told an interviewer, ‘I know that one day a big artist is going to get killed onstage, and I know that we’re going to go very big. And I keep thinking: it’s bound to be me’.²⁷ And two years later to Playboy, he responded to a question about his supposed ‘obsession’ with being assassinated on stage, by saying, ‘I’ve now decided that my death should be very precious. I really want to use it. I’d like my death to be as interesting as my life has been and will be’.²⁸

Indeed, the power of retroactive narratives is an important component of the magic perpetuated by much of his work. ‘I’m already five years older, I’m already in my grave’, he sang on ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’ in 1995, an overt reference to Ziggy Stardust’s memento mori from decades before, ‘We’ve got five years, that’s all we’ve got’.

Bowie’s lyrics don’t necessarily tell us his inner feelings. However, the middle section of the title track ‘Blackstar’ contains an interesting back and forth that we might take as dialogue between dæmon and artist, a tug-of-war between devil and man, immortal stardom and the hapless mortal who can never for long fill those shoes – to affect a certain spooky action at a distance with our face and voice, a magic trick. Bowie may want to go on performing forever, but it’s quite likely David Jones often yearned for a little peace and quiet. An artist doesn’t truly become art until they can get out of the way.

You’re a flash in the pan

I’m the great ‘I Am’²⁹

All-in-all, Bowie was a master at using a superficial veneer of self-referential allusion to signify boundless depth, so we can only be absolutely certain of our uncertainty. His doubles became Russian nesting dolls, Aladdin Sane atop Ziggy atop Bowie. Many have wondered where David Jones fit into that hierarchy. This, too, was a part of his style. According to Brian Eno, ‘Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me’. Hugo Wilcken expounds on this idea in his book Low, dealing with the album by the same title, ‘Lazarus-like, modernism seemed to inject itself into popular culture years after its demise in the high cultures of art, literature and music. […] With pop, postmodernism always came before modernism. Pop culture really didn’t need Andy Warhol to make it postmodern’.³⁰

This pretence of profundity, his dandy suit, is also reminiscent of one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms that is generally read as amongst his most misogynistic, ‘MASKS. There are women who, wherever one examines them, have no inside, but are mere masks’³¹ and, ‘Man thinks woman profound – why? Because he can never fathom her depths. Woman is not even shallow’.³² It is an ironic twist that both of these male artists should be so influenced by Nietzsche at various points in their career, and yet also be the embodiment of Nietzsche’s assertion, that the sense of depth created by their surface hides an absence of substance.

In effect, Bowie and Mishima both recognized that if you wear a fiction long enough, it begins to wear you. Nietzsche was also well aware of this, and he also seemed unable to distinguish between self-mythologization and reality, as will be explored more closely in Chapter 7, ‘The Great Contrarians’.

No matter how we conceal ourselves from an audience, even that absence gives us away. This is the basic psychoanalytic insight: a second birth is given to whatever is repressed, even if the fictionalization process does far more than merely obfuscate our desires or fears. In a 1983 issue of Musician, Bowie said:

As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself. I continued designing characters with their own complete personalities and environments. I put them into interviews with me! Rather than be me – which must be incredibly boring to anyone – I’d take Ziggy in, or Aladdin Sane or The Thin White Duke. It was a very strange thing to do.³³

These worn fictions arise from us, our personal lives and conflicts. Enshrining it within the mise-en-scène of art seems to free us from all responsibility, like an inversion of Baudrillard’s example in the previous section: a bank robber who claims it was all for their art project when the police take them in to the station. A bank robber claiming to be an artist strikes us as more absurd than an art project that gets misinterpreted as a real heist, but is it really? When we consider that a reality TV host became the president of the United States in 2016, this absurdity may seem a bit forced.

On this subject, again from Wilcken’s coverage of Low, we get a tantalizingly brief passage that almost appears to demand the extended treatment of this chapter:

The rock celebrity world in particular is one of myth and fantasy […] There aren’t the same social brakes as in the