The artist who fell to Earth - interview with singer David Bowie - Interview

At the time of his fiftieth birthday, David Bowie's revving up for the next century

David Bowie's art shoots off simultaneously in many diverse directions. He is an artist, composer, rock musician, singer, dancer, performer . . . and that's just the beginning. With a panoply of new projects, including a new album out this month, Earthling, and a fiftieth-birthday bash in early January that sounds heavenly, David Bowie is taking the idea of the postmodern Renaissance man one step further into the twenty-first century.

INGRID SISCHY: How could we do a "wanted" issue without you? You, who so passionately wants to be an artist the way you want to be one and not the way anybody else wants you to be. Something must be working. You're very wanted these days. Tell us about a few of the things that are coming up.

DAVID BOWIE: On February 11, I am releasing a new album, Earthling. And both to promote it and to celebrate my own stately age, I'm doing a show at Madison Square Garden in January. As fortune would have it, there's a Rangers game on the eighth, which I think is a good leveler It settles me into having dinner with the family. And then I get to have my sort of bash on the ninth. What I've concocted isn't a retrospective. That's the antithesis of everything I have ever wanted to do. So I've just worked with the kinds of acts I really believe in - people who have some integral connection to my past, people who I was once influenced by, or they might have been influenced by me to a certain extent, or we have worked together. I did not want to do away with the past but inform the present with aspects of the past, rather than make it a historical voyage. So the guests are going to be people like Frank Black who was in the Pixies, the Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth, Robert Smith from the Cure, and Lou Reed - that nature of performer And there will be a lot of contributions from the artist Tony Oursler. Plus I'm resurrecting a lot of the footage I used, in a very different context, with the Sound + Vision tour Stuff that was put together by Edouard Lock from [the dance company] La La La, Human Steps. A lot of it features Louise LeCavalier, who's the lead dancer. We're using a huge forty-foot screen. The images are on film, not video, so the quality is just astounding. We're backing the action up to the screen so you have the feeling that there is no spatial difference between the screen's image and the artist performing. It's a stupendous piece of theater. Anyway, that's just to give you an idea of the kinds of things that we'll be doing.

IS: You're working on a slew of other things, too, aren't you?

DB: Oh Lord, what am I doing? [pauses] I worked with Philip Glass on the "Heroes" symphony recently, and he's asked me to write the next symphony with him which will be brand new. And Twyla Tharp is now doing it as a ballet that comes to town [this month]. I'm working on formatting the spring and summer tour, incorporating songs from this new album, Earthling, and the previous album, Outside. I'm putting together an exhibition [of my art work] for Basel for this spring. I'm supposed to be putting together an installation for the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City for late fall of next year as well as a show for the Marconi Gallery in Milan. And I've been asked by Bill T. Jones to write a piece for him.

IS: Aren't you also doing something with Robert Wilson?

DB: Oh yes. The Salzburg Festival commissioned [my album] Outside as a piece for their year 2000 festival because they know it will eventually be a cycle of four or five albums. Robert's going to be putting this whole thing together as a piece of musical theater - I don't know what else to call it - with Brian Eno and myself.

IS: You always have major energy. But it feels like there's this extra boost right now. Plus what's interesting is that it feels like you're showing all your different sides at once, all in different ways. The last time we spoke for the magazine, you and I spoke about the fact that fragmentation is a part of the contemporary condition. Yet artists are expected to cut out so many parts of themselves that show this. What's been dogged about you is your refusal to do that. Why?

DB: I grew up in an extremely dysfunctional family. There's an awful lot of mental illness in my family, spanning two or three generations. Fortunately, somehow or other, I've been able to harness that experience in the kind of work that I've chosen to do. In fact, having a way of expressing myself has kept me sane. Sure, I've done serious mutilation in the past, emotionally and spiritually - albeit briefly. But it made me realize how much I need to encompass, both in the conventional and the unconventional, the orthodox and the unorthodox sense, in my diet of life. What I'm good at doing, and what I'm best at doing, and what I understand and feel a part of and comfortable with is - a world of synthesis. I synthesize all my enthusiasms of a given moment. The things that excite me about society and how it works and how it's structured become the threads of what I do for my work. I'm not just interested in one aspect of how we express ourselves. I like the visual arts, I like theater, film, music, and dance. All those things really become part of the palette for me. It's not about original thinking. For me, the idea of the original thought is old-fashioned. Original thought shouldn't be an ambition. It shouldn't be the goal. It should be something that comes about by doing one's work. I let others decide how much of what I do is an original thought. As an artist, I have to assume that the things that excite me are going to excite somebody else and that the audience will become larger or smaller depending on the accessibility of the thing that's inspired me.