David Bowie, The Enchanter
Description
Greta Garbo, Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, Thin White Duke… How many masks has David Bowie worn and then fallen off during his life? Bowie is a chameleon character. He reinvents himself in and through the media and the artistic scenes in which he evolves. Three authors, all Anglo-Saxon academics, have taken up the protean subject that is David Bowie. They look at and reflect on his cultural and artistic importance. And set out in search of his true self beneath the masks.
They write a text in three voices, where each one takes hold of a fragment of David Bowie's personality or image, which they dissect into four parts: (1) How Bowie creates a certain type of urban, extraterrestrial, tourist and intergalactic spaces in which he exists; (2) how he subverts and renegotiates time and the temporal through themes related to resurrection, nostalgia and desire; (3) how he embodies gender, race and sexuality by opening up transgressive capacities; (4) how his work generates, reproduces and calls upon memory? And how does it allow memorization through sound, vision, allusion, remembrance and forgetting?
In a provocative light, the authors try to uncover Bowie's being. Under his alter egos that he creates, then kills to always be reborn in another form. They help us understand the importance of his influence and the strength of his attraction throughout the world and over several generations. In the end, the portrait of an enchanter, a sorcerer, emerges. This is not a linear biography but, like Bowie's own personality. It is a mosaic biography, fascinating because it is open to the different incarnations of an artist who remained iconic until the end. From his beginnings to the final album, Blackstar , David Bowie, the Enchanter intends to do justice to the considerable work of an extraordinary artist while showing the many ways in which his work enchants contemporary social and cultural life.
Preface by Bertrand Burgalat
" Bowie deserved this job.
Bowie is Raymond Loewy's MAYA King: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. This is pop music at its highest level of artistic demand and clarity. These are strange waves that sneak into the shooting galleries of fairgrounds.
Bowie is the concealment of refinement, hits sprinkled with unexpected chords. We don't notice them, everything is fluid and concise, he doesn't try to show off his sophistication: he's not narcissistic.
Bowie is a passer-by who never plunders. No one has claimed and shared his oblique influences, his admirations, his infatuations so much, without ever trying to imitate them. As if the simple fact of exposing them freed him from all mannerism. Where others slavishly copy while evading the model, Bowie transcends, always very far from the starting point. He is the anti-vampire.
Bowie is a top producer who pulls everyone up, it's the costume at the service of theatricality and not brands, it's the complete spectacle, it's a mechanical faith in the present and the future, a haunting of the past and a love of the past.
Bowie is... Good reading"
