David Bowie Centre Location: V&A East Storehouse, 2 Parkes Street, E20 3AX [map] Open: 10am - 6pm (until 10pm on Thursdays and Saturdays) Admission: free Two word summary: Starman's hoard Five word summary: documenting David's life and creativity Website:vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/david-bowie-centre Time to set aside: half an hour
When the V&A Storehouse opened in the Olympic Park in May last year, one corner of the 2nd floor wasn't open. The David Bowie Centre's door was finally unlocked in mid-September but, to regulate numbers, you had to book a free slot in advance. Finally on Tuesday the requirement to plan ahead was removed and now anyone can wander in and admire the creative ephemera of a boy from Brixton. Oh! You Pretty Things.
David planned ahead keeping decades of cuttings, papers, props and costumes, then bequeathing his 90,000 item archive to the V&A. They decided the best place for it was their new Storehouse at Hackney Wick with its acres of storage space, filling racks with stacks and stacks of boxes. Only 159 items made the cut for display, at least in the initial selection, but other objects can be booked in advance for your hands-on perusal in a separate lab alongside. When I walked in yesterday a woman was examining two of David's gold discs, her hands carefully covered by a pair of purple disposable gloves, and when I walked out later the frames were being packed respectfully away.
The main space is extremely tall and divided into two halves, one with shelves and the other with ten tall glass-fronted displays. Within are an eclectic selection of things to admire and things to read, notionally themed but you'd never really guess. Some of the suits are fabulous, for example an Alexander McQueen Union Jack concoction, a lurex jumpsuit and a narrow-waisted turquoise number as seen in the video for Life on Mars. I was less drawn to the photographs, perhaps because images are more easily shared and all you're seeing is a print, although they do form a considerable proportion of what's on show. But I did love the many manuscripts scribbled in David's handwriting and somehow saved through the years, including sheet music for Fame and (omg yes) the lyrics for Heroes as they were first written in black pen on a sheet of torn red graph paper.
Items are often symbolic of culture at the time, for example an electronic Stylophone used on Space Oddity (1969), an East German entry permit (1977) and a Yahoo! Internet Life Online Music Award (2000). The cabinet for the Glass Spider tour is topped off by the gold resin wings Bowie wore on stage in 1987, again not that most people staring up at them would have realised. A couple of the displays focus on artists who worked with Bowie rather than the man himself, which although emblematic of high esteem did feel overly tangential when space here is so limited. But I did love David's rejection letter from Apple Records dated 15th July 1968 ("The reason is that we don't think he is what we're looking for at the moment") and also a reference written by his father a few years earlier, perceptively noting "It is impossible to get him to relax and once having made up his mind to do something nothing will stop him in his effort to make a good job of it".
The opposite wall is stacked high with boxes, all labelled but closed. A few items are available for you to flick through in flappy plastic folders on the study table in front. High above are 21 iconic costumes hung on a looping rail, but all inside sturdy plastic wrappers so you can't see much of them, only read some text explaining what they are. And on the wall is a huge screen playing Bowie videos and live performances, which a large proportion of the visitors were watching rather than studying the actual objects. It does provide the best soundtrack you'll ever hear in an exhibition space but equally you could just sit at home and watch most of these on YouTube, plus they'd be in the proper landscape format rather than lopped-off portrait.
One thing which struck me while looking round was how a single Londoner was being celebrated on such a great scale. Imagine being deemed so important that a national museum chooses to celebrate your work with a named gallery. Imagine them taking ownership of tens of thousands of items relating to your career development. And imagine people standing reverently in front of some post-its you scrawled on for a project you never realised! Who keeps everything from their early scribblings to later artistic paperwork, who has sufficient space to stash it all away and who also has the nerve to consider the nation might think it worth saving? Personally I have enough old papers that that V&A could easily fill a cabinet with several formative childhood works, were I ever to be deemed a key national icon, but instead the contents of my spare room will all be heading down the tip after I'm gone. Such is the rarity of genuine Fame.
The visitors yesterday were a mix of older folk who experienced the magic first time around, and were maybe transformed by it, and youths too young to remember anything. It seemed a particularly popular destination for middle class family groups, say 60-something parents and 30-ish offspring, each thrilled to be pointing things out to each other. The entire crowd at the V&A Warehouse are those with culture on their mind, barely a Brexit voter amongst them, because why hang out at Westfield when you could enrich your artistic credentials up the road in E20. A sign outside the David Bowie Centre warns that visitors may be held outside if the room exceeds capacity, so this weekend may not be the most convenient time to visit. But it's well worth a look when you have the time, in both Sound and Vision, very much Hunky Dory, as Boys Keep Swinging.
