Show me the Ziggy-Barin-Baring knitting! A visit inside the archive of 90,000 elements of David Bowie | VIRGINIA

IIn the 1990s, David Bowie began to seriously develop an archive of his own career. It seems that something revealing about timing. This happened in the heels of the Sound + Vision of the 1990s, when Bowie announced much that he played his success live for the last time – a resolution that lasted the two years. He also followed the Tin Machine Back saga, the short -term group of the hard rock that Bowie insisted that he was simply a member, rather than the star attraction, and whose work has so far escaped the vast campaign of postthums Bowie archive outings. These include more than 25 albums and boxes during the nine years since his death, with another – the collection of 18 pieces that I cannot give everything – because of this Friday.

Having tried to escape the weight of his past with resolutely mixed results, Bowie seems to have rather resolved to come to a kind of accommodation. “I think you are absolutely right,” explains Madeleine Haddon, principal conservative of V&A in London, who is about to open the David Bowie Center for his East warehouse, taken from his archives. “And this self-reflection capacity was simply huge.”

Admittedly, judging by the large quantity of things in the center, he built his archives with an impressive eagerness. This implies everything, boxes and boxes of badges (not only official goods, but also shitty boots sold in the rear pages of magazines and by sellers outside the night) to works of art sent by fans. You wonder what the anonymous Bowie nuts which sent him a collection of small pebbles with faces drawn on them, glued to a larger pebble and labeled “rock concert”, thinks that their work of his work is displayed in a glass case to the largest design museum in the world and applied and decorative. Sometimes Bowie seems to have been quite ironic in his additions: the archives contains a t-shirt of fans so that he could visit after the release of 2013 the next day, something he had absolutely no intention of doing, the T-shirt campaign or not.

According to all the accounts, he adopted an impressive approach. In one of the screens that make up the small permanent exhibition of the center, the Styophone he played on the quirk space: Bowie apparently subjected to this when he came to Ebay. He regularly visited the archives when she was housed in an establishment of “museum quality” in New Jersey, and, says Haddon, “notes left to provide detailed information on projects, in particular some of the unrealized, he would not know. There is even a painting that tries to draw all the stages of his career. ”

The V & A would like to emphasize that the David Bowie Center is nothing like the David Bowie Blockbutting exhibition in 2013, which remains the most visited exhibition in the history of the museum. Articles on a permanent exhibition – nine cupboards on the theme, three turntables every six months, including one organized by the guests (initially, the last dinner and the Nile Rodgers) – represent only a fraction of what they have and do not aim to tell a complete story.

The real meat, however, is the accessibility of the entire archive of 90,000 articles to the public, which Haddon describes as “absolutely revolutionary”: the reservation system to see the objects of your own choice is definitely a simpler process than in one of the large archives linked to POPs in the United States.

Despite this, a large part of what is exposed is fascinating – in particular what exists in the shadow of large tickets such as the combination knitted with a Kansai Yamamoto, Bowie, went on stage during the Ziggy Stardust era. An exceptionally common letter of rejection from the Beatles Apple label tells you something about Bowie’s modest position in the late 1960s, and also something about Apple’s lamentable approach to A&R. (They also refused Crosby, Stills and Nash, Fleetwood Mac, Queen and Led Zeppelin.)

Among the projects not carried out, there is a synopsis for a film entitled Young Americans which seems to have nothing to do with the album of the same name, and rather details a story on Major Tom in imprint in a plot to simulate the landings of the Moon. Whether you see his existence as proof of the Polymathe skills of Bowie as a multidisciplinary artist or consider his plot of conspiracy theory as a proof of the quantity of cocaine that he put in 1975 depends on you. Anyway, he reveals a small advertising nugget: Major Tom’s family name was Hough.

The attention paid to the 1987 Glass Spider tour feels like the burn of the myth that has lasted since the death of Bowie. He crosses the exaggerated excesses of the tour – an extravagance of threads and light on a scale entirely different from everything that even the rollers had already tried, with an absurd series, a choreography, a reminder and a scripted dialogue – and rather focuses on the belief that his arrival in Berlin was a decisive factor in the collapse of communism.

Another unrealized project reveals that Bowie’s penchant for a large live declaration was not traveled by the critical reception of Glass Spider, despite the more stripped approach to his following tours. Fans have long known Leon, an unprecedented forerunner from his album Knotty 1995 on the outside whose songs have been circulating online for more than 20 years – but not the whole extent of Bowie’s ambitions for the project, that his notebooks reveal a sumptuous first in theater, unexpected, Mumbai. You wonder who he thought that it would pay: The Glass Spider Tour had been sponsored by Pepsi, but seven years later, after his best album for years, the Buddha of Suburbie, had barely scratched in the Top 100, who was going to fly to launch a set of deeply uncompromising songs in India?

A cynical can say that there is something of the holy relics on the profession of calling specific objects to visualize in private. But it is difficult to stay cynical when you are in the presence of objects. I asked, a little vaguely, for something from the Ziggy era and something from the 1970s. The first is covered by a costume designed by Freddie Burretti of the 1980 show, a special television recorded in the marquee which is indeed the last stand of Ziggy. Bowie nicknamed him the Angel of Death outfit. A red PVC basque decorated with ostrich feathers, it is maintained together by frantic and frantic appearance seams inside. You can take it as a recall of the speed at which Bowie’s career was playing at that time; Alternatively, you can just bung how to someone should be thin to adapt to the thing.

At the end of the 1970s, there was a Koto (a Japanese Zitor) used on the album “Heroes”, the handwritten credits for Low, and – The Real Jewel – Bowie’s own sketch for the original Low cover. An image of a boy sticking pins in a voodoo doll, she has no resemblance to the finished sleeve, but her gloom corresponds to the content of the album. Low’s musical shine can blind you that a completely reduced album is lyrically – something that could have been more obvious if it had appeared in this round.

The real David Bowie Center test could be whether it changes the perceptions of its subject. But maybe he has already done it. Bowie has spent her last decades refusing to be “intimidated by my own rear catalog”. He has never done the thing that heritage artists are used to doing: release a new album that deliberately goes back to their most loved work. He also did not capitalize on his obvious influence on Britpop, rather throwing his fate with the drum scene. He returned after six years of silence with the next day, an album housed in a sleeve that literally erases his past – an empty white square almost obscuring the hero’s cover – and bowed with a racket influenced by jazz that did not look like anything other than he had done.

He insisted on his right to face the front. “I do not know where I go from here, but I promise that it will not be boring”, because the quote that you can now buy hooded sweatshirts, catch-all bags, cups, pint glasses, refrigerator magnets and notebooks. And during all this time, he looked quietly back, amazing a large archive, the anotant, plotting a graphic that explained his past career. He is often considered as a rather distant figure, far from his audience and their expectations, the quintessence of a kind of pop star mystique made extinct by the rise of social media – and yet he was, theoretging the letters of the fans, sculptures of painted pebbles and Shonky comrades in hand from Bowie in hand. You may have been surprised by the degree and the intensity of the public mourning that followed his death, and by his subsequent altitude to a kind of secular saint. But in the light of his archives, you suspect that David Bowie would not have been surprised at all.