Post-modernism is notorious for breaking the pre-established boundaries of art and literature. One could easily say that David Bowie also broke pre-established boundaries in art, fashion, and music. Like many famous canonical literary figures, Bowie was born in England. An English lady, Jane Austen, is known for her romantic fiction based in the country side. Another English woman, Virginia Woolfe, is often associated with feminist views appearing in her writing. Unlike these figures, Bowie was not known for just one thing. Bowie had ever changing genre, style, and persona.

Part of his music and works involve hyperreality. For him, part of the hyperreality was creating a whole new person, Ziggy Stardust. Some argue that Ziggy Stardust was part of performance art which is also very common in the visual art world of post-modernism. Another staple of post-modernism and maybe even an appendage to hyperreality is simulacra. Ziggy Stardust appeared to be a real person and artist but he was actually just a projection of one of the many personalities of David Bowie. There is definitely a “loss of connection to reality” because obviously, Ziggy isn’t a real person, but just David Bowie with a different wig on.

Yet another staple of postmodernism is intertextuality or the relationship and reference between texts or forms of media. For starters, David Bowie has a song called “Andy Warhol”. If that is not a reference to another art (or artist) then I don’t know what is! If anyone knows who Escher is and has seen the Labyrinth (featuring David Bowie as the main character), they will immediately associate the stair scene with Escher’s piece of the stairs. In the painting or in the scene, you don’t know where the stairs go and what’s real or not. Escher himself is also post modernist so it’s post- modern inception for a post-modernist artist to have intertextuality to another post-modernist artist. Woa.

If anyone needed a reason to study David Bowie… here’s some reasons.

I also apologize for the word vomit that is this blog post…. I just got really excited and had a lot of ideas. whoops

Dani