L'enchanteur - Portrait d'une icône sous ses masques

Description

Tour à tour Greta Garbo, Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, Thin white Duke… How many masks did David Bowie wear and then shed throughout his life? Bowie is a chameleon character, who reinvents himself in and through the media and artistic scenes in which he evolves. Three authors, all Anglo-Saxon academics, have taken up the multifaceted subject that is David Bowie, examining and reflecting on his cultural and artistic significance, searching for his true self beneath the masks.
They write a text in three voices, where each takes hold of a fragment of David Bowie's personality or image, which they dissect in four parts: (1) How Bowie creates a certain type of spaces – urban, extraterrestrial, tourist, and intergalactic – 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 transgressive capacities; (4) how his work generates, reproduces, and calls forth memory and allows memorization through sound, vision, allusion, memory, and forgetfulness. Under provocative lighting, the authors attempt to uncover Bowie’s being beneath the alter egos he creates, then kills to be reborn in another form. They help us understand the importance of his influence and the strength of his attraction worldwide and across generations. In the end, the portrait of an enchanter, a sorcerer, emerges. This is not a linear biography but, like Bowie’s very personality, 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 ultimate album, Blackstar, David Bowie, the enchanter, seeks 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.
Three authors, all Anglo-Saxon academics, have taken up the multifaceted subject that is David Bowie, examining and reflecting on his cultural and artistic significance, searching for his true self beneath the masks.
Includes a 540-page book with several unpublished photos.