“Time. One of the most complex expressions. It is memory that made it manifest. He is suspended between past and future, without ever truly being present. Or rather, at first he seems indifferent to the present. A tension that is not humanly measurable. The word craves to be understood to have meaning. But somehow you feel that the word is not addressed to you. It seems to flow over you, holding a dialogue with something arcane, which is perhaps not mortal. This is what fascinates you, perhaps captures you. You are aware of a deeper existence, which gives you momentary comfort. There is no beginning and there is no end. Suddenly we transcend the outward appearance of meaning. When you find yourself struggling to understand a profound and absolute mystery, everything becomes transitory. Does it matter? Do I care?”
David Bowie has always had a complex relationship with the idea of memory and the passage of time. Rather than being remembered, he seemed interested in understanding how time could be traversed without turning into a trap. It is perhaps worth starting from here, ten years after his death, to avoid yet another celebratory portrait and instead try to follow the almost scientific method with which he pursued his personal challenge with temporality.
Long before the word curation became central in the cultural lexicon, Bowie had already set out his work in these terms, not limiting himself “only” to producing, but always keeping the concept of selection in the foreground. It is no coincidence that already at the beginning of the 70s, talking about himself at Melody Makerexplained that he did not feel like a great author but rather a skilled compiler. It was not a pose, nor a gesture of modesty: it was an accurate description of his way of being within the culture of his time. Bowie has always worked for connections, juxtapositions, filters. This is clearly seen every time he made his gaze explicit, as happened in 2003 with the list of his 100 favorite books published by the BBC. A real path, a constellation in which Mishima coexisted with Orwell, Kerouac with Genet, Burgess with Colin Wilson, not a simple list based on taste, nor an ideal library. Bowie therefore did not use the past as a refuge, but as still active material, something that could be put back into circulation if placed in the right place.
The same logic has somehow run through his entire musical trajectory. From the fusion of youth musical idols to create his first characters, to Kraut rock brought into British rock, to Philadelphia soul filtered through Young AmericansBowie often acted as a mediator, someone who took existing languages and shifted them in context. When in 1976 he said to Rolling Stone of not knowing where he was going, but that it would certainly never be boring, he spoke of movement, of an almost physical need not to stop, not to return to occupy the same position twice. Something very different from claiming unpredictability as an absolute value.
In this sense, time is probably the truly great theme of his work. More than identities, more than masks, more than ambiguities. Major Tom, a figure that Bowie takes up and abandons several times, is the perfect image of what he fears most: suspension, the impossibility of going forward or backward, being stuck in orbit. In the 90s, when he stated that if you feel safe while working it means you are working in the wrong place, Bowie was talking about the risk of transforming the past into a comfort zone. For this reason, each of his characters was already created as temporary. Ziggy has a closed story arc. The White Duke is destined to dissolve. There is no accumulation, there is no reassuring continuity. Career, for Bowie, is a series of passages, fractures, calculated deviations. And for the same reason, the darkest period of his career, the '80s, represent a unicum in which Bowie no longer works on that level, but simply looks at what was around him and follows it without reinventing it. Not surprisingly, that will also be the only time he will stage a totally self-celebratory tour, the Glass Spider.
Paradoxically, this constant attention to movement has never meant removing the past. On the contrary. Bowie kept everything. Objects, costumes, notes, photographs, work materials from every era. He did this systematically, almost obsessively throughout his life. Bowie Isthe exhibition inaugurated in 2013 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, was born precisely from that immense archive. He followed it personally precisely to prevent it from turning into a posthumous project, into a celebration entrusted to others. In that context, Bowie organized his own story as a journey, where each phase was placed, explained and related to the others. Something useful not to establish a definitive image, but to make the clear trajectory of its path legible. It is another act of curation, perhaps the most explicit: at that moment Bowie decided how his past should be traversed, without leaving it to mythology or nostalgia.
The same attention also emerges in the management of what would be published after his death. The posthumous releases, the reprints, the box sets in fact follow a precise editorial line, maniacally set before the end. An act in which even absence is governed and even silence has a structure. A decade earlier, Bowie had intuited with the same lucidity another issue destined to become central in our lives: that of overabundance. In the late 1990s, speaking of an Internet still in its infancy, he observed that the real problem was the Internet's similarity to life itself, because, as he told the BBC in 1999, there was “just too much of everything.” However, his response was not to subtract from that too much, but, once again, to become a filter. BowieNet, the public recommendations, the ante litteram playlists: even there Bowie moved like a selector in a world that seemed to be rapidly losing obsolete hierarchies and structures.
Also Blackstar it fits perfectly into this plan, as the last and definitive work on time. When in Lazarus sings “look up here, I'm in heaven”, Bowie doesn't ask to be remembered, nor does he offer a final consolation. Once again he leaves symbols, images and connections open, he takes up something of his past but here too as if to say that everything is connected and has a very specific temporality. Perhaps this is the point, ten years after his death: rather than asking ourselves who David Bowie was, it is worth asking ourselves what he taught us to do with the time we have. In a present that tends to repeat itself, Bowie remains out of date because he does not invite us to go back. Rather, it shows how to choose, how to order, how to cross. And how to take care of the future, without stopping looking at what made it possible.
