Cultural philosopher Ad Verbrugge has never had very much with David Bowie. He told this at the beginning of his lecture, Friday night 18 December, as a special attraction of the David Bowie Late Night at the Groninger Museum. That was the first disappointment for the assembled fans. More were to follow. For Ad Verbrugge had not quite prepared for his performance. He had brought with him the text of a two-hour lecture for young students of cultural philosophy at the VU, a text that was mainly about Bob Dylan and his relationship to the history of art and literature. And because both names have a D and a B in them, he had adapted it a bit to make it also about David Bowie. So he kept mentioning David Bowie whenever he mentioned Bob Dylan. And in a very pastor-like way, he quoted a single excerpt from Bowie's song 'Time'.
As if it were a psalm.
That, of course, was his first mistake: that he thought he could use a text for 20-year-old students in front of an audience of hardcore David Bowie fans, most of whom were there especially for the David Bowie Late Night had travelled to Groningen. It takes a lot of nerve to tell that audience something new, and it takes even more nerve to give them a lecture, even though Dutch Bowie fans are usually more educated than his supporters in England, where Bowie has been a folk hero for much longer. Everyone who had come to Groningen for Late Night was actually secretly hoping for something secret, something special, which, after all, also had to be paid considerably more than ordinary daytime exhibition tickets. Perhaps He would appear in person.
https://youtu.be/ROmdX7hXDdE
But no way. We had to make do with Ad Verbrugge telling us that he only 'believed' in Bowie during the 1980s. To an audience of real fans, you then belong to the would-be pop kids who liked Let's Dance, but for whom 1. Outside or Scary Monsters are a touch too intense. Anyway: after more than an hour of talking, during which he kept announcing he was going to talk about Bowie, but didn't, more than half of the audience called it a day, clocked the certainly not unpleasant Bowie Cocktail and plunged into the 'Bowie is' expo. That made up for the disappointment.
Anyone who has seen the original in London's Victoria and Albert Museum will be a little disappointed by the display in Groningen. That museum lacks the large halls and height of that London art temple. The lack of space also means that things are placed more on top of each other, that some parts are treated very briefly, but who cares. The effect of the expo remains overwhelming.
It is quite amazing how the curators of the exhibition on this greatest post-war rock star have managed to lift the story from a collection of fan club articles to a grand artist's portrait. After two rooms, you realise that you are not walking through the life of a pop star, but that you are experiencing how a rock star is admitted to the art universe usually reserved only for people who wielded brush or chisel. Picasso, Matisse or Rodin, and now so David Bowie, who finally gets the recognition as an artist who has influenced almost all art disciplines.
The final room of the expo is an orgasmic highlight. Surrounded by massive screens, you see all of Bowie's personas lit up between metre-high videos of live performances. That hall, in the ridge of the Groninger Museum, is magnificent, but here the scale does have a bit of an effect: the surface feels like only a quarter of the hall in London, and then it works less. The love was no less. The music equally beautiful, the mystery still untouched.
The way Bowie himself shaped his career is the most important factor in the reverence he commands from more people than just his fans. Among true fans, that reverence borders on the religious. There are those who are seriously mindful that the boy from Brixton is actually from another planet. Wonder if these Bowie's Witnesses will one day, in a century or two, be part of a new world religion. And maybe by then they will have elevated that lecture by Ad Verbrugge, with its ecclesiastical reverberations, into an apocryphal testament. Ad would surely love it.
Things can, in short, get weird.
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