“Canvas of Flesh”: David Bowie, Andy Warhol in Basquiat

The artistic interests and the careers of David Bowie and Andy Warhol crossed numerous times. This article sets David Bowie’s intersecting relationship across time and place with Warhol as the foundation upon which his performance as Andy Warhol in the 1996 film Basquiat (directed by Julian Schnabel) is based. My first argument is that as a musician, Bowie was influence by ‘the New York scene’ but he creatively and performatively employed over time his own metaphors for conveying the didactic. To come to play the part of Andy Warhol, draws his arc to a close of becoming recognised as the artist Andy was. I wish to draw clear parallels between the essay’s two binary relationships, between on the one hand Bowie and Warhol as real-life media self-constructions and on the other, the ways the film depicts the dyadic relationship between the art-world in New York, Basquiat and Warhol. It is against this background that David Bowie is the prime vehicle to play Andy Warhol. My specific route into this problematic is unearthing the essence of Bowie’s art-form fusions, vision and sound, which allowed him to portray in the film the dialectical tension between art and commerce, of genuine acts associated with risk and will.