All grown up : Beezy quits clowing around   Edited by Charlotte Bauer

It seems the one-time clown of local art has decided not to join the circus after all. On the eve of joining up with David Bowie in New York, Beezy Bailey tells JUDITH WATT why we should take him seriously BEEZY BAILEY claims to have grown up. Gone is the sensation-seeking performance artist whose favourite ploy was to appear dressed only in a thin layer of gold spray paint blowing flames from his mouth. Gone are the days when the style of the thing seemed to matter more than the content. At the Cape Town artist's first exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, there are no performances, no fire-eating. "I've changed. I've become resolved about my work. In the past, a lot of it was inferior. But the 80s was about bullshit, and I was swept along with it. People couldn't take me seriously." Bailey expects all that to change with this exhibition. While the sniffs of his local peers might take longer to dry up than Bailey imagines, there is no doubt in superstar David Bowie's mind that in Beezy Bailey he has found a new collaborator. Bowie, who attended art school before turning his visual flair into a series of legendary pop personae, has started making art again. Last month, Bailey was part of Bowie's London Cork Street debut in an exhibition which received critical acclaim. Now the two have teamed up to make a series of paintings and a film in New York about the late Basquiat. "Bowie has always been my hero," says Bailey. "After the initial strangeness, we clicked and went straight into working together in my studio." While it's easy to speculate that the two met only because both move in privileged circles (Bailey is heir to his father Jim Bailey's fortune) and Bowie didn't exactly push himself to "click" with other artists, he did take a long look at contemporary South African art while he was here, finally choosing to work with Bailey out of respect for his art.

Artistic fantasy ... serving up Bailey's head on a plinth

Bailey is frank about the break: "It's like taking a bus then finding yourself in the back of a Rolls Royce." Reports from London say Bowie's paintings are remarkably like Bailey's - there's even a brisk trade in Bowie Bailey T-shirts. In the meantime, the 31-year-old Bailey still sees himself as being on the edge of the local art scene. "Being seen as just Jim Bailey's son has been difficult for me. I've always been an outsider, growing up with eccentric parents who've encouraged my individuality; as a result, I have a romantic and fantastical outlook on life." Reality has been painful, especially, he admits, his consistent exclusion from the circle of Young Turks at the so-called "cutting edge" of local art. "I'm not a product of Michaelis or Wits," he shrugs. The Goodman exhibition spans painting, sculpture and print. Bailey calls the small- to sized paintings his "cloud pantings" in which an abstract blob of paint develops into an image. Some are really good, combining Chagall-like fantasy with the whimsy of early Hockney. Bailey acknowledges the flimsier aspects of his artistic reputation: "In the past I would have reeled off 20 to 30 works knowing that some were not up to scratch.  This time, I've done 30 paintings over a three-month period and reworked them." Potentially quaint subject matter like cats, pigs, mermaids and mad professors are disturbing rather than cosy, and the way faces are used shows the influence of Robert Hodgins. His "co-exhibitor" at the Goodman is Joyce Ntobe' a figure of Bailey's imagination who began life as a protest against what Bailey saw as tokenism in the South African art world of the 80s To make his point, Bailey entered a major art competition as Ntobe, a tactic that succeeded when "her" work was accepted and his rejected. "Joyce is still about protest and against political correctness," he says. Bailey clearly still loves the fantasy. Joyce has steamed forward here with an installation of eight small Mother Earth figures. They're made from resin, lit from underneath and filled with objects like beads and lipsticks and Vaseline. They're beautiful. It maybe that Joyce will soon become an interior designer because these make wonderful lights. This exhibition shows a slightly freakish talent which is out of step with current local art, but which is about the freedom of experimentation. Bailey's energy is daunting. "There should be no limits to creativity," he says, adding: "I'd like to be a rock star." His detractors might wave this comment as gleeful proof of his court jester role in local art yet Bailey is so far down the road of being regarded as a "serious" artist by people like Bowie and leading American art star Julian Schnabel that there's no turning back. Although it's easy to see why he is regarded as a tinkering playboy, Bailey is deadly earnest when he says: "I can never see myself not painting," - even if his idea of success is "a chain of Beezy Bailey shops across the world". Beezy Baily and Joyce Ntobe are exhibiting at the Goodman Gallery until May 13.