Even in an artistic life of oddity, irony, apparent contradictions and self-aware consistency, it still comes as a surprise that David Bowie left London – the city of his birth and where Ziggy Stardust fell to Earth – more than 40 years ago.

Aside from brief visits, he's never returned.

David Robert Jones who grew up in suburban Sundridge Park, some 15km from central London, reinvented himself as David Bowie and became a global citizen.

Although considered one of the greatest living English artists – he declined a knighthood in 2003 – Bowie has lived and worked in cities which reshaped his art, notably Philadelphia (the Young Americans album), cocaine-drenched Los Angeles in the mid- 70s and then austere Berlin.

He made videos in Australia (Let's Dance), collaborated with Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto (who created the famous striped body suit for the Aladdin Sane tour) and today lives quietly in New York.

He has been many Bowies over the past five decades and 11 days ago a whole bunch of them landed in Melbourne.

The expansive exhibition David Bowie Is – on loan from London's Victoria and Albert Museum with additional material from Bowie's Australian appearances – has come to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).

Already seen by over one million visitors in six other cities – Bowie himself attended once, anonymously – the exhibition draws from 75,000 objects Bowie had in his archives.

David Bowie Is includes dozens of iconic stage costumes; famous or private photographs from all periods of his professional life; his drawings, handwritten lyrics, collages, instruments and stage designs; posters and books; video and film footage; photo shoots for album covers and publicity . . . And more.

It has been likened to walking through the mind of David Bowie. But in the absence of the man himself.

The intellect behind this cross-discipline work is evident, but quite who David Bowie is remains the tantalising complexity.

So the clever exhibition title allows multiple interpretations.

Around the walls the phrase "David Bowie Is" gets taglines: David Bowie Is . . . A Picture of the Future; Making Himself Up; Looking For a Future That Will Never Come To Pass . . .

Add your own and something here supports it.

The room David Bowie Is Someone Else shows clips from his numerous films, including his earliest appearance in the indie two-hander from 1969, The Image.

Bowie is the mysterious boy who comes out of a painting into the real world, a prescient metaphor for how he would explore illusion and reality.

"I wanted to be well known," he says in a soundbite on the audio guide about his early years, "[but also] the instigator of new ideas".

As he became David Bowie – a name he adopted referring to a bowie knife "cutting through the lies" – he learned the importance of collaboration in extending the parameters of his art.

He reached into high and low culture, the art avant-garde, to provocateurs like Brian Eno and William S Burroughs, and the fashion stylists of old Hollywood and new Japan.

Pop culture has always been about fashion – every new musical movement demands a different set of clothes – but no one before Bowie understood how change could be a constant.

He fused art, music, design, fashion and performance in a way which re-calibrated the possible. And threw in gender manipulation and ambiguity, drag and androgyny.

Over here we see him in Michael Fish's "man dress" like some louche Pre-Raphaelite posed seductively on a chaise-longue for the cover of The Man Who Sold The World, and over there in high-waisted pants of the kind Katharine Hepburn wore.

Elsewhere he's Greta Garbo. Or a 20^th century Pierrot from the Commedia dell'Arte.

"I'm gay and have always have been gay, even when I was David Jones," he provocatively announced to Melody Maker in 1972 at the height of glam-rock androgyny.

But that sexually liberating headline-grabber was a role too as he invented characters and caricatures from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke and beyond.

Yet despite the image-making he was always self-referential.

The first single released under his "Bowie" persona with his band The Lower Third in January 1966 was Can't Help Thinking About Me.

It included the lines, "I'm on my own, I've got a long way to go . . .".

Bowie never stopped thinking about, and quoting, himself.

The cover of his recent album The Next Day was a subversive adaptation of the famous Heroes cover by Masayoshi Sukita.

In 1980's Ashes to Ashes – which referenced Major Tom of Space Oddity a decade previous, who also reappeared in Hallo Spaceboy in 1996 – he sang, "I never did anything out of the blue".

Never did, even if it took his audience by surprise.

It's telling that while many British musicians of the 60s were the product of art school holding-pens (Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, John Lennon), Mick Jagger – the most financially astute pop figure of his generation -  went to the London School of Economics.

Bowie, however, worked in an advertising agency.

He saw how image could become reality, and how to sell both across what we now call multiple platforms.

It was Bowie's good fortune his mid-60s pop career failed to ignite (seven bands in five years) and that his tellingly "self-titled" debut album – a mishmash of theatrical songs inspired by Anthony Newley, the-then current trend for Edwardian foppery and effete whimsy – should be released the same day as the Beatles' culture-changing Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

If he'd been a pop star as he desperately wanted he might have become, as with many of the Beat group era, a prisoner of the genre.

But the failure of his various teenage bands and records allowed him to walk away and explore mime and theatre (learning the art of performance), esoteric literature, film . . .

When he returned to popular music the borders between art forms and disciplines had become porous to him.

He passed through them and drew from the broadest spectrum of ideas and ideologies, but beholden to none.

He would write about what he knew – Fame with John Lennon, Fashion ("turn to the left, turn to the right"), gay culture (John, I'm Only Dancing) – but also adopted and adapted from others.

Through Brion Gysin and Burroughs he explored the cut-method of writing, a conceptual practice they'd got from Dada artist Tristan Tzara.

But Bowie took the idea of sliced configurations of phrases and words in a more technological direction.

With Ty Roberts in the 90s he invented the Verbasizer which randomly reconfigured sentences to create "a kaleidoscope of topics, meanings, nouns and verbs slamming into each other".

The results became prompts to think in new directions.

Old ideas and new technology, the analytical and intuitive sides of the brain in creative conjunction.

At the entrance to the inclusive, intelligently contextualising exhibition which explores all these facets of Bowie's creative life there's a quote by him from 1995: "All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings."

So, David Bowie Is can be as much about what you bring as what he offered in an idiosyncratic career as an outsider inside popular culture.

Everyone who knew Bowie, and others who don't, has a cute, clever or insightful aphorism about him.

The most simple in David Bowie Is comes from his longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti: "There's no one like him," he says. "He's David Bowie."

And a whole bunch of them just landed in Melbourne.

Bowie Is not the only game in town

Within a few hundred metres of Melbourne's ACMI on Federation Square the open-minded visitor to the Bowie exhibition can find art and culture of all persuasions.

Not the least at the National Gallery of Victoria International (NGV) on nearby St Kilda Rd where a comprehensive collection of works from Russia's Hermitage opens on July 31.

Masterpieces From the Hermitage; The Legacy of Catherine The Great contains big ticket paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Velazquez and others, but also examples from Catherine's collection of cameos.

Catherine the Great – not Russian but a German married to Peter The Third – was one of the great collectors who exchanged correspondence with Voltaire, employed advisors to buy work from China and Britain (England's greatest portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds has one of his few erotic pictures in the show) and bought what was then contemporary art.

This blockbuster has more than 400 works on display.

In the same gallery starting August 14 is The Horse, tracing representations of the animal from sturdy working beast through idealised noble steeds to images from China and India . . . and of course the Melbourne Cup.

Right next to the Bowie ACMI exhibition is the National Gallery of Victoria (another NGV) which showcases recent and contemporary work.

Until October 4 there's the exhibition Bunyips and Dragons: Australian Children's Book Illustrations in addition to the galley's permanent exhibits (for bigger kids and adults).

Look in on the City Gallery at nearby Melbourne Town Hall (ground floor, 110 Swanston St).

It's little more than a large room beside a tourist information centre but has a regular turn-over of interesting art and objects from the council's expansive collections.

Across the road towards Flinders St Station is the famously bohemian Nicholas Building (37 Swanston St), which contains odd specialty shops (looking for that elusive button?), a terrific vintage clothing store (RetroStar) and little independent artist-run galleries.

The smallest is CAVES (one windowless room on level 6) and it's worth going to Blindside Gallery (level 7) for the art and a different view of the city through the large windows.

There's plenty more to see in this precinct . . . and we didn't even mention laneway graffiti.

David Bowie Is at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) runs until November 1. Bookings are advised. For further information see: acmi.net.au

The writer travelled courtesy of Tourism Victoria, tourism.vic.gov.au

- Stuff