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2007 Summer

Linder: Radical Anatomy

Thomas Evans

Linder

Star Series No.1: Pink Supreme

2007

Photomontage

10 15/16 x 8 1/4˝

Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art

Among the varieties of figurative collage in the early 20th century we can trace two tendencies: the fantastical, typified by the hallucinatory scenarios of Max Ernst, and the political, of which the satirical photomon­tages of Dadaist John Heartfield would be one instance. In his collage novel of 1934, Une Semaine de Bonté, Ernst recomposed Victorian engravings to devise mutant humans, such as women with bird heads, enacting bizarre dream trysts in polite drawing rooms. Monteurs like Heartfield sensed new opportunities for both satire and propaganda in the medium, and worked primarily with photography—both found imagery and their own photographs—to produce witty gags, such as Heartfield’s classic photomontage of Hitler seeming to salute but actually receiving a bribe from a banker (“millions stand behind me!”). The Surrealist writer Louis Aragon was distinguishing between realist and surrealist modes as early as 1923, saying of Ernst that “collage with him becomes a purely poetic procedure.”

British artist Linder does not make such a distinction. She unites fantastical and political tendencies in her collages, and has continually adapted them, over the course of a thirty-year career, to her own specific concerns. And like the Berlin Dadaists (or the Russian Construc­tivists, who, from their in­ception in 1921, described themselves as engineers, and who attempted, with varying success, to merge their labor with industrial design), she has viewed the ‘artist’ moniker with indifference: “my thought was to follow faithfully in the footsteps of George Grosz, John Heartfield, et al, who renounced the title of artist and preferred to describe themselves as as­semblers and engineers.”

The bulk of Linder’s photomontages use back­drops culled from late 1970s furnishing cata­logues, environments that contrast awkwardly in their pristine neutrality with the nude hybridized creatures that inhabit them. Heads and sexual organs are replaced, not with fanciful Max Ernst bird heads, but with domestic appliances such as TVs, vacuum cleaners, cookers etc., whose oversaturated catalogue color lends the mod­els’ unerotic bodies a distinct whiff of the morgue (this projection of women’s bodies as meat was underlined in a 1982 Ludus appear­ance at Manchester’s Hacienda club, when Linder performed in a ‘meat dress’—dis­carded chicken sewn onto layers of black net­ting—and sported a rubber dildo, alarming the usually unflappable clientele). Linder’s brisk, matter-of-fact approach lends an unapologet­ic clarity to these works, and no superfluous visual information softens their impact. Her 2004 assemblages, from The Lives of Wom­en Dreaming series in which various types of 1920s women’s garments sprout fringes of hair, are constructed with the same pungent economy of means, and it’s nice to note in this context that Linder uses a surgeon’s scal­pel rather than scissors to extract her images a tool well-suited to her conceptual incisiveness.

Collage has fre­quently provided refuge for individuals oper­ating outside the routine channels of art—those whose studios are the kitchen table, so to speak—but the variety of Linder’s proj­ects has also helped to keep the toxic ‘art­ist’ tag at bay. She has been an editor (of the punk magazine The Secret Public, with Jon Savage), musician (as singer with Ludus), photographer, graphic designer, and even bodybuilder. But from its early stimulus in the feminist discourses of the Seventies and the vigor of Manchester’s punk scene, Linder’s work has remained conceptually consistent in its efforts to overturn prejudicial codes and habits of gender performance, using, as she puts it, “the tools of seduction and glamour to produce a different kind of confrontation.”

British punk catalyzed and unleashed a joyously defiant feminism for several of Linder’s contemporaries, and one can point to similar refusals of constrictive sanitation and gender assignation in songs by Au Pairs, The Raincoats, The Slits and X-Ray Spex (“you may get to touch her / if your gloves are sterilized” etc.) By 1981, three years after her iconic 1977 cover for the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict hit the racks, Linder had begun to ap­ply the props of germ-free domesticity to her own body, and was photographed wrapped in bandages and clingfilm by the Swiss photographer Birrer for SheShe, a booklet that accompanied the Ludus cassette Pick­pocket. More recently her defiant disposition has drawn her to Ann Lee, the 18th-century Shaker pioneer whom Linder cast as a char­acter in her extended performance piece The Working Class Goes to Paradise, and to more myth-laden treatments of androgyny and sexual politics. This development in her concerns has occurred alongside a return to photomontage, with a gentler sequence of works called The Paradise Experiments in which roses bloom from the eyes of female models. Glamour here is amplified to almost cartoonish proportions, but without condem­nation, rather with an odd blend of fondness and remoteness. Linder’s ability to fuse such contrasts remains at her work’s core, and continues to empower.