Linder

Linder (AKA Linder Sterling; b.1954) FIG.1 breathes potent, rebellious new life into photographic images – whether oily bodies from Playboy or blooming flowers from interior design magazines. The British artist first began using photomontage in the mid-1970s, when she produced a work for the cover of Buzzcocks’ single ‘Orgasm Addict’ FIG.2, which shows a slim, naked woman with grinning mouths pasted over her nipples and an iron in place of her head. At this time, Linder was recognised within both the post-punk music and art scenes in Manchester. Working across photography, sculpture, drawing, performance and music, she has since used her own body as well as those from pornography and fashion magazines to explore such themes as misogyny, domesticity and sexual freedom.

These ideas are often intertwined in a single image, exposing the impossibility of reconciling the conflicting expectations placed on women. In her early photomontages, women are shown in constrictive lingerie FIG.3, surrounded by kitchen and household appliances FIG.4, giant cameras, cutlery and food; their enlarged, wide smiles are pasted on. Linder’s process of cutting, layering and gluing is precise and yet inherently violent, as she uses a surgeon’s scalpel to slice through the misogynist values that underpin the imagery she selects. Linder has had institutional solo exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, and Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (2020–21), as well as Nottingham Contemporary (2018), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2013) and Tate St Ives (2013).¹ The artist’s first London retrospective, Danger Came Smiling, is on view at the Hayward Gallery from 11th February to 5th May.² Spanning from the 1970s to the present day, it traverses early glamour photography and the contemporary world of deepfakes. Emily Steer interviewed the artist about her practice and the role of images and language in shaping our view of a woman’s place in the world.

Emily Steer: Danger Came Smiling covers five decades. It must’ve been an intensive process to search through your archive for an exhibition of this scale. Do works that you made years ago read differently when you see them now?

Linder: I turned seventy at the end of last year and that much history becomes heavy to carry around, whether in the psyche or just the physicality of it. I’ve done a few retrospectives, so I know the emotional contours of the work, but the pieces really do change. I was thinking recently about the photomontage that was used for ‘Orgasm Addict’ and how the woman’s body wasn’t particularly fashionable in 1976. Generally, women didn’t look like they were going to the gym. It’s interesting how the reading of her body has shifted over the decades. Also on a material level, the weightiness of print media operates differently. So many images are consumed online now, so we haven’t got that perfume from the text, we don’t get ink on our fingers from cheap newsprint.

ES: I’ve always viewed her as conventionally sexy through the male gaze. But my references are more 1990s models and that type of athletic body. What originally drew you to her?

L: I found the image in a photography magazine; it wasn’t a fashion shoot. She was gleaming, it looks like there’s oil on her body, there are some marks under her ribs. I think she was beginning to usher in a new form of sexiness, so she was prophetic perhaps, and then a decade later that body became a desirable template for a lot of other women.

ES: ‘Orgasm Addict’ was your first photomontage. The tactility in your work, with the tears and cutting, still seems to be a central component – often like a violent or rageful act. What leads your decision to cut up certain images?

L: It’s very controlled rage. I will see an image and think ‘Right, give me that scalpel now!’. There is that glee sometimes. I work with a surgeon’s scalpel and the one I love is made for stab incisions. I sometimes want to travel back in time to those women and men who were stuck in tiny rooms with (probably) a male photographer using a large zoom lens. I always wonder ‘What went on before? What went on afterwards?’. It’s very vulnerable; the pornography industry isn’t an easy place to navigate. Pretty Girls FIG.5 FIG.6 came not long after ‘Orgasm Addict’. It was like a new toy, a new way of making images after always having drawn and been very dexterous at that. To be subtractive, to cut and remove, was thrilling. Still now, I can be looking through any book and there’s this sudden aesthetic arrest that stops me. I find it hard to explain, to identify why out of this Playboy issue, I might want to work with this one image. I don’t try to overanalyse that, it’s just if something is happening in that rectangle that I find interesting. Photomontage is all about getting the photograph to tell something in a new way.

ES: We experience a lot of desensitisation with images, especially pornography. These extreme bodies and acts can become nothing because they’ve oversaturated the media. I’ve heard many people, but especially men, talk about pornography as a constant search for something that’s able to cut through the visual noise. It seems as though in your work, you’re getting people to really see what they’re looking at.

L: If I’ve had that aesthetic arrest, I want to communicate it, so you can see these banal images – predominantly of women – in a different way. I do something to that photograph and the meaning shifts, it gets many meanings, or the meaning is obscured.

Interestingly, I recently received a collection of Playboy magazines, including one from July 1968, which is the month that the Hayward Gallery first opened. I worked with the left side of the ‘Miss July’ centrefold for a new photomontage, which is titled The Most Sacred Monster of Photomontage in Her Time FIG.7 after Salvador Dalí’s Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (1939; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam). I added an apocalyptic fiery sky over the wallpaper – the recent fires in Los Angeles now resonate deeply – and then I added a photograph of me by Benoît Hennebert taken in 1984. I also added two anatomical cut-outs, in homage to Dalí’s bones, which presumably have been spat out by the central figure of Shirley Temple after eating wayward men! For Liverpool Sphinx FIG.8, I cut up two centrefolds from the October and November 1968 issues of Playboy, adding another photograph of me by Hennebert. I refer to these two works as ‘the deepfake diptych’. Deepfakes are often created from photographs of women in the early thirties or younger, taken from their social media accounts. As I was working on these, the UK government declared that deepfakes and other digital violence towards women and girls are to become a criminal offence. I’ve been following campaigns for this change in the law for a while now.

ES: Is there a work in the exhibition that you were especially excited to rediscover in your archive, or particularly drawn to?

L: I suppose when I started to work with the male queer body. That was a glorious moment of thinking: what happens if I apply the same motifs to those bodies? I did a series called Magnitudes of Performance FIG.9. One of the first magazines I worked with was very niche, it was called Transexual Horse Lovers. I became ecstatic, there was something really interesting that wasn’t quite happening with the female body. But the so-called ‘straight male body’ is difficult. The eroticisation of the male body can be confusing as high fashion borrows from queer visual language. There’s a lot of intrigue there. But how can one get under its skin?

ES: You’re surrounded by a lot of pornographic material as part of your work. What’s it like for you to scour through?

L: As a child, my step-grandfather would show me pornography. I found my own antidote by looking at fairy tales or the ‘Princess Tina’ ballet books, which would pacify those encounters. So I’ve seen pornography from a very young age; part of me knows it very well. I’ve done lots of therapy with extraordinary practitioners. I did eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy and had this deep sense of peace about my childhood, and then for about a month I couldn’t make any work because we’d neutralised pornography! It was like looking at a tin of beans because there was no pulse or charge.

ES: It’s also interesting that you used to counter those early experiences by looking at fairy tales, because you speak about the importance of enchantment and magic within your art even now. I wonder if that balance is still happening?

L: I think so. On my shelves I have children’s books, lifestyle and interior design publications and pornography. Even looking at those, it’s so strange to think ‘that’s in your head, that’s your psyche’. There’s also so much online now about transformation: ‘Have this cream, or this lipstick which will make your lips look bigger’. This is the language of fairy tales, except it’s aimed at women my age or young adults. I think more than ever there’s this promise of transformation.

ES: The title of your exhibition Danger Came Smiling comes from a book your grandmother owned. How has that impacted your work over the years?

L: Yes, it was a romance novel. So many of my early works were from my grandmother’s True Confessions magazines – these salubrious tales of sexy romance. A lot of her material gets recycled. Danger Came Smiling was also the title of an album I made with Ludus in 1982. About six months ago, I saw Ralph Rugoff, the Director of the Hayward Gallery, and I was wearing a t-shirt with the phrase written on it, and he gasped and said ‘that’s the title of the show!’. It gives a new lens to how you view all those images of smiling women and men in my work. 

ES: It also suggests contradiction, which comes up a lot in your practice. The fairy tale and the pornography magazine, lightness and darkness, good and bad exist side by side. I think we often look for singular views on the world, in order for it to appear safe and contained, but you offer painfully stark contradictions.

L: If you take down those dividing walls in the psyche, everything can suddenly feel new and unknown. But more and more, I look back and think that’s how I work stuff out. I also wanted to mention that no one ever asks me about the glue. It’s this sticky, invisible substance, but it holds everything together. Without the glue, my work would fall apart.

ES: It’s quite semen-like too, evoking the cliché of a pornography magazine with the pages stuck together.

L: It’s very semen-like. It can be quite messy. If I haven’t glued the little bits down fully it might ooze out. I don’t know what my psychological glue is, but within the work I make, the glue and scalpel are bedfellows. One is gloopy, messy and soft, and the other is cold, metallic and cutting. The glue haunts every image, it works on the nose as much as the eye. Newsprint is cheap and thin; if someone has been a heavy smoker looking at Playboy, when I glue the pages, it releases the smell. Occasionally there’s a bacon-like breakfast smell released too.

ES: Your senses are a large part of your process. You’ve also used your own body in images and performances, such as Hiding but still not knowing FIG.10 and Your Actions Are My Dreams FIG.11. Has this experience enabled you to work through your own relationship with your body?

L: I think so. In that very accelerated period after I created Pretty Girls, I felt that I should go in front of the camera. I’d made works of other women’s bodies, women I would never meet. It felt strange to be the one fully clothed and invisible. I started to be photographed for the SheShe series FIG.12. I felt very safe with my friend Birrer as a photographer. We were two young women in her tiny flat being playful, it felt quite ritualistic. Seeing that younger self now is really interesting – remembering at the time that I may have had a dissatisfaction with my body, and just thinking ‘wow, you’re actually looking pretty good there, Linder!’. Recently I was photographed by Hazel Gaskin, and I love working with her. She sees the lens in a very different way. We talked about the aggressive language around ‘screengrabs’ and ‘shoot’ and ‘taking a photograph’. It’s really engrained.

ES: You take on many different roles and work across quite a few art forms. How do you see these aspects interacting? Does it all come from the same place, or do they offer respite from one another?

L: Performance often comes after a long stretch of making paper-based work. It’s like an itch when I want to do something more embodied than that tiny motor skill of cutting and gluing. For Danger Came Smiling, we’re planning a Roberts Institute workshop in the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Rooms, and I really want it to focus on the right to fail, to be experimental, which is very liberating. I’ve ringfenced performance and music as an arena where I can keep things exploratory with no expectations. I improvise and edit and improvise and edit again. Sometimes there might be ten or twenty of us working together, and I can relinquish control and be inspired by other musicians and artists. I don’t do enough of that now.

ES: You mention that you don’t want to be too rigid in the planning, but I wonder if you have some starting points or prompts in mind for the Hayward event?

L: My latest photomontage work has helped to shape the workshop. I recently explored notions of deepfaking with the choreographer Holly Blakey and my son, the composer Maxwell Sterling. We’ve been considering how one could slowly deepfake a folk dance or a nursery rhyme until the original is but a ghost of its former self. Both Holly and I realised that we’ve had images of sphinxes on our walls for quite some time now. And I also have this quotation: ‘As Leonora Carrington once wrote, salvation will take the form not of a knight or a hermit but the Sphinx, the puzzle, the unanswerable question that sets the imagination racing’.³ Holly and I wondered how we’d walk across a room if we were both sphinxes, and we look forward to finding out.

ES: Danger Came Smiling is divided into four sections, could you tell me a bit about how you arrived at them?

L: Early on, I knew I wanted some definition between the four rooms: ‘Grammar’, ‘Glamour’, ‘Seduction’ and ‘Cut’. My archive is very close to Lancaster Castle, where the Pendle witch trials happened in 1612. As I walk past it each day, it’s a sobering reminder that people were hung for their learned, beguiling, bewitching use of grammar and glamour. You can’t fully divorce those terms, etymologically; both meant ‘the power to charm’. When I was younger, of course I was shown ‘glamour’ photography. Harrison Marks invented the term in the 1950s, but the definition of glamour for a sixteen-year-old from Liverpool will be very different from a fifty-year-old in Ohio, for example. We all define it differently and bring our own language. The idea of seduction comes from The Moon and the Virgin: The Archetypal Feminine by Nor Hall, which I read in the 1980s and it really opened my eyes. She looks at the Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone and really goes into that idea of being led out, being led away from, not thinking of seduction as we think of it. It has a far older pulse to it, which can be empowering.

ES: There’s a common reading of ‘seduction’ that demonises women: the idea of the female seducer guiding the man down a bad path, without any acknowledgement of his autonomy.

L: Yes, and that often also leads to ‘oh, she was asking for it, she was dressed in a certain way’. Even now that can work against a woman. I was given a camera for my eighteenth birthday, and I went out to photograph the Damned and various other groups. I was attacked late one night, and a man was arrested two weeks later; he’d raped several young women. When the police phoned to say they’d found the guy, they said ‘Yes love, it was really simple, he saw you getting off the bus and he fancied you, the way you were dressed, and he just wanted to rape you’. I just didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t form a response. There was no language to say, ‘I’m feeling uncomfortable’ or ‘I need to press pause and work this out for myself’. I think this generation is really questioning how dress can be misconstrued. It’s complex and part of me does think, seventy years on the planet and there’s still a really long way to go.

ES: Domesticity and the subjugation of women within the home has also played an important role in your work. Cutlery becomes weapon-like in your 1976 montage Untitled FIG.13 and you’ve also contrasted baked good with nude women’s bodies. Looking back, how do you think these pressures have changed?

L: Some magazines that I’ve used in the exhibition are from the 1970s, which show models out in swinging London, walking through the countryside in some gorgeous frock or in Paris. They’re represented as having so much agency. But then, at the same time, the adverts in those magazines were sending the message that the home has to be immaculate, the children have to be fed, the husband has to have his shirt pressed. When you see them together the contrast becomes so graphic. You want to be that woman going through the wheat field with a mini dress on, but are you safe? What do you go home to? What are the expectations when you walk through your front door? The kitchen is a particularly charged site. My photomontages have a lot of food in them FIG.14. They explore gluttony and pleasure and excess. I know very few people, whatever gender identity, who are totally at ease with food, because it’s not just food – it’s appetite, oral satisfaction, sexual satisfaction.

ES: There’s a lot of shame wrapped up in our appetites. For women, there’s a stigma around having too much sexual appetite. You need to want sex, but if you want it too much then you’re intimidating.

L: Yes, then you become lustful. Everything is measured. If I was dating now, I think I’d be totally lost. You grow up with this idea that things get better if you work hard enough, if you’re good. My dismay when Roe v. Wade was overturned – my god. I started drawing again then. When I was around thirteen, I particularly liked Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings of foetuses, which I now know was quite a craze around that time. I wanted to go back and look at them after the ruling. I made these big ballpoint pens from deodorant bottles at the local chemist and made loads of drawings of foetuses. When I think of Danger Came Smiling, I think of Trump’s gurning face and this right-wing moral superiority.