Montage of Sex, Punk and Feminism
Artist Linder talks about her place in the art world and why so many women love her work.
[L]inder’s best-known piece of (visual) art is probably her seminal sleeve for the Buzzcocks 1977 single Orgasm Addict. The montage aimed to highlight the unfair cultural expectations placed on women, as well as the prevailing tendency to treat the female form as a commodity (the sum of a woman is her domestic appliances et al). This propensity towards Dadaesque collage, composed by combining images taken from men’s magazines (read: porn, cars, DIY) with those taken from women’s fashion and domestic magazines, was to become Linder’s signature style. Fuelled by a desire to change and challenge the status quo, Linder’s work addresses heavy-hitting issues such as feminism, capitalism and sexuality. It is, however, her innate ability to bring light and humour to these topics that proves her worth and strength as an artist and human being.
While retaining her commitment to the visual arts and the medium of collage, Linder now works across a variety of artistic disciplines, with a particular current focus on performance art. In 2013, she debuted The Ultimate Form, a multi-media piece featuring a ballet created in collaboration with Northern Ballet, which was first shown as part of her retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, before travelling to the Hepworth Wakefield and Tate St Ives, to great critical acclaim. This autumn she is collaborating once again with Northern Ballet for her upcoming show, Children of the Mantic Stain, at the Leeds City Art Gallery. The significance of her punk-feminist work cannot be overstated — it changed the way we view both advertising and art, forever.
"I was born with a female body and I’ve never been too sure what to do with it... Life can be so complicated before you’ve even got out of bed in the morning."
Hunger: What do you think of the art world?
Linder: In 1976, no one that I knew ever referred to an “art world”, even though the expression had been coined ten years earlier in Arthur Danto’s essay of the same name. Everyone that I knew, myself included, worked outside of the gallery system. We made art in our bedrooms or on our kitchen tables, we never gave any thought to gallery representation — it seemed totally irrelevant then. This makes life difficult for today’s art historians as they try to retrace our steps and to see the bigger picture beyond the walls of the bedroom. The contemporary nebulous art world means different things to different people. I never ponder my position in the art world or on the art spectrum; it’s difficult enough making the work without then losing time wondering where that work will sit. Thankfully Stuart Shave represents me and negotiates the art world on my behalf. It means that I can hide myself away in various coastal locations and stare at the sea, pondering the fallout from men and women still not having come a long way, and what to do about it all.
How did you develop your unique approach to collage?
In 1972, when I was 18, I read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. The text [which criticises traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in imagery] radically shifted the way that I looked at art in books and museums. I was living in a small village in the north of England at the time and my access to contemporary art was slender, so I followed Berger’s lead back down the rabbit hole of art history, coming up for air occasionally and looking at contemporary adverts for Playtex “Cross Your Heart” bras in a very different way. The “Cross Your Heart” bra had been launched in 1954, the year that I was born; famously the bra “lifts and separates” the mammary glands. It wasn’t until 1977 though, that Playtex were allowed to show a woman wearing only a bra from the waist up in TV commercials. In that same year I glued a cut-out of an iron over the face of a photograph of a naked woman and stuck grinning mouths over her breasts — almost overnight I had worked out how to pictorially translate my way of seeing the world.
How do you think your perspective has changed in the last 40 or so years?
I’m always looking backwards and forwards to monitor the progress of the world that I see around me. In the 70s, adverts for Virginia Slim cigarettes used the slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby” but I disagreed; I was with John Berger when he said that all publicity works on anxiety and I got out my scissors and scalpels to make my point. Photomontage is an anxiety displacement activity and my perspective on all art-making activities has stayed as fixed as the glue that holds my work together.
"I never ponder my position in the art world or on the art spectrum; it’s difficult enough making the work without then losing time wondering where that work will sit."
What drew you to photomontage?
The lineage of artists who have worked in that tradition and their opposition to the political climates in which they lived and worked. Artists such as Hannah Höch, George Grosz and John Heartfield liberated the relatively new art of photography so that the found image could tell stories in a new way. In 1976, having always had a pencil, a pen or a brush in my hand for as long as I could remember, I decided to put all mark-making tools away and to cultivate the same dexterity of mark-making with a Swann-Morton surgeon’s scalpel instead of a brush. I didn’t think that the paints, brushes and pens would be banished from my life for quite so many decades, but there you go.
When did you first discover feminism?
I discovered feminism in 1970 when I was 16 and living, literally, on the road to Wigan Pier. When I first heard of the women’s liberation movement, it sounded equally exotic and prosaic — I was a young woman and I wanted to be liberated from social mores. I’ve already mentioned being seen as ripe for the generational demographic for slim cigarettes and uplift bras, and “bra burning” became a phrase associated with the women’s liberation movement (although no bras were ever actually burnt; it was a media fib). I hit puberty just as the second wave of feminism was happening, I knew I had to take sides to survive and so I joined the sisters who were [said] to burn their bras outside the Miss America 1969 competition. The fact that I was living in a small mining village near Wigan at the time did not deter me; I needed allies wherever I could find them. The monthly magazine Spare Rib helped to forge global insights and connections, so that my bedroom in Wigan felt more of a cultural incubator than a chicken coop. Maybe if I’d grown up amid the bohemia of Chelsea, then feminism wouldn’t have held the same thrall. In 1970, I devoured the writings of the second wave of feminism with the same gusto as the Wigan miners around me devoured pies and pints. Fourteen years later, when the miners created the picket lines, we were suddenly all on the same side for a while.
A lot of your work — particularly the early pieces — revolves around pornography; why do you feel it’s an important subject?
Using pornographic imagery in 1976 was very different to using pornography now. I lived in Manchester at that time and there were only two “adult bookshops” in the city selling hardcore pornography. The demographic at work here was definitely for men only, hence the best-selling UK magazine of the same name. At that time, I was very curious to look across the full spectrum of representations of women in print media. I studied and subsequently cut up photographs of women from Playboy, Vogue and Family Circle magazines, shoehorning them into interiors cut out from Ideal Homes and adorning the paper women with cut-outs of domestic utensils found in mail order catalogues. It sounds like a nightmarish series of compositions, and it was to a certain extent, but photomontage affords a certain elegance too — the precision of the surgeon’s scalpel helped to create a poise across the halftone dot of the pictorial plane. I’ve been doing the same thing ever since. The progress within sexual politics in advertising and editorial has been incremental; I snip away to try to accelerate it.
How do you think your gaze differs from that of a male artist?
Well, we have no proof that it does; it depends on the male artist in question. I have the advantage though that I can put myself in the picture and try on for size how it feels to be depicted in certain ways. As Berger wrote in 1972, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” My gaze is still that of a sullen 16-year-old who doesn’t want to be seen as a dolly bird. I haven’t yet worked out how contemporary 16-year-old girls posting selfies on Instagram fit into this equation.
Do other women react well to your work?
Women love my work. I ventriloquise their thoughts; I’m their dummy. I cut up men’s and women’s magazines and interfere with their visual and written language, making things right by making them wrong. Women laugh far louder and longer than most men do at the pornographic photomontages that I create, I’m the Lorena Bobbitt [the woman who famously sliced off her abusive husband’s penis while he slept] of the printed page.
Is there a narrative to your work?
Boy meets girl and comes unstuck, or boy meets boy and they stick together? A lot of my time is spent unpicking the visual narratives that are woven around men and women in magazines. You sometimes only have to snip at one stitch and the whole thing comes undone in your lap. The narratives that are told within print media are in the main repetitive and fragile, fairytale-like at times. We’re encouraged to see a pair of new shoes yielding as much transformative power as Cinderella’s glass slippers.
How has your work itself changed?
In lots of ways my work hasn’t changed at all — aspects of my current practice are identical to my practice in 1977. In the last year though, I’ve returned to using paint once more, enamel paints to be precise. Going backwards feels like the most radical way to go forwards right now. I’ve even started to draw again. Looking at my rows of tins of Humbrol enamel paints makes me very happy; their Matt US Tan is a perfect match for some of the skin tones in the 80s naturist magazines that I’m currently working with, but their Matt Flesh is my favourite — it looks unlike any flesh that I’ve ever seen.