Linder, Oh Grateful Colours, Bright Looks VI, 2009
Femme/Objet is the first retrospective of British feminist punk artist Linder Sterling (or just “Linder”). The Great Exposition made it to the artist’s opening presentation of the show.
Linder has the kindly face of your friend’s mother, making it all the more incongruous as she describes her intellectual interest in pornography in a softly spoken voice, barely audible over the noise of a video showing her younger self screaming into a mic during a gig with her band Ludus at Manchester’s legendary Haçienda club in 1982. During said concert Linder wore a dress with a bodice weaved out of meat (way ahead of ms Gaga who went to the MTV Video Music awards clad head to toe in meat in 2010). Under her net skirt, which she whips off during the performance, Linder wore a dildo, clearly visible in the video pointing and bouncing around aggressively at the gradually retreating crowd.
Linder, Orgasm Addict single cover for the Buzzcocks, 1977
Linder continues to be involved in performance art but the main body of her work is photography and photo-montage. Her early collages use found images and splice naked women with domestic appliances (she designed the single cover for the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict, showing the torso of a naked woman with an iron for a head). Searching through gendered magazines in the 1970s, Linder had the realisation that what they had in common were women’s bodies and the image of women: fashion, homes and domesticity in women’s magazines; naked women in men’s porn magazines. Her interest in magazines led her to Manchester’s only porn outlet at the time. “I had to be very brave” she says.
This seems quite quaint compared with modern internet-driven pornography. “We went to Pigalle”, says Linder, exchanging conspiratorial glances with Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, the show’s curator, “for research, But print media in porn is nearly over”. In the light of these changes Linder’s more recent work has something of the nostalgic about it. Using negatives unearthed from the 1960s, she continues to create montages which mix (now) retro-looking naked women with flowers, outsized mouths and garish-looking cakes. Although coming from a feminist place, the collages are not without humour. In a series from 2011, Postliminal rites, pictures of snakes or cactuses – nudge nudge wink wink – are placed in front of genitals. The original images in the series come from a specialized magazine for “transsexual horse lovers”. As Linder says, with the decline of the printed porn magazine, “there’s only really weird stuff left”.
Femme/Objet is on at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris until 21/04/13
