Linder: Femme/Objet

An exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris illustrates the delicate and contingent work of collection and excavation that one of the most influential figures of the British punk scene evoked and extracted from waste materials, pornography and advertising in the late 1970s.

In his splendid book Subculture: the meaning of style, British sociologist and expert on the birth of youth movements in 1970s Britain Dick Hebdige devotes a fine page to collage, stolen from William Burroughs, the master of literary cut-ups. Similarly, political and poetic rebel Linda Mulvey changed her name to Linder to reference the German name of John Heartfield, her collage master who was born Helmut Hertzfeld.

A changed identity and graceful extreme techniques were born out of the circumstances of a politically ferocious period, packed with revolt and subjects that she treated with seemingly out-of-context forms and materials: flower-women, housewives with domestic-appliance heads and vapid magazine heroes.

Linder, Femme/Objet — Top and above: "Linder: Femme/Objet" installation view at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Photos by Pierre Antoine

After years of Photoshop, it would be pointless now to simply analyse Linder’s photomontages in terms of pure technique. Instead, an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris illustrates her delicate and contingent work of collection and excavation, the great delicacy that Linder, one of the most influential figures on the British punk scene, managed to evoke and extract from waste materials, pornography and advertising, in the late 1970s subculture that magnificently glorified the idea of “homemade” with humble materials. Her personal and social artistic revolt lies in this pre- and post-Thatcherite poverty.

Linder, Oh grateful colours — Linder, *Oh grateful colours, bright looks VI*, 2009, original photomontage. Collage on a photo by Tim Walker. © Linder

Do not be fooled by the glossiness of Linder’s later works at the end of the exhibition. Created from more contemporary materials, they realign her work alongside commodity artists good and excellent, from Jeff Koons to Damien Hirst.

It is, rather, to the Max Ernst of Une semaine de bonté or the collage grounds of Joseph Cornell’s boxes that we must turn if we are to thoroughly enjoy and understand the beauty of series such as We are the kind of people who know the value of time (1976-77), a masterpiece of the transgender aesthetic.

Manchester, Linder’s birthplace, was in a terrible state at the time and it seemed impossible that any sense of beauty could be created or developed there. Yet it was a hive of music phenomena and, from her proletarian workshop, the artist extracted little gems that took on concrete form in the home dinette.

Hers was an obsession with an inverted image of the bourgeois world — on the one hand, women’s magazines (fashion, decoration and photo-stories), on the other, the male press (automobiles, DIY and pornography). Linder incestuously paired them together. Her flower-woman almost became a signature-piece, and the porn heroes and playmates were submitted to cosmetic surgery and truly disgusting rituals. Images became meat to shape her obsessions, and the artist turned herself into a performer. On 5 November 1982, at a concert of her group Ludus at the famous The Hacienda club, she appeared on stage in a dress made of leftover food and meat found in the bins of a Chinese restaurant; Bloody Linder cocktails were served to the audience and her managers offered them the same leftovers, wrapped in pages torn from porn magazines. The concert ended with Linder improvising a striptease and revealing the words “Women wake up!” on her body.

Had her work been confined to these high points of scandal-strategy, fairly common to her generation, Linder’s work and research would probably have run itself out in trendy cultural consumption and become irrelevant at least two decades ago. On the contrary, however, it is the elegance and restraint of her work that surprisingly, and very effectively, fill the museum rooms today. The Paris installation slightly softens the biting minimalism and ferocious social criticism of her beginnings, but suburban life and art as a means of deliverance stand out, nonetheless.

Linder knows how to function as a political artist and is well aware that her basic ingredients are surrealism and the juxtaposition of different and distant levels of interpretation. Her conceptual transference is clear in works such as Cakewalk degagé (2010) in which the impossibility of fulfilling her childhood dream of learning to dance gives rise to an exhilarating gallery of dance steps and cream pies — Picabia-style. What Linder produces is not the simple situationist détournement that frequently underpins much of the subculture aesthetic. It is, rather, her precious quality as an inveterate miniaturist and her ability to extract a convulsive beauty from images. Linder applies quite a shamanic essence to her work, an approach revealed in all its completeness in the sophistication of the collage. In this “Femme/Objet” exhibition, Linder has produced a manifesto or, rather, a global work that manages to create a tension between emotionally distant categories, genres, universes and epochs. She does this via the mask of an absent-minded, perverse and schizophrenic housewife, as if we were observing a character from a John Waters film. What we actually see on the walls is the essence, served cold, of 30 years of work. Beautiful copy-and-paste pages of a white-trash period reinterpreted through a magnificent and distorting Raphaelesque lens. Ivo Bonacorsi

Through 21 April 2013

Linder: Femme/Objet

Musee d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

11 Avenue du Président Wilson, Paris

Linder: Femme/Objet

An exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris illustrates the delicate and contingent work of collection and excavation that one of the most influential figures of the British punk scene evoked and extracted from waste materials, pornography and advertising in the late 1970s.

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