How to smash the system, according to punk art pioneer, Linder

“14 year-olds come up to me and say ‘what can we do, what can we do?’ which always makes me so happy,” says Linder Sterling (commonly known as Linder), the renowned British feminist artist whose work—she is best known for her DIY photomontages—is habitually prefaced with the term ‘radical’. “’What was it like?,’ they ask me, like it was a war. I just want to scoop them up and have an academy or something. But they can work it out, they’re all smart,” she says of her Gen Z fanbase.

Linderism, the artist’s first retrospective in the UK, arrived at Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge on Valentine’s day and is mammoth in size. Spanning her extensive career comprised of performance, photography, zine-making and music, which debuted beside the Manchester punk scene in the early 1970s, the exhibition is more akin to a takeover: two gallery spaces, Kettle’s Yard House and neighbouring St Peter’s Church, as well as the shop, research space and stairwell, all bulge with 50 years of Linder’s work, while a book, published in collaboration with Koenig Books, is similarly plump with archival notes.

Producing the charged artwork for English punk band, the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict in 1977, by 1982—having formed her own musical outfit under the moniker Ludus—Linder was performing at Manchester’s iconic Hacienda. She wore a dress of meat offcuts (a look lifted by Lady Gaga in 2010), later referencing the Bucks Fizz skirt-rip of the previous year’s Eurovision to reveal a dildo: the audience retracted. It was, she notes, her first experience of being able to influence people.

Today, the performance serves as a focal point of Linderism, played on a loop in a room titled ‘HEL, AND OTHER HEROINES’, while next door, her photomontages hang in a room labelled ‘PARADISE EXPERIMENTS’. Many splice vintage pornography alongside fragments of flora and cuttings from home magazines to challenge the perception of femininity as docile and domestic. 

A multi-disciplinary artist largely concerned with the experience of women, Linder’s trajectory is brilliantly unique. Here, she speaks to SLEEK about subverting the system.

Rejecting social media as a radical act for 2020

“We’re so busy publishing what we had for breakfast or publishing a new mascara that maybe the radical is actually orbiting this invisibility, and therefore difficult to pinpoint because you’re pointing at somebody who is not participating in contemporary social media. That might sound quite minor, but I think it’s a big step, to just absent yourself from all that online discourse. There are radical acts being done with people exploring gender—using social media in that case, in a very clever way to say, ‘I’m having these struggles or I’m having this debate about my gender, my sexuality,’ opening yourself up to the world. I think a lot of artists use social media in a very brave, very clever way.”

Contemporary expectations (and why then, her photomontages remain relevant today)

“We’re surrounded by images. I mean, an 8-year-old can Facetune their face, and most images are manipulated in some way. I’ve sat in on shoots with some of the world’s most extraordinary male and female models, and even those freakishly beautiful people have so much retouching on them. I’m really fascinated by that, and the gap therefore between the editorial image of perfection and this 8-year-old in a tiny village near here who’s Facetuning. I wonder what happens in that gap between the image you’re presenting to the world, and that subject’s experience, how then you go out, or you look in the mirror and you see a face that isn’t Facetuned, and perhaps, the anxiety that’s created in that gap. I didn’t have to deal with that when I was young, I don’t know if I would have been robust enough, or maybe I would have got in there and participated.”

Minimalism as a punk act

“It’s the DNA of the work [the Orgasm Addict cover], I still look at that image and remember the absolute simplicity of it, just scalpel, blade… It is interesting because it’s just three elements, so I think even then I learnt to economise this sort of editorial—especially with pornography, it doesn’t take much—those pornographic images are so fragile with eroticism and the kind of sexual nature they present. It’s like playing billiards, you can knock them off so easily, it doesn’t take a lot to totally deflate the erect pornographic image. I still go back, when I’m making new work thinking ‘oh maybe this should be here and this here’, I always subtract down to the minimal intervention. I’m quite a minimalist, economical.”

On having agency in the art world

“My gang never joined in with anything so I thought why would I want to be part of the art world? It didn’t seem that radical, it didn’t seem that exciting, so if there was this nebulous art world, I wasn’t in a rush to be part of it, I didn’t see the attraction. So [today] you have people like me saying ‘it wasn’t always there, and what is it anyway? Who’s funding it? Is it the business world?’ Who gets to have agency in that world—you know all the service workers who are supporting that, I have mixed feelings. But I’m with good galleries who are very ethical, I feel very happy.”

Reconfiguring the internet

“It’s very poetic in parts, it gets slightly surreal when you see ‘she and her’, ‘she met Ben Nicholson’, ‘she collected this or she was at the Tate’, it’s really beautiful.” For the duration of Linderism (through 26th April), Kettle’s Yard founder Jim Ede’s name has been replaced by his wife Helen’s on the gallery’s website. “None of us know much about Helen, it’s all Jim Jim Jim Jim, and we love Jim, but we just know that Helen can’t have been this mute… she must have been far more fleshed out then we’re led to believe. Who was she? Why do we know so little about her—we’re in her home, sitting on her chairs. In turn she stands in for every other woman we don’t know much about.”

Linderism runs through to 26 April 2020 at Kettle’s Yard. 

Unless otherwise stated all images © Linder Sterling. Courtesy the artist; Modern Art, London; Dépendance, Brussels; Andréhn- Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Paris; and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo.