Sorcha Dallas

Linder Sterling could inspire thousands upon thousands of words about her essential place in British culture from punk onwards- her art and performance over a 30-year career encompasses record sleeves, experimental pop group, Ludus, whose dissonance was evident in confrontational, difficult music were often packaged with ‘zines and idiosyncratic New Wave graphic design; her role as a Manchester catalyst lending a lifetime of artistic and emotional support to among others the Buzzcocks, Magazine, J on Savage and especially Morrissey; a top feminist from the age of 16, her visual art conflates (amongst other things) vintage pornography with household goods in collage as an artistic form of commentary about society’s objectification of women. It’ s no great surprise that it has taken three decades for the (art) world to catch up with this blazing Northern soul.

Linder Sterling immediately familiar Orgasm Addict is now hanging in Tate Modern and a ring-a-rosy of exhibitions and performances in contemporary art spaces worldwide suggest Linder is having more than a season in the sun. When I discovered her over 20 years ago at the age of 17, I was floored by what she had already accomplished and inspired by the possibilities she suggested in her work: this was the real hardcore. Today, nothing Linder says or does Linder says or does puts this early impression asunder.

In London, Linder wears a look of bemusement; we are on the grass in front of the Frieze tent, before the private view, watching the deals go by: “It really is like the last hour at IKEA!” she laughs, shaking her head with incredulity. Inside, I hunt for champagne while various worthies compete for her attention or ask for input on future projects; in a moment we bump into Richard Prince’s Dodge Challenger in curious orange, garlanded with a busty auto-show beauty – we can’t be the only women in there having a WTF? moment. We’ve been chatting about this kind of thing already in the Buddhist café around the corner from Studio Wolfgang Tillmans: there is a mandala on wall and we seem drawn to ideas of what goes around, comes around. “In three days’ time I complete a thousand days of meditation; if you miss even one day you have to go back to the beginning and start the cycle over – but if you complete it you’re set up for life changes. So as the Frieze Art Fair finishes I will probably evaporate!” Linder jokes. “It’s funny…If I don’t get to it as the day progresses it’s like I haven’t brushed my psychic teeth…” She is extremely garrulous in company. Through giggles we register impatience with those who drop the no-sense-of-humour bomb on feminists or their objections to exploitations of women – Linder may well be the prototype Riot Grrrl – as it is obvious from her work that her humour is pretty much as mandatory as circumspection in Linderland. “My dad’s a builder, you know, so I think I might have a genetic predisposition to want to fix things. So here I am, trying.”

Who were your heroes and heroines at 20 and who are they today?

To borrow from Proust, ‘The many gentlemen of whom I am comprised’.

I asked this because I needed some perspective, sitting with someone who was and is dictionary-definition legendary: tales of Linder and her work weave tendril-like through the fabric of just about everything in popular culture I have ever really loved. She was the first person to lend an ear, feminist books and her loyalty to Morrissey; soon after the Hacienda’s opening, Linder became annoyed with the casual use of pornography in the vids that used to play over clubbers, responding with a performance wearing a ‘meat dress’ made of stinking chicken offcuts, which she whipped off to reveal a giant black dildo, freaking out self-appointed Manchester scene aristocracy who couldn’t face literal carnality. Obviously she isn’t wearing this outfit today but she still carries the sentiment of doing so with her wherever she goes.

In a fashionable moment, Linder knows where she fits in. “There is this world that I’ve learned to keep both geographical and psychological distance from, “ she explains; she now lives by the sea in Lancashire with her partner and teenage son, away from the pressures of culture capitals. “There’s this feeling of having to sit out for two generations but it has been worth the wait because people who are now in key positions who’ve liked my work are beckoning me back in. In the ‘90s a lot of my generation felt it was time to ‘sit this one out’ and allow younger people to just get on with it; we had a sense that once they’d worked through this impulse we might re-engage again.”

Your work is being feted at a time when an unquestioning consumerism and the persistent refusal to see women as proper equals remain rampant in our culture. The I look at one of your pieces and see an iron where a young woman’s head should be and wonder if you feel we had a chance to change definitely 30 years ago and collectively blew it?

Well, we all blow it all the time, otherwise everything wouldn’t be in such a mess; but then we get out of bed and on good days start all over again. I’ve temporarily elected Janus as my household god – I seem to spend a lot of time at the moment simultaneously looking forwards and back, poised on the threshold. When I was 16 years of age, I discovered Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. The title seemed to suggest that women had been living in a state of psychic, emotional, creative and economical castration – her list was probably longer than that, but the enemy was suggested as being as much internalized as external. I don’t think that much has changed; in fact, I think that we live in a culture of even more exaggerated stereotypes now. Take away the window-dressing and rhetoric of 2007 and in some respect, we are still having to ask for more, Sir Dickens knew what he was after.

You don’t just foreground your gender, you also address class issues. Performances like The Working Class Goes to Paradise, inspired by your own visit to the Tate as a teenager, force a question: are the gateways to ‘paradise’ still open to those who identify as working class? What do you think about the way people are nowadays subdivided into deserving and undeserving poor as if the Victorians never left us?

From the council estate to the private estate, to the eternal debate around nature and nurture, at some point there has to be liberation, and a move away from the familiar. Paradise is packaged and presented in many guises now – most of them oddly archaic, in fact – to those on the council estates and beyond. I grew up in the 1950’s and watched war films and cowboys films on TV. There were always goodies and baddies – them and us. The spy films of the ‘60s and kitchen sink cinema, and always a feeling of having to be on guard and ready to fight back. Within my home, superstition prevailed even around ‘not catching cold’ because my parents’ generation, catching a cold was just one removed from turning the last bend. There was always a dread of ‘something you couldn’t shake off’. I was weaned on Victorian northern Gothic – damp slates on the crematorium roof, depressed dogs – but also Liverpool Beat Boom: white PVC boots and eyeliner the width of wing mirrors. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I’m still not sure what Paradise looks like. I would like to think that a Paradise could exist that would not have created in opposition and out of compensation to the ‘host culture’ but through the sheer joy of being – enter (Shaker heroine) Ann Lee, stage left. It’s probably a mistake to operate in an oppositional manner if you want to change the way of the world’ it’s too binary, too reliant on there only ever being this way of doing something, or its exact opposite. I’ve learned that incremental change is far more effective.

What was the last thing you wanted to shout from the top of a hill?

A sound that is wordless, but not meaningless. We are both guilty (or perhaps also innocent) of spinning back to Manchester and its consequences across the afternoon; Morrissey is a touchstone and a counterpoint to Factory worship. “In 1992 or ’93 I went to Japan with Morrissey, and also to California to document a tour; the reactions of the fans were specific: the Japanese cried and the Americans jumped up and down going ‘ohmygaahhhd!’ It is weird when you watch a friend become famous but at the same time there is this inevitability that gathers force as it happens before you, where you tell yourself, ‘of course it was meant to be’.”

In this season of re-visitation prompted by the film Control and the death of Tony Wilson, you were famously ambivalent towards 24 Hour Party People when the film was made – has your perspective on events of the time become more or less ambivalent, if so, why?

Someone said that Tom Hanks is interested in making The Smiths film, so heaven knows I’m being mythologised now. But the pop myth Manchester that people want to revisit no longer exists. On the Euro groovy-boy art map, Manchester is a kind of second division Old Street. Curators from Zagreb roam the streets looking for members of New Order, like the whole cast of Manchester’s pop history are just going to be sitting there, waiting – tagged and bound by Dave Haslam. The city has changed and appears glossy and vacant, its creativity disengaged. Are we all supposed to be archaeologists now? Is all we have to look forward to is to be recast as characters in some space-age kitchen-sink film? Will Keira Knightley be Linder to Jude Law’s Morrissey in The Boy With The Thorn in his Side? I saw the original shooting script for 24 Hour Party People and Morrissey was portrayed as a fumbling Goth, indebted to Wilson for teaching him all that he knew about pop music. Is that how you sell out Madison Square Garden faster than The Beatles – as Morrissey has – I wonder? The depiction of myself was libelous as well as untrue, and so legal action had to be taken. Lynne Tillman said ‘history should never be written by narcissists’ and she doe shave a point. If a serious survey is happening- whilst thankfully most of the people who were there at the time are still alive – then let’s at least make it an honest one. Moving away from the narcissists, can we widen the spotlight out? I’ve still never seen 24 Hour Party People and I’m still not sure whether or not I will see Control, probably eventually. Please, I don’t think it was satirical to want to portray Morrissey in the way they were planning; they were quite sincere. They have to tell the story in a way that reflects their own glory in preference, with the one story told the one way, by the same persistent and loud voices. There is a lot of mythologising going on.

What was the first work of art you ever made?

I only visited an art gallery once as a child. My parents took me to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool when I was about 10 and I remember feeling simultaneously awed and intimated by the immensity and glamour of the paintings there. Art seemed to belong to a time and place far away from where I was born. There seemed to be no pathway between myself and the foreboding canvases – the gilt frames reinforced the solid boundaries between myself and any precocious ambition to become an artist. It was only at secondary school that I became aware of the connections between pop music and pop art and, living in the north, between politics too. One of the most dramatic sights that I saw as a child was a mass protest march in Liverpool in opposition to the proposed Polaris nuclear submarines – everyone was very impassioned and looked amazing. It was very volatile and loud too. That, and I Love Lucy, told me something of life beyond the factory gate. So, the question, “the first work of art” becomes quite loaded. The photomontage that was used for the sleeve of Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict felt like my very first becoming. At that time, I was very much in love with artists such as George Grosz and Hannah Hoch, who had rejected the label of artist and instead referred to themselves as ‘engineers’. In 1977, the world of fine art in Britain seemed irrelevant and far away – almost an echo of standing in front of the gilt framed canvases at the Walker Gallery – “they said nothing to me about my life”, to paraphrase a friend.

Were you always noticed or singled out from a very young age?

Yes – but I often found the consequences of that to be quite threatening. In the late ‘70s a lot of us suffered from violent physical attacks. During punk in Manchester, even buying a loaf of bread needed nerves of steel. I’ve always been intrigued with social camouflage, voluntary invisibility and the disappearing act. Haven’t you ever wanted to be invisible?

Did you notice the Riot Grrrls or Guerilla Girls at all when they tried to make feminism relevant to young women who wanted to make music or art?

I always kept an eye out for the grrrls and cheered from the sidelines. In the early ‘90s I gave birth to a potential Riot Boy – and that’s a task in itself: how to raise a boy as if he might one day raise children of his own?

Do you believe that prominent contemporary female artists create a better atmosphere for other women working as same, or is it really about their own self-advancement following the queen bee model? Or is the real problem that man-world can appreciate only one of us at a time?

I always believe that there’s safety in numbers so really, the more female names on the art roster the better. Earlier this year there was a flurry of debate around the F word – feminism – on both sides of the Atlantic. Is she, isn’t she? Was she, wasn’t she? I always felt completely at ease with ‘feminist’ as one of many possible terms of endearment. When I first heard the name, The Women’s Liberation Movement, I thought that it sounded fantastic; I wanted to e first in the queue. That queue in Wigan was fairly small at that time, which was surprising. I had a postcard of an early Lancashire suffragette pinned to my wall. She wore clogs and a shawl and was escorted either side by twp policemen as they arrested her. And yes, to your question of the female in the spotlight, there does seem to be a limit to our numbers; it sometimes seems still to have an air of occasion that we are even here at all.

What does the landscape of seaside towns like Morecambe and Heysham do for your work? I’ve been through Heysham and found that desolation particularly focused the mind.

In 2002, I made a very conscious decision to exchange the harsh landscape of north Manchester – literal and psychological – for that of reflective seascape. I felt as if I had existed on margins of culture and I wanted to mirror this geographically and so I choose to live in a remote village next to the sea. I find that I can work with absolute focus here – there really aren’t any distractions and I like the idea of a tidal existence, ebb and flow. The most direct link that I can see between the landscape and the work that I am making now, is the reflective surface - in nature it’s the sea at low tide providing a vast silver pool, in my new work it’s the incorporation of mirrors, endlessly reflecting the female gaze back to the viewer.

Graphic designers affect, influence and make art; when you were at art college this was not yet accepted or obvious. Today, things like technology and objective relativism have gone some way towards demolishing those boundaries and critics are now examining your collected work in this new light. What do you think took them so long?

The art historical spotlight moves in mysterious ways.

Whether recorded or visual, I viewed your work as intervention and critique. When an artist becomes more accepted by the critics of the day, how does it affect the critique carried in the work?

Then the task of history has become very exacting, and sometimes repetitive. It has to be said again and again, that these works were made in this place, at this time, as one individual’s reaction to that specific culture. As Jon Savage says, “Always go back to the work”. Not to tell history in a romantic way, or an exaggerated way, but actually in quite a delicate way, avoiding the clout of confidence that hindsight can give. Singing lyrics in a vocal booth made from a wardrobe in a ‘recording studio’ in a flat in Hulme in 1981, can now seem eccentric, determined and absurd – it was all three – but at the time, none of us knew what the consequence of that would be. If you listen to most Ludus records they still sound clunky and perpetually hard to place. Generationally, there seems to be a drive now to elevate and mythologise anyone that dared to release a record or write a fanzine. As James Nice, from LTM records has pointed out, playing guitar in Manchester in 1978 was the equivalent of doing military service at that time. With critique, it’s case of now you see it, now you don’t.

When and where are you happiest?

Too soon to say. Alone with a Mivvi ice cream, perhaps?

Tell me about your upcoming shows at Stuart Shave/Modern Art and Baltic – what’s in them and how do you describe your work to people who are not familiar with it?

The Baltic show – Pretty Girl no 1 is named after a magazine of the same name that I bought in Manchester in 1976 – before Chief Constable James Anderton “cleaned up the city”. The magazine shows one woman in 24 different positions within a small constructed room; the cover says, “natural poses”. It’s a perfect illustration of the lexicon of pornography at that time. I applied one domestic object from a mail order catalogue to each page – illustrating a different lexicon – that of consumerism. At Baltic, you can see these images opposite the photographs from SheShe, a small publication made in collaboration with a Swiss photographer, Christina Birrer, in 1982. They are a series of portraits, a sort of Linder through the looking glass. I arrived at Birrer’s makeshift studio (lack of finance did not reflect lack of intent), with bandages, cling film, keys, mirrors and enough make up to make Danny la Rue blush. The results of this collaboration stare out from the white gallery walls in Newcastle now, although at the time you could buy SheShe with a Ludus cassette and badge for 50p. As it happens, Birrer and myself appeared in one of the very earliest issues of i-D. We were photographed ironing things and trying them on – which, at the time, were all the qualifications you needed. That’s what we did in the early 1980’s – we “got ready”. The new work for Modern Art is made with ‘negs’ of female and gay porn; the images are really old and ‘healthy’ looking in that mid-century way; also before Woolfenden gay porn had to be quite discreet and in the eye of the beholder. In using negatives I can make the images I produce as big as I like to fit each other whereas when I made work using old magazines and catalogues I was really limited by the size of the pages. When I return from London I’m getting to work on them – isn’t it amazing what can be had on eBay? Another thing I’m excited about is my first trip to Berlin; despite my love of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch and all these others, not to mention Weimar culture generally, I have still never been there and so there is something wonderful and slightly romantic about the idea of taking my own work back to Germany and completing that circle as well!

Can the underground – what you once called ‘the secret public’ in a ‘zine of the same name – still exist amidst the fast pace of culture and commerce?

Looking back to the days of The Secret Public, there were all sorts of gaps and space. If life pre-Google can be imagined, pre-Nokia, pre-Microsoft, pre-iPod et al, then you can see that we had a lot of time on our hands and only three television channels in the evening for distraction. Something had to happen. For a ‘secret public’ to exist now, a space for secrets has first to be found.