Sorcha Dallas

Over the past three decades, Linder (aka Linder Sterling, nee Linda Mulvey) has carved out a position as one of punk’s leading visual innovators. Her early achievements include cofounding and singing for the band Ludus, designing the sleeve of the Buzzcocks’ 1977 ‘Orgasm Addict’ single, and cofounding the British zine The Secret Public, which she filled with her explicit collages. This exhibition features a career-spanning selection of Linder’s work, including photographs from her series ‘Pretty Girls’, 1977-2007 – twenty-four shots of photocollages assembled from pornographic and women’s magazines. Set in pristine mid-twentieth-century interiors, each features a nude figure whose head and/or sexual organs have been replaced with an object, oftentimes a mechanical device (an oven, a Polaroid camera) – a nod to the clinical eroticism of modernist design. The sanitized pinup aesthetic Linder constructs has barely changed over the years, a continuity that allows her work to link past and present through the common denominator of materialism. When ‘Pretty Girls’ was shown earlier this year in New York at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, it seemed like a comment on the rise of Britain’s economy from stagnancy in the 1970s to postmillenium flashiness. However, in London, when seen alongside Untitled, 2006, a suite of neo-romantic ballet dancers whose heads have been replaced with roses in bloom, and the artist’s trio of large-scale black-and-white photocollages on aluminium in which a nude woman in repose is overlaid with colorful digital flowers, the photographs seem less politically overt and more compositionally involved. Linder’s work was once seen primarily in terms of its similarities to British Pop art, mainly that of Richard Hamilton, and to Dada, and one of the artist’s relationship to punk and feminism. This exhibition shows that Linder’s art has emerged stronger for its associations while remaining distinctly its own thing. DIY at its punk best.