Sorcha Dallas

In the mud 70s punk emerged as a defiant response to a point in British history when the future seemed impossible, the past irrelevant and the dominant hegemony stifling. Music, art and the visual landscape took on polite society with an attitude of resistance that articulated a creeping dissatisfaction with the way things were. At the Barbican Art Gallery ‘Panic Attack: Art in the Punk Years’, eruditely curated by Mark Sladen and Ariella Yedgar, explores the practices of artists fused into the sensibility of the, now historically categorised, punk/post-punk condition. ‘Panic Attack’ underlines that punk was far from a simple gesture of persuading the Sex Pistols to swear on national television: it was an extended moment of urgency where a politics of conduct railed against the silent consensus.

Included in ‘Panic Attack’ is a selection of photomontages by Linder that juxtapose material sourced from mass-distributed magazines aimed at gender-specific readerships- both these ‘women’s’ and these ‘men’s’ magazines presuppose ideas of what a woman is and what she does. Linder’s practice has been included in a number of recent exhibitions and both her early and current work seems to be charged with a particular interrogative power that demands a contemporary rethinking of assumptions surrounding visual representations of power relationships. The performance The Working Class Goes to Paradise – that collided Shaker rituals with three bands playing simultaneously for four hours – was programmed into the Tate Triennial 2006; the ICA exhibition of this year ‘The Secret Public: The Last Days of the British Underground 1978-88’ (see AM306) was named after the one-off 1978 fanzine Linder co-founded with the writer Jon Savage; and a survey of her work is on show now at PS1 New York.

Through collage, performance and music Linder’s practice over the last three decades questions the position of gender identity and commodification of the female body in society. PS1 features her photomontages alongside documentation of the artist playing with her band Ludus at the Hacienda in 1982 – and three vitrines of ephemera, including flyers for Manchester record labels Factory Records and New Hormones, writings and her 1977 Buzzcock’s Orgasm Addict sleeve where a stretching female torso tilts her steam-iron head. One displayed text announces: ‘you abuse my sexuality – you take it and make it your commodity – I’m your property – use me to sell man made machines masculine dreams.’ Linder’s work is a refusal to accept such a possible world. The ‘Pretty Girl’ series of 1977 depicts women in various domestic situations engaged in chores such as selecting a bottle from the drinks cabinet – always unclothed and in glamour-model poses. In each image the women’s head is replaced with an appliance, most designed for timesaving homemaking. Linder describes that she ‘wanted to mate the G-Plan kitchens with pornography, [to] see what strange strange breed came out’ with these ‘peculiar jigsaws highlighting these various cultural monstrosities that I felt there were at the time’. As with John Stezaker’s male-female fusions and Hannah Hoch’s rearticualtion of the body, Linder splinters gender misrepresentations to dissolve the power and fictional nature of such assumptions.

In an interview in 2004 Linder replied to the superficially meaningless question ‘What is the strangest item of clothing you have ever worn?’ with the statement ‘In 12982 I wore a dress made of raw meat. I was a vegetarian. My group Ludus was playing at the Hacienda and various points needed to be made’. This documented performance in the opening year of the Hacienda screened within the PS1 exhibition space explicitly lays bare the gender politics at stake in Linder’s work. During the set Linder rips off the dress constructed from netting and chicken meat, in a style that cuttingly apes the skirt-ripping Eurovision Song Contest dance of teh same year by Bucks Fizz, to reveal a large dildo. In reflecting such throwaway mainstream television gestures overlooked as harmless choreography within the male-dominated context of Hacienda, where soft porn was often an ambient backdrop, the unacceptability of generic female gender representation is made plainly apparent by Linder’s gestures. The recent attention being given to Linder’s powerful work is a signal that various points still need to be made. The currency of these statements tunes in to a contemporary revival of dissatisfaction.