Sorcha Dallas

It took a mild BBC documentary series on the so-called ‘loony left’ of the 70s and 80s to remind me exactly of the noxious context into which artist Linder Sterling first inserted her work. One of the programmes told of how the GLC, then London’s ruling body, banned sexist advertising on the Underground. An example of the kind of picture they had in mind was an ad for a brand of sticky-backed plastic which used an image of a naked woman covered with a wood-effect finish. Did every red-blooded heterosexual London male make a stampede to the shops to buy the stuff? We never found out, but the wood woman had good company; her sisters could be seen on hoarding after hoarding.

Into this commercial landscape, Linder (she dropped the surname early), then a Manchester art student already famous on the city’s nascent punk scene, did a simple thing. She clipped the torso of a nude female from a porn magazine, stuck an iron on her head and replaced the nipples with two sets of lipsticked mouths. This untitled collage, later used on the cover of Buzzcocks’ “Orgasm Addict”, has been an icon of British punk art ever since.

Given this bald fact, it’s astonishing that Lionel Bovier’s ‘Linder: Works 1976-2006’ is actually the first monograph ever to be produced on the British artist. It’s a suitably lavish edition, covering Linder’s art in all its myriad manifestations, starting with her first tentative punk productions and following through to her performances with Ludus and, most recently, at Tate Britain with the mass of noise, dance, mysticism and whiskers which is her ongoing project ‘The Working Class Goes To Paradise’. There are essays from Jon Savage (with whom Linder produced the fanzine The Secret Public in the late 70s), old friend Morrissey and writers and critics Lynne Tillman, Philip Hoare, Andrew Renton and Paul Bailey.

There are touching reminiscences from Linder herself. She describes punk in 1976 as a “transformative raiment” – though it still took guts to go to the corner shop looking “visibly different from every other member of society and at every moment of very day”. It is Paul Bailey who, in his introduction, asks the obvious question: “Why is Linder not better known?” His answer – that she is “a fugitive artist”, one who has worked without the support of the official art and music industries for decades – certainly goes some way to explaining Linder’s too-long sojourn on the sidelines. Another was the breadth of Linder’s work: multimedia art is not a new concept, but it is an idea that has had to be re-learned by these more heterogeneous times.

Jamie Reid, whose rougher edged cut-ups adorned The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks and who came to be recognised as punk’s unofficial typographical tactic, was the other collagist of that era. But while he and Linder were undoubtedly influenced by John Heartfield’s incendiary anti-fascist works, it’s arguable that Reid’s work was both a provocation against and a response to punk’s emphasis on social atomisation on the one hand, and DIY ethics on the other. Linder tapped into another current, one which took Richard Hamilton’s Pop Art swipes at domestic dystopias and Martha Rosler’s feminist performances, and which respectively reprised and anticipated Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman’s play on the nature and construction of female identity.

A student with a commercial art degree, Linder studied outside the fine art tradition, and it’s arguable that her work straddles this divide. It thrives on the directness of pop imagery, taking up its energy and reflecting it onto more shadowy areas. Her Buzzcocks sleeve is one of several of her collages which conflate images of sexual desire and consumer aspiration. Of course, there is a violence to them – the “Orgasm Addict” image is as unfit for purpose as Man Ray’s pin-studded iron – but also a sly entryist tactic. Linder is using commercial images to enter and subvert a sexualised marketplace. Like Warhol, this is fine art out of mass production. Unlike Warhol Linder is, one might say, a Guerilla Girl avant la lettre.