Sorcha Dallas

Ten years ago, I was invited to Lincoln in the middle of Nebraskan prairie to lecture to the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Society on the Hon Stephen Tenant, the 1920’s aesthete and androgyne. I was told that the state was famous for the fact that aspirant transsexuals were sent there to live for a year in the guise of their chosen gender. If they could hack it in the Midwest, they’d proved themselves worthy of the op.

Ten years later, in Manchester which is looking (and acting) more like New York every day, I’m watching Linder Sterling, Mancunian punk legend, partner Howard Devoto, muse of Morrissey, photographer and artist, who has had herself prosthetically rebuilt to resemble Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. It’s a disturbing image, not least because the movie showing next door is Hilary Swank’s Oscar winning performance as Brandon Teena, the Nebraskan cross-dresser in ‘Boys Don’t Cry’.

Punks eyes glaze in rapture if you recall Sterling’s early work: the “Orgasm Addict” collage (1977) for the first post- Howard Devoto Buzzcocks single, a female nude with an iron head and lips in place of nipples; her floating symbolist alien heads for the cover of the first Magazine album. ‘Secret Public’, the collage magazine she made with the journalist Jon Savage in 1977 (now a collector’s item) was an eruption of Northern subversion, “a fanzine with production values,” she jokes. Her performances with her group, Ludus, at the Hacienda a couple of years later were confrontational affairs, in which she whipped aside a dress of red meat (Sterling, like Morrissey, is a vegetarian) to reveal an enormous dildo. Her riposte, she giggles, to Buck’s Fizz pulling off their skirts in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Two years ago, Sterling’s first retrospective show at the Cleveland Gallery in London was entitled, “What Did You Do in the Punk War, Mummy?” Charles Saatchi wanted to buy the lot. He was told they weren’t for sale. Described as “the missing link between Yoko Ono and Tracey Emin”, Sterling’s work bypasses current notions of metropolitan irony in a viable, self-sufficient alternative to the celebrity-obsessed art of Hoxton. It’s that much more edgy and dangerous: “Lowry with guns,” as one critic described it.

The recent Cornerhouse exhibition is the first outing of the ongoing project that is Linderland. Sterling was inspired by the founding of the Shaker cult by the 18th-century Mancunian mystic Ann Lee. Arrested for preaching in the streets, she would escape England for New York State. In the process Lee reinvented herself as the second physical embodiment of Christ; incensed mobs assaulted her, demanding to know her true sexuality. As with Brandon Teena in Nebraska, they seemed threatened by her gender and her self-faith.

It is Ann Lee’s Christ-like role that links her to the second component of “The Return to Linderland”: the pncho’d, cheroot-chewing Clint Eastwood, another nameless and redeeming figure, riding into town on a donkey. That image neatly segues into her third reference point: North Manchester itself. Her photographic diptyches contrast Lancashire western clubs, all twirling revolvers and Stetsons, with Mancunian lads on street corners showing off their Armani socks or bleeding from their heads after some unidentified bust-up. The effect is of dandy males parading themselves in a post-feminist, post-Loaded search for identity. But there are darker themes, too, undertones of persecution and mortality.

In 1997 Sterling was involved in a serious car crash which she survived, she says, because she was carrying with her a bottle of water from St Winefride’s shrine at Holywell. The event was a catalyst for Linderland, says Sterling, and as a result, the project explores the very notion of faith. In the process, Sterling is redefining Manchester’s myth.

She is almost willfully Northern in her aesthetic. Her last exhibited work was in a dilapidated former Catholic high school in Widnes. Sterling’s Salt Shrine was a half-glazed classroom filled to the windows with 42 tonnes of industrial salt. The effect was astounding: the room seemed luminous with the mineral, resonant with its sacred and corrosive qualities, and the institutional repression of the building itself. Nearby, in a deserted corridor, stood an abandoned statue of St Bernadette. Sterling’s salt was already beginning to spill out of a cracked window, and she looked forward to the building’s imminent destruction, when her piece would be ploughed back into the earth. Out of the “cleansing rite” as Sterling puts it, was born Linderland, a resurgent uprising of the North as poetic and polemical as that of Shelley, who two centuries ago wrote of a then-affluent region ruled over by “the helots of luxury”. Last Satruday, Sterling gathered three North Mancunian groups – lads with Beckham crops and more attitude than Liam Gallagher and Shaun Ryder put together – and had them play continuously for four hours in a blackened warehouse while she and three other women re-enacted Shaker ritual dances to projected backdrops of bearded female saints and engravings of Shaker meetings. The grinding repetitive riffs became totally hypnotic, inducing a trancelike state in the participants. It reminded me of Ian Curtis’s epileptic dances in front of Joy Division – a late 1970s industrial gothic manifestation of Shaker rites. But Sterling had also injected modern folk art into the piece, in the form of line-dancing – the logical heir of the Shaker’s ecstatic dances. Sterling’s current performance, “The Working Class Goes to Paradise”, is the most intense manifestation of Linderland to date. It’s community art taken tot a transcendent degree, as though the loosely gathered participants had entered into some weird transchronological state in North Manchester’s “deliquescing industrial hinterland”, as Sterling calls it; an area as bleak as Nebraska’s prairies.

With Sterling as its autofact, Linderland is the ongoing struggle. Aided only by organizations such as Cornerhouse and the Worker’s Film Association, her journey in Mancunian myth – from punk samizdat to spaghetti westerns – seems likely to continue without any assistance from the coffers of a London “swirling in a sea of sovereigns”, as the art historian William Gaunt wrote of a previous art boom. As manchester’s Buzzcocks once sang with passion, “I want autonomy”.