Sorcha Dallas

So, what is the point of 40 tap dancers? On a Friday morning in early April this is the artist Linder’s most pressing issue. And it is giving her slight existential turbulence. Sitting in her Lancashire home, she drifts off in thought, contemplating the sound of scores of tap dancers echoing through the Arches in Glasgow, where she is planning her one-off mammoth show for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts (GI). Eventually she comes back to the conversation. “The sheer beauty and glory of 40 tap dancers. That’s very seductive. They are agents of glamour …”

Linder has popped up during zeitgeist moments in popular music, visual art, photography and performance art in the northwest of England over the last 35 years. She is a Scouse and Manc Zelig. At heart, though, she is an etymologist. She chews words over like cud. Breaks them down. Finds nutrients in their hidden and archaic meanings. And the word that currently possesses her is “glamour”.

It runs like a thread through The Darktown Cakewalk: Celebrated From The House Of Fame, her upcoming 13-hour show for GI. She is on a mission to remind Scotland that the word’s source lies here. In the 1600s, it was used in Glasgow and Edinburgh to describe a spell or an enchantment. Women were killed as witches for their “glamour”. Today, however, they are feted for it on TV talent shows. “The X Factor becomes the Hex Factor,” says Linder.

From 11am on April 23, she intends to play with glamour’s mutating, shifting persona over 13 hours. She struggles to describe exact details because she does not quite know herself. It will have a few set characters, a muse, a witch, a pop starlet, but will be mostly improvised dance, music and visuals. More than 100 people are involved, including a troupe of Finnish tango dancers, Stuart McCallum from The Cinematic Orchestra and fashion designer Richard Nicoll. It will be so improvised that Nicoll will be designing and making Linder’s outfits throughout.

“The show is also partly pure curiosity,” she says. “What happens to the audience, what happens to a ballerina in 13 hours, what happens to a double bass player in 13 hours? So maybe I’m a scientist too. Maybe I’m just doing social experiments. The star of the piece is time itself. We’re all subservient to time.”

The audience can dip in and out of the Arches throughout the day, leaving during a witch trial, returning several hours later to find a bathing beauties contest. They could even visit the Sorcha Dallas gallery to see a new exhibition of Linder’s collage art. But the Arches show is her signature art form made flesh. “This is going to be the ultimate expression of that,” she says. “It will be 13 hours of collage in flux. It’s a very democratic way to work. Everybody influences everyone else. There is no one element dominating at all. That’s exciting to the artist.”

Apply Linder’s forensic foraging of language to the show’s deliberately clunky title, and it opens up like a puzzle box. The Darktown Cakewalk exists as a piece of sheet music from 1899. A Cakewalk refers to a dance that originated amongst black slaves on sugar plantations in the 1800s that mocked the rich white owners promenading in their glamorous finery. In a move that Linder describes as “racial pinball”, the rich white people soon appropriated the promenading dance for themselves.

The second half of the title comes from a subtitle to a 1609 Ben Jonson play, which is riven with the witchcraft hysteria of the time and features a Jacobean form of entertaining promenading, the masque. All glamorous in their own way. “Glamour is my Trojan horse,” she says. “I never do things with big sloganeering. Someone said I make the explicit implicit. That’s a good thing. You can use entertainment to lull people into reflecting on profound themes in a far more open way.”

Like the words she de-constructs, Linder has meant many things to many people in many times. To her family she is Linda Mulvey, born in Liverpool in 1954. To the singer Morrissey she is a friend and confidante. “On my most dark days when you wonder ‘why bother?’ – and there have been many over the years – he has been the one saying ‘bother’,” she explains.

To a generation weaned during the winter of discontent she is a post-punk muse. She used her signature collage technique to design the cover of the Buzzcocks single Orgasm Addict, a naked woman with an iron for a head and Cheshire cat grins for nipples, and dated Howard Devoto from Magazine. To feminists she was a radical provocateur who wore a dildo while playing a gig with her band Ludus at the Hacienda in 1982, and made jewellery designed to look like bloodied tampons. Now aged 55, her punkish howls have mellowed and moved on from three-chord, phlegmic polemic. Performance art is now her way of dealing with the everyday. “It is my compensatory pleasure,” she says.

In 1998, she filled a disused school with industrial salt. In 2000, she filmed a series of videos based upon Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, with Linder playing Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name and young Manchester men standing in as cowboys. And now there is the 13-hour Cakewalk, her most ambitious “compensatory pleasure” yet, and one she uses rather non-punk language to describe.

“It’s a lovely warm bath, and you will really want to stay there,” she said. “The luxury of having all that time really affects you. Everything slows down. And I’m very excited about experiencing that.”

Linder is not crass enough to say that this is the new punk – she is too careful and considered in her language to do that – but she does see some parallels with the scene in which she was one of the key iconographers.

“When I look back to British culture in the late 1970s, the 7-inch, two-and-a-half minute single was very radical,” she says. “They were vital because the culture was quite slow and sluggish. And the actions to do with protest were like punk itself: spiky, pointed, fast. Now we’re in a culture of instant gratification and soundbites. Everything is so quick.

“So now the most radical thing to do is 13 hours of the most intricate dissonance, consonance, harmonic, rhythmic possibilities you can think of. And the shocks come in more subtle ways. We live in a culture bombarded by stuff – whether pornographic or very, very violent. The most radical thing is to get rid of the stuff, empty out and slow down. So I think the most radical acts are the most slow, clunky, inarticulate ones.”

As the interview continues, she stops in the middle of several answers to go back to the root of key words, like a living breathing Oxford English Dictionary. She atomises “entertain” (“‘Tain’ means to hold, ‘enter’ between. Holding between. So what are we holding between ourselves?”) and “confidence” (“‘con’ means with; ‘fider’ is strength”), before she eventually stumbles into the apocryphal tale of how Michelangelo viewed unwieldy lumps of Carrara marble. “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set it free,” he is reported to have said. And with it she laughs and makes a confident and entertaining statement about her own GI show.

“I’m Michelangelo, and time is my big slab,” she says. “OK everyone, here’s this big slab. Carve it, shape it, any way you will. Here we go. Here’s a hammer, here’s a chisel. Off you go.”