Sorcha Dallas

In a grimy back street in Bethnal Green an exhibition of Linder Sterling’s work is quietly enjoying its moment. The collages shown here, the medium for which Linder is best known, reach back 30 years to the hey-day of punk. Linder’s visual art is inextricably linked to the punk movement through her association with the Buzzcocks via her cover for ‘Orgasm Addict’, not to mention her own band Ludus. Both Ludus and Linder have been experiencing a renaissance of late with exhibitions of Linder’s work in other suitably industrial venues such as PS1 in New York and Gateshead’s Baltic gallery and retrospective reviews of Ludus releases on various music sites.

Neither the band nor the visual side of her work was ever in the spotlight when they were conceived and perhaps this is because they were both very difficult to consume by a mass audience. While other acts were delivering a very visceral, masculine performance Ludus created a sort of icy, punk-jazz sound while Linder infamously wore a dress made of meat at one Hacienda gig as a comment on the club’s archaic practice of showing porn. Her collages were equally challenging as they also included pornographic material in suffocating suburban interiors with faces replaced by household items or eyes and mouths torn or turned upside down. This was a subversion of the mainstream magazines at the time – film starlets and fast cars for the gents, and interiors and cooking for the ladies. Pornographic imagery is a two-a-penny in the art world these days and in magazines, a look at the latest wet t-shirt wearing, stoned, teenage girl in your average American Apparel ad will tell you that. In the North of England in the late 70s and early 80s this explicit material was still shocking to the general public.

So why is it relevant now? This recent release of Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic ‘Control’, a groundswell of interest in bands like XXTeens, who reference early British punk, and a long-lasting obsession in fashion for the aesthetic of early punk attire mean that Linder’s work seems current again. Not only this but the origins of her work in fanzines, magazines, invites, flyers and singles covers are once again recognized as viable artistic material with entire exhibitions dedicated to the art of the flyer. The overtly political imagery and the pro-feminist message is perhaps the only dated aspect of her work and it seems a sad thing to say that we have moved beyond protest and activism to irony and self-reference, a depressing march of progress.

The recent acquisition by Tate Britain of a few works including the image that was used for Orgasm Addict and a tie-in walk talk for Late at Tate see Linder finally being embraced as an important part of Britain’s artistic heritage. New work using digital processes to re-imagine 1960’s readers’ wives pictures in all their naïve, non-cosmetically enhanced glory see a distinct thread being explored anew in a time where society is more ready to accept and understand Linder’s work.