Sorcha Dallas

Linder’ s practice comprises collage, photography and performance, weaving a concern with the presentation of self through an attack on stereotypical images of femininity put to the service of consumerism. Inflected by the punk context in which she performed in the band Ludus from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, Linder ‘s work is nevertheless underwritten by a wider exploration of the relations between the individual and collective, or society and the outsider. To this end she has inhabited the characters of figures such as Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker movement in Manchester in the Eighteenth Century, or Clint Eastwood, playing the fictional lone cowboy, combining cross-historical identification with the disruption of gender norms.

In April this year, Linder staged a performance work, The Working Class Goes to Paradise, at Tate Britain. The piece comprised an intense four hour ritual for which Linder invited three indie bands from Lancashire to play continuously, whilst twelve women performed repetitive movements taken from drawings of Shaker rituals. Linder herself appeared in a variety of guises involving make-up, costume and prosthetics. The audience were admitted only for two hours within the overall event.

Catherine Wood: You have related your interest in the Shaker movement and it’s founder, Ann Lee, to your own early involvement in the Punk scene in Manchester, seeing some kind of equivalence between these two ‘outsider’ positions and you have said “Punk was for me a form of transformative raiment”. Therefore is there also a parallel in terms of the spiritual nature of belief?

Linder: I began to study the life of Ann Lee (1736 · 1784) in the last year of the twentieth century. At that time, I felt on many levels, to be in a position of exile – especially creatively – and it was difficult to remember whether that exile had been culturally enforced or self-imposed. I felt invisible. As I read about Lee ‘s life and traced her steps throughout the city of Manchester – her path there is also invisible – I became fascinated with how her host city had received her. The eye witness reports of early Shaker gatherings could almost have been exchanged with the media coverage of the early Punk concerts in England, both were met with intense hostility, verging on hatred, from the wider world. I envied Ann Lee’s faith, as I felt that I had no faith. For the few months in 1976 when punk first happened in the UK, belief and behaviour were inevitably smashed and broken. This was very liberating, but then little was offered in exchange. I remember seeing a documentary about Cecil Collins at that time in which he said, “Nihilism is so easy” and I knew that he was right. For me, however, it took a long time for my ‘Fool’ to meet her ‘Angel’.

CW: Could you say something about how these parallel concerns came together when you staged the performance within the museum in The Working Class Goes to Paradise, in the church –like ‘Duveen galleries’ at Tate Britain and whether you saw the intervention as a form of ‘institutional critique’?

L: I had never visited a gallery until I was sixteen years of age. A school trip was organised (I lived in a small mining village near Wigan) and we were taken to what was then the Tate Gallery at Millbank. I remember being as much overcome with the scale of the building, as by the paintings upon the walls. To take The Working Class Goes To Paradise to the Duveen galleries thirty-five years later, felt like connecting a loop, between past and present, north and south, viewer and viewed. The first performance of The Working Class Goes To Paradise took in north Manchester in 2000 without an audience – no one was invited, it was a self contained and private affair. When the invitation was extended by Tate Britain earlier this year to repeat the piece, there was an automatic hesitation on my part; the dynamics of the performance seemed so tethered to the geography of the north Manchester wastelands. I had my anxieties too, about gentrification. I did not want to get sidetracked into the issues of ‘institutional critique’ because, by its very nature, The Working Class Goes To Paradise confronts audience, venue and the expectations of all concerned – not least myself. It is a piece which nearly always claims victims. When it finally happened, I was aware of the ‘Gothic Nightmares’ exhibition below the performance area, and of how the sound vibrations from three rock groups travelled throughout the galleries and collections beyond. Ann Lee preached and protested in Manchester cathedral – for which she was arrested and imprisoned. Andrew Renton now would like to take the piece to Tel Aviv.

CW: You have said, “my mother once said ‘we were too poor to be photographed’ and there began my life’s fascination with the medium.” In your work the image is very much associated with power, is your own manipulation of given images (capitalist advertising) a way of wrestling back some power, not straightforwardly as a consumer but as a user?

L: Eleanor Anlin told me that she often walked out of cinemas because she hated becoming a slave to narrative. To prohibit my slavery to images that I see around me, I have developed a process of looking at media and consumer images in the same way that a supermarket checkout scans product barcodes. A lot of advertising is incredibly fragile, a world of promise on a pin head; it can be disturbed and dismembered very easily. Still, I love the pure potential of photography and also the fact that the etymological root of ‘camera’ is ‘dark chamber’.

CW: Jon Savage described your mutual approach to making collage, using images from magazines, as ‘performing cultural post-mortems’ on found material…

L: I’ve returned to photomontage now for the first time in thirty years and I was instantly reminded of how clinical a process it is. I wear white gloves, have a sheet of immaculately clean glass to cut on, use a surgeon’s scalpel and magnifying spotlight. The only anachronism is the Pritt stick! I use images from magazines and books from the formative years of my sexuality, there’s still something there that has to be for ever cut up, rearranged and glued down until I make sense of something. Rapunzel had to find the name, I have to make the picture – then I can live happily ever after.

CW: The female subject through sexuality, domesticity, myth or fairytale and gender identity seems to be a prevailing theme throughout your work, often posed as a question of self-presentation. Could you say something about the different guises and disguises you have adopted – such as the Clint Eastwood character in The Working Class Goes To Paradise – and how they evolved? I am also wondering about the Christ-like connotations of the Eastwood disguise, which became apparent during the performance, and whether they were intentional?

L: In the past I used images of women from advertising, fashion and pornography. I photographed Manchester transvestites in 1976 to look at their use of guise. A little later I worked with photographer Birrer and arrived at her studio with cling film, bandages, keys, a breastplate, corsets, a vanity case of make-up, cut up magazines and then played with these in front of her camera. In 2000, with The Return of Linterland, I became very interested in the construction of masculinity. I filmed and photographed gangs in north Manchester and immersed myself in films of Sergio Leone. The Man with No Game – Clint Eastwood – seemed a perfect body to inhabit, a desired shapeshift, and the ‘malign all masculine world’ that he inhabited, was somehow archetypal enough to allow the mirroring of contemporary violence and nihilsm of parts of north Manchester. Leone did describe Eastwood as “a grizzled Christ” figure – the first time we see him he’s on a donkey and not on the hero’s steed. Ann Lee had been described by her followers as the second Christ and had been dragged from her bed and had her skirt publicly lifted in order to prove her gender. The Working Class Goes To Paradise created the psychic container in which to montage all the above, using time as glue, and my body instead of as sheet of glass. The Christ like connotations were not consciously invoked at the Tate, but enough eye witnesses have remarked upon it to make me realise that something fairly potent did happen.

CW: Regarding your manipulation of self-image, how far did that extend outside of your ‘artwork’ or grow from the way you dressed every day as a punk in the 1970s…was your work influenced by artists like Claude Cahun or Cindy Sherman at that point or born out of private experiment?

L: In the late 1970’s it was incredibly difficult to find out about artists such as Claude Cahun or Cindy Sherman. I used to religiously buy the British feminist magazine, Spare Rib, which was one of the few magazines that would focus on women’s art, as well as politics and culture in general. Even so, whether it was information about contemporary female artists or those from the past, it was incredibly hard to find. The feminist scholars were only just getting to the task of writing and then they all had to find publishers too – this took time. For me, I found that drawing on my face or paper were really one and the same thing. As a teenager I had been fascinated with Aubrey Beardsley and I think he had as strong an influence on my make up as Barbara Hulanicki. And then of course, as a generation, we were all very aware of Warhol and The Factory. During 1976 it was time for us to practice as he preached – not easy in Salford.

CW: You saw the ‘The Secret Public’ – a fanzine you produced with Jon Savage – as both a manifesto and a ‘pamphleteering’ device. What were the clearest strands of its political message?

L: The loudest voices in Punk tended to be male and heterosexual. ‘The Secret Public’ was produced by a gay man and a feminist, so already we had an advantage. For my generation, the slogan was, ‘the personal is political’, and Jon and I had no hesitation about simply making representations of a world that we feared we may have to inhabit. My photomontages were mainly claustrophobic domestic interiors and Jon’s crazed exterior landscapes. ‘The Secret Public’ was really a rallying call for a different way of seeing, of developing an X ray vision, so that when moments of seduction happened within popular culture, a loss of consciousness, then “poppies would not make them sleep” to paraphrase the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

CW: You and Jon Savage identified equivalence between DJ-ing and cut-and-paste collage, “Chad Jackson was mixing vinyl like I mixed photographs and glue”. How much was the punk aesthetic made possible or born out of technology and how much a reaction against it?

L: The act of photomontage was relatively democratic. In theory, anyone with a pair of scissors, some glue and a magazine could make something. Technology oddly, mainly hindered. In 1977, there was only one photocopying bureau in Manchester and the assistant there saw my work as purely pornographic and refused to duplicate it. Jon had a far easier time in London, whilst I had to meet the manager in Manchester and declare my intentions as honorable. The printers of ‘The Secret Public’ too would only print for cash, no receipt. Duplication was never easy then.

CW: Are you interested in a sense of dark comedy to your work, for example in the breasts with smiling mouths in your famous Orgasm Addict, or would you say the work is more threateningly ‘surrealist’ in tone, the ‘vagina demura’.

L: It ‘s always interesting showing my work to people for the first time, because they often laugh very loudly at certain pieces. In the montage used for Orgasm Addict the equation of the everyday is suddenly inverted, the answer not quite what was expected, there’s suddenly a punch line. Maybe the tradition of the Northern comic is mixed in with the glue I use, maybe I’m as much Max Wall as Max Ernst.

CW: How do you see the dialogue between visual art and music or pop culture at this point in time and compared to late 70s early 80s?

L: I see a lot of artists continuously referencing my generation. I lose count of the ‘quotes’ - visual or otherwise - from Morrissey, Ian Curtis or The Fall. It seems to be a male thing, the record collection paraded. The worlds of music and art still work in such completely different ways, for good or for bad, little has changed. In the late 70’s no one within visual art would have been caught dead with a guitar in hand, but even in those days there was always a guitarist or two, with a penchant for a palette.

CW: What are you working on now?

L: Roland Barthes was heard to murmur, “To get out, go in deeper.” This describes where I am at the moment.