LONDON — For half a century, artist Linder has taken a scalpel to the pop culture images that define Euro-American culture. Working primarily with photomontage, her surgical dissections and monstrous re-assemblages offer insight into the insidious intersections of gender, desire, and commercialism at the heart of patriarchal capitalism’s imagery. Linder: Danger Came Smiling offers a punchy and thorough overview of Linder’s oeuvre, navigating the ways in which the artist has shifted mercurially between categories, from the fine art scene to documentary photography to the wild underworld of punk music and beyond.
Some of Linder’s earliest photomontages remain her most powerful. For instance, a set of untitled works from the mid-1970s combines images from contemporary advertising with pornographic images of women to create darkly comedic parodies of domestic life. In one piece, a woman’s naked torso emerges from a frying pan resting on a sleek kitchen worktop. She has a blender for a head, with eyes and lips cut from fashion photoshoots. In another, a woman in lingerie appears to pose for a giant camera in her bedroom, but she has a vacuum cleaner for a face.
Similarly, in the 1977 series Pretty Girls, a nude female model poses in classic “pin-up” poses around a domestic space, her face masked by spliced photographs of items such as coffee pots, record players, and irons. By digging into the visual language of both pornography and advertising aimed at women, these images effectively subvert deep-seated societal assumptions about the roles and wants of women. Here, domestic space is transformed from an idealized and commercialized haven into a dystopian site of dysmorphia, control, and surveillance, in which the boundaries between woman and object are blurred.
In many of her more recent works, Linder eschews domestic objects for luscious images of flowers, often using them to obscure pornographic scenes, much like the fig leaves of classical sculpture. In these pieces, Linder draws attention to the complex symbolism of flowers, which mark key life events, from birth to marriage to death; show romantic intentions; represent femininity; and act as memento mori in the still life tradition. In Linder’s surgical interventions, women and plants become hybrids, caught in a state of metamorphosis that speaks to the fluidity of gender, and positions both bodies and blooms as sites of resistance against the binaries of patriarchy.
Linder’s world is one of punk disregard for the rules, filled with subversion and brash beauty. She repeatedly exaggerates the aesthetics of desire until they reach absurdity or grotesqueness, demonstrating how our expectations and yearnings are constantly manipulated by patriarchy and capitalist consumerism to unrealistic or unsustainable ends. In this context, cutting becomes a transformational act that dissects time and space, creating a language of simultaneous isolation and combination that remains as incisive today as it was half a century ago.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling continues at Hayward Gallery (Southbank Centre, Belvedere Rd, London) through May 5. The exhibition was curated by Rachel Thomas with Gilly Fox, Katie Guggenheim, and Charlotte Dos Santos.