»The Working Class Goes to Paradise« was the name of a performance that was (re-)staged at Tate Britain in April 2006. The working class in paradise: the English artist Linder (born Linder Sterling) first translated this messianic wish into a performance concept in 2000. In it, the story of the American Shaker movement, which was founded by Manchester-born Ann Lee and is one of the central themes of Dan Graham’s »Rock My Religion«, is adapted for the present day – with four rock groups playing simultaneously, a number of eminent historical women and Linder herself as Saint Wilgefortis, the patron saint of all unhappy women and anorexics. A kind of basic configuration that has been characteristic of Linder’s work for thirty years is discernible in this mixture of social movements, feminism and rock music. This body of work disappeared from public awareness with the demise of the post-punk band that she founded, Ludus (active from 1978 to 1983), and has now, over the past five years, been undergoing a gradual rediscovery and/or updating. A retrospective in the Magasin in Grenoble, planned for August, a recently published catalogue book and the reprinted back catalogue of Ludus are going towards raising »Linderland«, as the artist likes to describe her multidisciplinary field of work, from media oblivion.
Everything had begun with graphic design and photo collages in the Manchester of the mid-seventies. Using a scalpel and magazine photographs as her »painting tools«, she not only translated the emerging punk sentiments into paradigmatic montages, but also brought to bear a strong female element within the largely macho punk movement. A naked woman’s body with an iron instead of a head and lips painted on the breasts with make-up provided the often reproduced cover motif for the Buzzcocks’ single »Orgasm Addict«. The fanzine »The Secret Public« (1978) that she brought out together with Jon Savage contained more of her acclaimed pornography-meets-household-furnishings collages. A woman, bound and with a tea kettle as a head, allegorised another pioneering punk motto: »Another Music in a Different Kitchen«.
The work of her group Ludus was devoted to a different form of music, less obsessed with maleness and less boorish. Ludus’ music is characterised on the one hand by angular rhythmical structures that continually permeate each other and on the other by guitar runs that drew increasingly on the African highlife style. In this way, it fitted into the post-punk universe, but was still a little at odds with the coldness and general distance from the world so fashionable there. This was due not only to Linder’s cascades of screams, somewhat redolent of Yoko Ono, abruptly combined with African feel-good melody and glass-clear jazz filling. Her lyrics, from the programmatic »Anatomy Is Not Destiny« to the sexually ironic »My Cherry Is in Sherry«, also created a pop-feminist space of resonance that at the time was to be found only in The Slits or the Raincoats, if at all.
A Ludus performance in November 1982 in the Haçienda took the confrontative element – and the discomfort of the mainly male audience – to an extreme: Linder had made herself a dress of chicken meat, and when she allowed it to fall off at the end, what appeared was not the expected nakedness, but a black dildo. The person who was fascinated by this kind of sexual politics (although he himself was to express it in a completely different way) was Morrissey, the singer of the then newly founded band The Smiths and a close friend of Linder. In the above-mentioned catalogue book, he explains the music of Ludus with the »failure to find personal gratification, for which the singing of those songs momentarily restored the balance«. He was also to make it possible for Linder to progress quietly, away from art and the stagnating independent field, as his court photographer in the nineties. It was not until the end of the nineties that Linder gradually returned, in exhibitions like »What Did You Do in the Punk War, Mummy?« and »Punk Graphic Design in Britain«, where her historical place of honour in the movement was reaffirmed.
Today, Linder is working – besides on the working class’s entry into paradise – on photo montages again. Nowadays she takes her raw material from ballet calendars and rose catalogues, and no longer from porn mags and kitchenware catalogues. But the montage of naked women’s bodies and household utensils still preoccupies her – as an »empowering collision of opposites in all its mutual resonance and absurdity«. Which the working class can only dream about.

The book »Linder – Works 1976 –2006« was published in June 2006 by JRP Ringier (http://www.jrp-ringier.com).
The CDs »The Damage«, »The Visit/The Seduction« and »Pickpocket/Danger Came Smiling« were issued in 2002 on the label LTM (http://www.ltmpub.freeserve.co.uk/ltmhome.html).
The exhibition »Replay – sphere punk« could be seen in Le Magasin - Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble from 4 June to September 2006 (http://www.magasin-cnac.org/).

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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