Greek gods, sporting heroes and French film stars: Linder’s new exhibition is full of icons and idols. Which is pretty appropriate, considering the revered position the English collage artist has come to occupy in art over the last 50 years of cut-up photomontaging – a journey which has taken her from punk pioneer to counter-cultural icon.
Her latest show at central London gallery Modern Art marks half a century since Linder – birth name Linda Mulvey – first picked up a Swann-Morton medical grade scalpel and started slicing magazine imagery to make satirical takedowns of gender norms and societal oppression. It’s her first show in London since last year’s landmark retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. “The Hayward show was significant in so many ways,” she tells Broadsheet. “I’d had a major retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in 2013 but it seemed as if I would forever be invisible in the capital city here.”
The Hayward show was a proper celebration of what makes Linder so special. Her unique and immediately recognisable style has graced classic record covers by bands like the Buzzcocks and Magazine; she’s had shows at museums around the world; she’s made ballets, fronted punk bands; she’s a radical who has had a genuine, profound impact on the art of the UK.
But her show at Modern Art, called Where the Tongue Slips It Speaks Truth, is a chance to take a quieter, more intimate approach. “I love the proportions of Where the Tongue Slips It Speaks Truth. Intimacy feels very important right now,” she says. “Truth feels very important now. Conversations have to happen. Visitors will be up very close up to every cut I’ve made in every work.”
The works are filled with references to ancient Greece, a lifelong fascination. “I was hooked on mythology from an early age. I spent time in Delphi and Athens last year, walking along the same path walked upon centuries ago to the temple of the seeress Pythia.” The appeal, apparently, is in the unknowable: “Whether answering the questions of kings or the enslaved, Pythia replied to all questions via a riddle. Each photomontage that I make is a riddle of sorts,” she says.
Other subjects include the footballer Miguel Azeez, and controversial French New Wave film star Brigitte Bardot, who recently died after spending her later years dedicated to both animal rights and anti-immigration, Islamophobic rhetoric. “When I was growing up in the ’60s, Brigitte Bardot was an erotic cipher floating across the Channel to an England still coy about such matters.” There are also four photomontages in the show made from ’60s publicity photos of Bardot, in each her face has been obscured with images of English pottery, “pointing towards the mistrust and containment of liberated women at that time,” Linder says. But what Bardot eventually became isn’t ignored either. “Bardot’s subsequent political hardening in the kiln of the far right haunts these works too.”
Because Linder has never shied away from confronting difficult topics. “Let’s remind ourselves that photomontage emerged from WWI with artists in Switzerland observing the cut-up bodies of soldiers returning home from WW1. In art, sometimes the knife can deliver what the brush never can.”
Linder: Where The Tongue Slips it Speaks Truth runs from now until February 21.
