Emily LaBarge
A retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery charts half a century of darkly humorous work by the punk-feminist artist.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling, installation view. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling, curated by Rachel Thomas with Gilly Fox, Katie Guggenheim, Charlotte Dos Santos, and Hannah Martin, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London,
through May 5, 2025
• • •
Mhmmmm, admit it: it might be from years ago, decades, in fact, but you identify with the woman in Untitled (1976), who—though locked in a seemingly loving embrace—is in the midst of stabbing her own eyes out with a giant fork. (Times are tough, am I right?) Or maybe it’s the woman, nude and trussed up, hands bound behind her back, knees shoved into a saucepan on a slick and otherwise tidy countertop, her head a blender affixed with mismatched eyes and a wide lipsticked smile, whose wonky, hysterical gaze arrests you. If not, there’s the lady in the lacey lingerie bodysuit with a hoover for a forearm and face; or another—amid the throes of passion with her oblivious, shag-haired partner—who clutches an orange vacuum (a lovely, brand-new model!) in one hand while cradling a stand mixer in her armpit. I CRAVED EXCITEMENT!, the image proclaims on a diagonal in jolly white typeface against bright red across its upper-left quadrant.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling, installation view. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower.
These darkly humorous photomontages open Danger Came Smiling, a retrospective of five decades of work by the feminist artist Linder. Born Linda Mulvey in Liverpool in 1954 (no relation, aside from political and conceptual, to the writer Laura Mulvey, whose famous 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” defined the problem of the “male gaze”), in 1976 she doffed her surname, and—inspired by the German Dadaist John Heartfield, whose 1930s photo collages mounted biting anti-fascist critiques—changed her given name to the Germanic “Linder.” In the same year, she also jettisoned her more traditional artmaking materials in favor of a scalpel and piles upon piles of magazines from across genres and gendered readerships—cars, DIY, music, gardening, fashion, interior décor, cookery, parenting, pornography.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling, installation view. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower.
The result is scrappy, intuitive, very funny images that bear the hallmarks of European collage forebearers like Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Richard Hamilton, and others (an alternate, more Surrealist lineage might include Dora Maar, Eileen Agar, Joseph Cornell). At the same time, these early works point to collage as a burgeoning medium for feminist artists interested in subverting the givens of gender and sexuality. Similar to her American contemporaries, Martha Rosler and Lynn Hershman Leeson, Linder slyly dismantled domestic interiors, replaced parts of (predominantly) female bodies with machines or electronic gadgets, and hinted at the latent violence and repression of the Western consumerist lifestyle and its manipulative visuals.
Linder, Untitled, 1976. Courtesy Tate. Photo: Tate. © Linder.
Linder’s sensibility, though, is stranger, more uncanny, luscious, illicit, disturbing, sexy, irreverent, and—what else to say but—punk, since she was, frankly, an epic one. Attending art school in Manchester in the mid-1970s, she described the genre, with its love of provocation, as arriving practically overnight: “punk was emerging in the summer of 1976 and by the spring of 1977 it had already made it into my mother’s copy of Woman’s Realm, with articles on how to knit your daughter a mohair jumper and make a binbag skirt.” (Perhaps Woman’s Realm was, like Linder’s grandmother’s favorite magazine, True Confessions, also a source for her collage materials.) Works from this time are all anarchically “untitled,” a rejection of the fine in fine art. Many take aim at the dehumanization of women, but it is perhaps romance that is exposed as the biggest fakery of all. (“Tell me about it,” I overheard one viewer say, looking at a picture of a woman with a cupcake for a head and a man with a toothy grin attached to his crotch, like some inverse vagina dentata.)
Linder: Danger Came Smiling, installation view. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower. Pictured: She/She, 1981.
“I have always treated myself as a found object,” Linder has said, a proposal that in her practice allows for, rather than objectification, transformation. In the second of four rooms, Linder herself becomes a tool for manipulation within images. In the wonderful She/She (1981), the artist appears in a series of black-and-white portraits that hang—alternating with lyrics from a song by her band at the time, Ludus (the show takes its title from one of their albums)—in a grid configuration. She drapes paper and cellophane over her head at various angles, as if collaging her own visage, choosing what to obscure or exaggerate. In one photograph, she holds up a torn image of a model’s face, almost seamlessly replacing the lower half of her own. Linder is and is not the torn image, is and is not herself, is and is not one-dimensional, three-dimensional, somewhere in between: “am I your death / behind my flesh / does my skull smile,” the unsung lyrics ask, without a question mark.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling, installation view. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower.
Around the same time, Linder started pumping iron, inspired by the bodybuilder Lisa Lyons, training every morning and recording the changes in her body. The thirty-minute video YMCA Redux (1982/2025) pairs her efforts at the weight machines with a riotous Ludus performance in which Linder tore off a dress made from raw meat (eat your heart out Lady Gaga) to reveal a black bodice with an erect dildo that bobbled around as she screamed. In more recent photomontages, Linder is still present, lushly embellished with blooming roses and giant mouths, sometimes sporting the molded martial-arts breastplate she had made decades before to wear at the gym. If the body is a battleground, to quote another famous photomontage artist, it’s also a place of endless, utopian imagination.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling, installation view. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower. Pictured: The Pool of Life, 2021.
Over the past decade, Linder’s work has grown in scale, so that the photomontages are at times much larger than their sources. In some cases, images are ornate and complex, perhaps more about composition and style—a visual lexicon, the technique of collage—than critical content (though nude bodies, retro ladies, mouths, eyes, flowers, sinuous shapes, transformation from one form, species, self to another are constants). Easy to forget that fantasy, particularly for women, is so often a powerful form of escape. Linder has spoken about how she first became interested in the photographs of ballet dancers that appear in certain of her works to distract herself from the unwanted, sexualized attentions of her step-grandfather. Being a girl teaches you, in so many ways, to hoard images, to hold fast to women beyond you, on the page or elsewhere, to know that no image is ever made up of only one image, no matter how it dissembles. It teaches you a grammar and a glamour all its own. We crave excitement, yes we do.
Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, frieze, and the Paris Review, among other publications. Dog Days will be published in the UK by Peninsula Press in 2025. Excerpts appeared in the winter 2023 issue of Granta and the autumn 2023 issue of Mousse.