Linder’s Incisive Collages of Porn Mags Cut Through Gender and Sexuality

Linder, The Goddess Who Helps to Cross The Sea of Misery, 2019

Seventies porn mags have a distinctive look and feel to them. Softly lit, with models and domestic sets bathed in a warm glow, they represent a golden, bygone era that never truly existed. Punk icon and artist Linder Sterling has built a career on the incisive interrogation of these pages—incisive being the operative word. Under her scalpel, the dappled naked skin and diminutive smiles of fantasy women take on new dimensions, transposed with blooming flowers, kitchen cupboards and other household items. The message is clear, parsed through her playful juxtapositions, and more relevant than ever at a time when the role and rights of women in society are under scrutiny.

Linder’s collaged, photomontage works are where she started out, cutting and pasting in Manchester in the late 1970s during her immersion in the local music scene. “I saw and heard musicians playing guitars and drums with the same clumsy determination that I’d begun to hack at magazines,” she explains. As the artist behind the infamous Buzzcocks’ 1977 Orgasm Addict album cover, she is no stranger to the political and pop-cultural power of the collage.

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““I saw and heard musicians playing guitars and drums with the same clumsy determination that I’d begun to hack at magazines”

“The culture around me felt very stagnant in 1976. There was a general sense of malaise in the air,” she remembers. “I started to tear strips and shapes of coloured paper and glue those to my drawings. I then ran out of coloured paper and began to cut out images from magazines. I immediately sensed a newness, which is always a very visceral and unmistakable moment for me.”

She has returned recently to the classic cut-up after years of focusing on performance works, with a newly unveiled large-scale installation, titled The Bower of Bliss, at Southwark Station on the London Underground (featuring an exhilarating mash-up of collated visual references and original photography), and a brand new exhibition at Stuart Shave’s Modern Art. Nostalgic graphic design abounds in the classic porn and lifestyle mags used by Linder as her base material, while her own interventions turn expectations of gender, class and sexuality on their head with forthright, decisive gestures. She snips to subvert.