The artistic career of Linda Mulvey - better known as Linder - started in the mid-to-late '70s when as a graphic design student in Manchester she became bored with her drawings and decided to destroy them all. Then, armed with a surgical scalpel, she proceeded to dissect a few publications - car, porn, fashion or domestic magazines - realising that, once decontextualised, shuffled and recombined, the puzzle-like pieces she had cut out of the pages could be used to tell new and more intriguing, frightening, disturbing and surrealist stories.
Soon after those first experiments she had a final confirmation of her theory about the power of photomontages when she came up with a provocative and by now legendary, cover for the Buzzcocks' "Orgasm Addict" (1977). It featured a female torso, with an iron for her head and mouths on her breasts.
This image is among the many paper narratives currently part of the retrospective "The House of Fame Convened by Linder" at Nottingham Contemporary (until 24th June). Linder actually conceived the event as a wider exploration of her creative process, of the pieces and artists inspiring her and of her passion for costumes and masquerades.
As a whole the event includes indeed 200 works by around 30 artists selected by Linder herself, going from the 1600s to today.
There are all sorts of references in the exhibition that takes its title from a masque by Ben Jonson. Visitors pass from one discipline to the next, from art and architecture to fashion, music and design, and discover Linder's passion for architect Inigo Jones, painter and sculptor Max Ernst, illustrator, writer and painter Aubrey Beardsley, architects Alison and Peter Smithson, artists Mike Kelley, Moki Cherry and Heidi Bucher, British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, painter Richard Hamilton and photographer Yevonde Middleton, just to mention a few.
The exhibition is built through juxtapositions and associations and coincidences, memories and ideas.
As a student at Manchester Polytechnic in 1977, Linder created erotic masks from cut-up lingerie for her friend Howard Devoto, from the Buzzcocks, they are juxtaposed to drawings of costume designs by Inigo Jones for masques at the court of James I.
Lace is also used to evoke Nottingham as a centre of lacemaking, and to hint at death through a mysteriously stained pall cloth. Death is often present in this exhibition and it is evoked by the death mask of Sandford Arthur Strong, by spiritualist objects and jet mourning buckles.
"The House of Fame" is not just an exhibition of Linder's art and photographs, but a display of her personal Wunderkammer, where you may easily stumble upon a one-handed flute, made for a musician who lost an arm and a leg in the Napoleonic wars, in 19th-century hat boxes with odd shapes designed to protect feathers and plumes, on an 1800s screen covered with fashion plates, together with other assorted memorabilia, bursting with life, history and the energy of punk.
Punk played a key role in Linder's life and her modus operandi is still very punk: the way she appropriates images and uses very basic materials (paper and glue) or things that have been discarded to create something new, raw, violent and radical, is one of the main lessons that came from this subculture.
Though graphically and visually striking - it is for example impossible not to be attracted yet scared by her lovely "Pythia", that is Georgiana, fifth Duchess of Devonshire, as painted by Maria Conway, with an owl as familiar and a head morphed into a disturbing coiled rattlesnake that looks incredibly real (coiling snakes are part of the Duke of Devonshire's family crest) - there is more than meets the eye behind Linder's photomontages. The female bodies without heads, but sprouting mechanical parts, kettles, cookers and cassette players from their bodies point at woman's objectification, while Linder's practice harks back to other artsist who used the collage technique, such as Hannah Höch.
This is a bit of an annus mirabilis for Linder who has spent the last few months as the first artist-in-residence at the 18th-century Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. Here she researched Jones' masque designs from its drawings collection and launched at the end of March the exhibition "Her Grace Land by Linder Sterling" (that will run through 21st October).
The experience of being an artist-in-resident in a historical mansion may have been dramatically different for Linder who was maybe more used to other and more entertaining environments such as Manchester's Haçienda where she performed with Ludus in 1982. Yet it looks like this is part of Linder's endless life metamorphoses: so far she has been an artist, a musician, a rug designer, a student of Indian music (her taus is also on show in Nottingham) and now a curator of her own exhibitions that seem to have an unexpected historical twist about them. Guess that can only be described as a pure and undiluted punk attitude.
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