‘I wish to get into these photographs and fragrance them’: Linder’s retrospective opens on the Hayward Gallery

I meet Linder on the cafe on the Hayward Gallery, on the opening day of her – surprisingly – first London retrospective. She’s dressed for battle, or for cover, in a glittering Ashish prime that lends her a reassuring bodily weight. (‘It’s like these weighted blankets in a method. I really feel invincible! Not that I’m below assault,’ she says, as we are saying howdy.)

It’s an enormous second for the Liverpool-born artist, who’s marking her seventieth 12 months with a fifty-year multidisciplinary retrospective. Tracing her beginnings on the punk music scene, through her photomontages and eclectic embrace of references, from pornography to trend, ballet, fetish, weightlifting and artwork historical past, it culminates together with her latest items, deepfake photographs of herself.

Taking centre stage right here is arguably her most well-known work, the photomontage she created in 1977 for the duvet of Buzzcocks’ debut single ‘Orgasm Addict’, which cemented her place within the punk and post-punk panorama. On the time, she was finding out graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic, exploring the artwork of photomontage, drawn to journal photographs depicting ‘ladies’s pursuits’ – the house, trend, romance – which she juxtaposed in opposition to males’s (pornography, DIY, vehicles).

Utilizing a surgical scalpel, Linder actually slices via these stereotypes in fluid pastiches that criss-cross typical gender roles, turning the male gaze on its head whereas her topics’ lose theirs. Depicting a unadorned girl with smiling mouths on her breasts and an iron the place her head ought to be, the picture is each playful and disturbing. Confronting and celebrating the glamour inherent within the illustration of the feminine physique, Linder mischievously recontextualises it once more, delighting in contrasts, an impulse which runs all through all of her work.

‘There’s a mischievousness typically in inserting one large caterpillar or a cucumber over the genital space,’ she says. ‘There may be virtually a childlike glee, however then it is also a critique – it’s a gag, a joke, however a gag can be a phrase with many meanings. I like the nice ‘gag,’ whereas on the similar time being conscious that these fashions are gaps. We do not know who they’re as a result of they’re by no means allowed to talk. They’re at all times nameless. It’s witty, having a lightweight contact with typically fairly disturbing materials that’s so exploitative of different topics. I’m from Liverpool – making jokes is within the DNA.’

There’s a heat in Linder’s work, seen not solely within the recontextualisation of sometimes alarming imagery and in her celebration of ladies’s our bodies and queer our bodies but in addition in her elevation of the mundane objects which make up a life. ‘It is all about this elevation, revering that {photograph} taken in 1976, the place she [the subject] would have needed to do about 20 totally different poses. There’s an empathy virtually in attempting to journey again and including flowers, or a bouquet, like one would to a ballet dance stage, stepping into these photographs to fragrance them.’

Linder has spoken earlier than about being uncovered to pornography from the age of three by her grandfather, who additionally subjected her to sexual assault. ‘With this pornography, and possibly for me, I believe as a result of I used to be little, I would at all times be their faces. I did not actually wish to be wanting on the our bodies. And I believe possibly – that is the primary time I’ve thought this – possibly that is circling again, and now I can lay them to relaxation. I could make them actually tender.’ In slicing out the heads in her personal work, Linder is defending these ladies, with home utensils typically thought to encumber ladies right here making them mighty, cyborg-like, prepared for battle.

Many moments within the exhibition are tender, typically surprisingly so, significantly within the tribute she pays to her late father with a sequence of images of herself and a pal ‘sploshing’ – the fetishistic apply of utilizing meals in a playful, messy and sexual method. Within the intertwining of fetish and want, tenderness and deep love, it’s one more uniting of two states which maybe aren’t as antithetical as they could at first seem like.

‘I used to be very near my father, he was so energetic at 84, after which he had a stroke. It was merciless. To maintain his dignity in hospital, I used to feed him candy, institutional meals, like custard and yoghurt. After he died, I used to be conscious of sploshing, which appears very British English in a method, it couldn’t ever have come from some other nation, this fetish the place ladies are coated in pretend beans, head to toe. So to do this, in a session with an in depth pal, was so cathartic. Tin upon tin of custard, rice pudding, meals colouring, honey, yogurt, cream, head to toe. It was unbelievable, actually, and transferring. We do not actually have rights of passage anymore. So I used to be actually proud of exhibiting it right here, actually blown up so you may see each grain of rice. At the moment I used to be bloated with tears, I could not cry. In order that felt good too.’