Linder Sterling, known simply as "Linder" was an important figure in the Manchester music scene of the late 70's and early 80's, influential collage artist and lead singer of the post-punk band Ludus. She is also a photographer and best friend to Morrissey, responsible for the photo collection "Morrissey Shot."
Along with Peter Saville, she designed many of the iconic album covers for the bands in the Manchester/Factory Records scene. Most notably, she did the cover for The Buzzcocks' "Orgasm Addict." Apparently, Pete Shelley wrote The Buzzcocks' classic "What Do I Get?" with Linder in mind.
A radical feminist, Linder's work (be it collage, music or performance) had a central theme of challenging cultural expectations of women. In Ludus, her lyrics tended to explore sexual politics. In the chorus of "Little Girls," she demands, "Little Girls, shake up, wake up! Let's remember how to use our wings." In "The Escape Artist" she addresses women's safety with the lyrics, "I was thinking wishfully, just how pleasing it would be to walk at midnight unafraid, to open my door, be quite safe." In "Breaking the Rules" she discusses the spectrum of sexuality.
In the early 80's, the famous Manchester music venue The Haçienda was what she described as "a male preserve", where they frequently played soft-core porn on the televisions. One notorious Ludus performance, on December 5, 1982, Linder decided to take her revenge and demonstrate her confrontational feminist tactics. Before the performance, she decorated every table in the club with a red-stained tampon and a cigarette butt. She also handed out pieces of raw meat wrapped in pornography. Despite her vegetarianism, she constructed a dress made entirely of raw meat which she performed in, with a dildo underneath which she revealed at the end of the performance. Linder said that the meat and tampons were supposed to represent "the reality of womanhood" and the dildo "manhood, the invisible male of pornography. That it can be reduced to this, a thing that sticks out like a toy." Linder managed to completely scandalize the usually aloof, unflappable rock kids of the Hacienda, who by the end of the performance had backed away from the stage and could barely bring themselves to applaud. Even Tony Wilson himself was very concerned about the potential of blood dripping on the floor and had her escorted out of the venue. That's punk rock, Linder.
I found this interesting recent interview she did with the Tate Museum where she discusses her collages from the 70's, in which she combined images of domestic spaces from women's magazines with cars and pornography from men's magazines as a way to critique "the various cultural monstrosities" of the time. She is now recognized as an important figure in the art world and her collages have been exhibited at museums such as the Tate and P.S.1. Her work has recently been collected in a retrospective book entitled "Linder: Works 1976-2006." The thing I like most about her art (both visual and musical) is that it has a very radical message but at the same time is very aesthetic/beautiful.
