A habit that sticks: the Linder exhibition

Well, you tried it just for once / Found it all right for kicks / But now you found out / That it's a habit that sticks

Freshly returned from the Linder exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank today, I'm of course compelled to write up a few half-baked thoughts on this artist who - because of the famous iron-for-a-head Buzzcocks cover - has definitely been a bit of an inspiration to your humble writer. Sort of. In fact, for me it was most likely other stuff before Linder - Gee Vaucher's amazing John Heartfield-for-the-nuclear age work for Crass, Barney Bubbles' cover for Ian Dury's mega-hit Rhythm Stick, Malcolm Garrett, Peter Saville and ... anyone else doing something eye-catching or unusual on record sleeves during the Great Post-Punk Era. But still, the design for the Orgasm Addict cover was - and is - one of the great punk designs. Yes, a design for living: 

And here's the iron-for-a-head woman the right way up, as seen - in spectacularly large form - in the Hayward Gallery exhibition:

I don't know whose idea it was to turn the image upside down (Linder's?, Malcolm Garrett's?, someone else's?) but I definitely think it works. As do the colours. It's the small things ... In the wall blurb for this four-room Linder extravaganza, a 50-year retrospective, there's a quote from her where she says she likes to use a "minimal interruption" to "totally change the meaning of the original image". I hadn't thought of her stuff like that, but I see that's exactly what she seems to have done. I think it's a reflection of how well-chosen her "interruptions" are that they feel much more extensive than they are. A clever tweak here, here and here, and blam! Anyway, here are a couple of others:

Yeah, it only takes an oversized fork and some googly eyes and you're into feminist subversion territory. It's easy, I guess. But then again, almost certainly not as easy as it looks. But it's direct, it's confrontational, and ... it's angry. Basically, it's punk. Or at least one strain of punk, with its sly humour and slightly off-beat observations. A few years ago, before today's 25-minute visit to the Hayward (no, sorry, I can't seem to dwell very long in galleries ...), I'd also seen some of Linder's stuff in a much smaller show somewhere in south London. Bermondsey, maybe? I'd come away with the impression that she'd long ago moved on from her punk-era collage/photomontage work and was more recently doing stuff with textiles or something like that. My basic (rather simplistic) feeling had been: shame there isn't more like the Orgasm Addict sleeve. Well, the Danger Came Smiling show has plenty of her domestic appliance/pornography work (all excellent imo), as well as quite a few things from her doing her own music with Ludus and - bonus feature! - some amazing photos of Howard Devoto wearing lots of make-up and posing with some kind of glam'ed-up fetish masks:

Marc Almond eat your heart out

Definitive gaze! Now if Devoto had taken that as his stage look when he went on Top Of The Pops, then Shot By Both Sides would unquestionably have been a big hit. Anyway, in my infinite ignorance I didn't even realise (or had long ago forgotten) that the "floating heads" design for the Real Life cover is another Linder design. And here are those attractive little heads - Devoto-esque aliens - in the Linder design phase:

And one final Buzzcocks/Magazine-Linder intersection here, a promo poster for their 21 July 1978 Lesser Free Trade Hall gig two years on (and spot the Sex Pistols/Ronnie Biggs reference): 

Early doors: seems this show started at ... 6:30!

Meanwhile, don't get the wrong idea. The Hayward exhibition isn't especially focused on her punk/post-punk stuff - this is just me skimming off this part of her work from a much wider exhibition. Nevertheless, her later output - all 45 years or so of it - is also good. And I was pleasantly surprised to see some of her more recent stuff occupying the same artistic terrain. For example this, a 2020 photomontage called Envy Would Praise His Beauty:

Morrissey, who met Linder at a Sex Pistols gig at the Electric Circus and became a life-long friend, called her an "alcohol-free mangle of Jean Genet, Yoko Ono, Norma Winstone and Margaret Atwood". I have no real idea what this is supposed to mean (does Morrissey?) but I guess it rather nicely reproduces the mash-up or collision factor of her art. The thing about punk was that it made things seem do-able. Seemingly amateurish music and apparently thrown-together artwork on the record sleeves. Great! DIY. If they can do it, so can I. Shamefully, I don't even own a copy of the bile-yellow Orgasm Addict record (I think I recently saw a secondhand one for sale in a London shop for £9.99, no sale!), but ever since I became aware of Linder/Buzzcocks' iron-for-a-head woman I was ... inspired. And here's the proof:

Don't try this at home. Or actually, do

No man, copycat punk art's not dead. In fact, far from it. It's a habit that sticks ...  

PS: how long before Google Blogger blocks this post on the grounds of "sexually explicit imagery"? Yeah, I'm just pushing out pure filth on this blog ...