Another Linder exhibition: Ah-huh, ah-huh, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah / Ah-ah-ahh!

Another day, another Linder Sterling art exhibition. Or so it seems. Yeah, the other day I whizzed around the Modern Art show When the tongue slips it speaks truth in the ridiculously wealthy environs of Bury Street in Piccadilly, London. There was stuff like this:

Put another record on: a work from When the tongue slips it speaks truth

Er, I ain't complaining. Her stuff - especially the trademark photomontage work - is great. It's pretty much exactly the kind of art I tend to like. True, to some extent - and in a slightly infantile way - this for me goes back to Orgasm Addict and her iron-for-a-head record sleeve (I blogged about this and other stuff after seeing Linder's big Hayward Gallery exhibition last year). A teenage musical enthusiasm helping to spark a super-amateur interest in art. But hey, what's wrong with that? Like thousands of other waifs and strays from my generation, the sleeve art of late-70s pop-punk very definitely opened my eyes to new (or old) types of art and design. And when these days I cut up my ancient Buzzcocks t-shirt or muck around with (an equally ancient) Buzzcocks poster, I'm even dabbling in a bit of my own art (ahem), chucking in a few sub-Linder (or John Heartfield?) adornments. Similarly, stuff like my not-at-all-grandly-titled Future dance: speed-art collage no1 also rips off Linder to some extent, not that she should be blamed for this or anything else I've ever half-heartedly churned out over the years. So yeah, all hail the power of music to foster an interest in art. And, by the way, with recent-ish acquisitions like these two records - ORKA's All At Once and Championlover's Makeout - I think there's definitely been a bit of art/design "feedback" going on, with me picking up these records partly because their sleeves owed something to the "classic" record-sleeve design era of Malcolm Garrett, Peter Saville and Vaughan Oliver. 

Front and back: two modern design classics

In the notes for the Modern Art exhibition we're told that Linder "utilises what Ithell Colquhoun refers to as 'mantic stain-making' to access what's hidden underneath the surface of the somatic body". Er yes, right. It's tempting to dismiss this as yet another example of modern gallery-speak, hyperbolic verbiage that verges on AI-generated gush. Except, maybe not. Just as designs like the Linder/Garrett sleeve helped alert me and others to new ways of seeing, I think it's also true that the lyrics (the poetry, if you like) of people like Pete Shelley (named after a poet) and Howard Devoto helped turn me and a whole generation onto a love of language, not least some of language's more esoteric alleys and crooked constructions. Call me childish, but in my mind words like "hegemony" and "lassitude" have always been slightly more meaningful because of the fact that I originally encountered them (or properly noticed them) in a Buzzcocks or a Magazine song. Simplistic stuff, I know, but there you go. I'm unrepentant though. If a United Artists poster for Orgasm Addict can these days be on display in the Architecture and Design section at MoMa, I think it's more than OK for me to dig (as well as slightly mock) the overblown language of the programme notes at your average art gallery because of a liking for the twists and turns of language derived in part from punk/post-punk. In fact, the stuff they weave into the press releases for these art shows is often pretty straightforward compared to your average paragraph by superstar theorists like Derrida or Baudrillard (or for that matter stuff by Brian Eno or Real Life/Secondhand Daylight-period Devoto). So yeah, one of the pleasures of gallery-going is trying to parse this language into something approaching plain English. Meanwhile, speaking of language, I'll end this post with a couple of choice selections from the mighty Orgasm Addict:

Ah-huh, ah-huh, ah

Ah-huh, ah-huh, ah

Ah-huh, ah-huh, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah

Ah-ah-ahh!