For many contemporary artists who either do or did play in a band (from Mike Kelley to Martin Creed), the temptation on the part of curators tends towards marking a clean separation between the artists’ musical activities and those art works presumed...

For many contemporary artists who either do or did play in a band (from Mike Kelley to Martin Creed), the temptation on the part of curators tends towards marking a clean separation between the artists’ musical activities and those art works presumed less frivolous. With Linder, no such separation is possible. It is not just that many of her early collages were produced specifically to promote or accompany her music, or that many of the same themes of grotesquery and exploitation pervade both – nor even that the violent collision of seeming opposites that characterizes her collages might serve as an equally apt description of Ludus’s music. What may prove to be one of Linder’s more enduring and influential artistic statements, recognised in this exhibition as a work of performance art whose filmed documentation was exhibited as such, was the stage act for a particular Ludus gig.

On 5 November 1982, the band appeared on stage at The Hacienda in Manchester, with Sterling wearing a bodice made of raw meat. A similar image of a woman clothed in meat appeared on The Undertones’ singles collection of the following year, All Wrapped Up. Canadian sculptor Jana Sterbak’s sewn beef dress,Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, was exhibited at Montreal’s Galerie Rene Boulin in 1987. More recently, Lady Gaga sported a dress made of flank steak designed by Franc Fernandez at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. But there is a significant difference between the later outfits and the original: whereas Lady Gaga used only the choicest cuts of prime beef, sourced from some artisanal butcher and chosen for their longevity, Linder merely rummaged in the bins of a local Chinese restaurant and stitched together chicken brains and other even less savoury selections.

For three and a half decades now, Linder has been cutting and sticking images of flesh and other comestibles, pushing the speculative identity of pornographic and commercial images to their gruesome limits. While her methods may have become more refined over the years (working increasingly with negatives bought from vintage shoots), the basic ingredients of her work have remained remarkably consistent: the cakes, flowers and outsized lips which variously adorn and deform her nudes can be found from her earliest pieces to her most recent. What perhaps has changed is pornography itself, becoming ever more the abject parody of itself presented in Linder’s collages. What, for instance, in a work like Sehnsucht (Longing, 2011) – for which the artist returned to her old modus operandi of working directly on contemporary store-bought jazz magazines – is the more surreal, the more horrifying: the lipstick and the car imposed by the artist or the bizarre suction device applied to the model’s breasts in the original image? Do we somehow need the former in order to see the sickness of the latter?

Read the full review of Linder’s show at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, at Frieze.

10/30/13 at 10:06am