Linder sterling biography books
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I’ve never seen The Great British Bake Off but the name smacks of a cosy notion of tradition and carbohydrate-laden competition. They often feel traditional: kitchens, roses, ballet, cakes, end-of-the-pier sauciness… “Things getting groovy in the kitchen.” Why this subject matter?
LS: The phrase “the personal is political” was originally the title of an essay written by Carol Hanisch in 1969 and I read it in 1970, when I was sixteen years of age and I pondered her every word.
For her 2018 retrospective exhibition The House of Fame at Nottingham Contemporary, she included the work of many female artists who have been overlooked. If you know where to look, black and white and colour negatives from different eras of photography are becoming more and more available. An artist able to inspire using a range of disciplines, she is probably best known for her superbly witty collage work, first launched on the British public courtesy of Buzzcocks’ ‘Orgasm Addict’ cover.
Maybe I should ask what is behind the ballet?
LS: The Children Of The Mantic Stain ballet emerged from research into the life of the British Surrealist artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun. Known for her collaged work, for the past 30 years Sterling, also known simply as Linder, has been creating photomontages that combine imagery from men's magazines and the objectification of women.
I wonder, do you see it as a physical work first, or a visual one? I happened to let slip recently that I wanted to buy a book to cut up and the collector wouldn’t sell it to me because he said that that would be killing the book.
Destination Moon. You told me you had to go to Accrington to find a place (on Accy market) that sold the Liberty bodice.
LS: Yes, there is an element of the undercover when sourcing materials with which to work. Throughout, she has pursued an uncompromising feminist critique of gender and the sexual marketing of the female body, most famously in her collages derived from pornography, which were first published on the sleeves of Buzzcocks records.
For the score, the first challenge was to work out how the sound could, at times, have the quality of a mantic stain and create auditory hallucinations, or become oracular of what was yet to happen within the narrative. Viewed as a whole, this colourful and enquiring, fearless and forgiving work is – for me – yet another important testament to a peculiarly Northern English strain of the post-war British art and music school tradition that produced Brian Clarke, Harrison Birtwistle and David Hockney.
/ 208 pgs / 150 color / 25 bw.
At the opposite extreme of the 2004 postcard series, are the 2-metre-high light boxes that I started to make in 2011. / 128 pgs / 50 color / 50 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 8/18/2020
Out of print
DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. | 10/31/2013 | Not available
$35.00
Linder Sterling: What Linder SawWALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
Postcards, 4.25 x 5.75 in.
I get a strong feeling, too, that your music can be seen as a herald for things to come. Is that fair comment?
LS: Considering that post punk was pre-internet, “newness” was often transmitted eerily quickly. I still prefer the creative challenge of working with the found paper image in the main, I like the sensuality of the cut and the messiness of the glue.
This smart and brightly subversive collection of 12 slipcased postcards by the radical, Feminist, Manchester punk artist, performer and musician Linder Sterling (born in Liverpool in 1954) is published on the occasion of her first solo show--at Linn Lhn gallery, Cologne.