March 20, 2025 • 67 mins
Emily is the co-host of this episode about art, transgression, female desire and the male gaze through photo montage, as cultural commentary and self-exploration.
We re-visit the exhibition "Danger Came Smiling" at Hayward Gallery. A punk goddess whose image was used in the Buzzcocks’ EP Orgasm Addict (1977), Linder is an under-exposed contemporary artist. 99p glue, a scalpel, vintage magazines, and she “travel(s) in time”, to bring back cyber domestic goddesses and anachronistic deepfakes. Her work seems to be at its peak, and always timely, as she enters her 7th decade on earth.
Support us: here.
Check out Linder on social media: @lindersterling.
Listen to Linder's band Ludus.
More about the exhibition here: Hayward Gallery.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
Hi, welcome to Exhibition Estas,the podcast where we visit
exhibitions so that you have to.And this time I'm very happy to
tell you that I, Joanna Pierre Nervous will be hosting this
episode with Emily Harding, who is back to talk about Linder and
her exhibition Danger came smiling at the Haywood Gallery.
(00:27):
And I'm particularly happy that she comes for this episode
because she does love photography and Linda's work
somehow has something to do withit, although she cuts it,
reassembles it. Basically, she works with photo
montage, but in a way that is absolutely breathtaking and also
(00:50):
a way to run towards the danger,to quote kind of a favorite book
of mine by Sarah Polley. And again, I will remind you
that you can contribute either through our website or through
the link in the shows notes. Thank you so so much to those
who have been donating, who've become members of exhibitionists
(01:16):
or those who have chosen to go for maybe a more substantial
donation as a one off, thank youso much.
This means a lot to me because it is such a pleasure to be in
your eardrums and on YouTube andSpotify also in your presence as
(01:37):
a video. But it is also a lot of work.
And so to see that you value this work is really, really
meaningful. So thank you so much to those
who supports exhibition NISTAS and to to those who cannot do
it. There's others who do, so this
is for everyone. The content of exhibitionistas
(02:00):
will always be 100% accessible, whether you donate or you don't.
So thank you. And without further ado, let's
do this. Hello and welcome to Exhibition
Listers, the podcast where we visit exhibitions separately and
(02:21):
then compare notes during the recording of the episode.
You'll be very happy to know that today I am Co hosting with
Emily Harding. She is here, she is back and I'm
so delighted to have her here with me.
We are going to talk about Linda's exhibition Danger came
(02:43):
smiling at the Hayward Gallery. So we're going back to the
Hayward, Emily. Yeah, I know.
Yeah, Great stuff. And it is so exciting to be back
to Anna. Nice to see you and so good to
be the other exhibitionist. Is that are listening?
Yes, we are in your eardrums or in the space around you
sonically or maybe in video form.
(03:05):
Available on Spotify and YouTube.
Let's talk about our exhibition which is Danger Came Smiling.
Open until the 5th of May at theHayward Gallery and the artist
in focus is Linda. So did you know her?
It's all the. Image The cover image for the
(03:27):
exhibition was familiar. I didn't know how to place it,
but I knew that I had seen it before and basically it's a very
sexy, slim woman who's looks like she has some kind of oil on
her and she's completely naked. Instead of nipples, there's a
couple of mouths pasted over herbreasts, which is really
(03:48):
unsettling to see. Like teeth?
Say the least, yeah. Where nipples should be like
Ouch. And then her head.
It's a laundry utensil. Yes.
Yeah, So. So, yeah.
So it's a giant iron over her face.
I was familiar with that, but I wasn't familiar with her.
I mean, I I didn't know anythingabout her.
(04:10):
After we after I got into the exhibition, it was there a lot
of links being made in my mind, but I wasn't actually aware of
her. She's been a presence in the UK
and probably internationally because that image was used in
the, I think, 1977 album of the Buzzcocks.
(04:34):
It was used on that cover. So obviously that image rang a
bell to a lot of people, but most of us didn't know who had
made it. And so the person who actually
did that collage is Linda, who now is the focus of this
exhibition. So she it's a solo exhibition of
this woman's 50 years of work. She is actually 70.
(04:57):
She's now 71 years old, and she has this massive body of work
that you can discover in this exhibition.
So I will maybe just introduce Linda, her life, which is quite
eventful. I mean, she was at the right
time, at the right place and at the wrong time in the wrong
(05:18):
place many a times. And then after the break, you'll
take us through the exhibition, if that's OK Emily sounds good.
All right. So Linda Sterling, as she named
herself as, born Linda Mulvey inLiverpool in 1954.
So she comes from a working class background.
(05:39):
Her dad was a bricklayer and hermother was a hospital cleaner
and she lived happily in Liverpool and, you know, she was
10 years old. When she was 10 she moved to a
little place near Wigan in basically a very rural setting
(06:00):
and a very small countryside town where she was.
She felt very confined and she felt kind of her world reduced
quite a great deal because she says that she loved being in
Liverpool. She loved particularly looking
at the women in the street and the way they adorned themselves,
(06:21):
their fashion styles, even though it wasn't her own style.
She just loved looking at people, at glamorous people, at
people well dressed and culture and all of the activity and the
the noise of the big city. So this was quite daunting to
her. She talked about how all of the
(06:41):
very glamorous people were coming from Liverpool in her
sort of in her world there. So it was like London was sort
of another planet, you know? I mean, the big cosmopolitan
Center for her was Liverpool, which is, yeah, just lovely her.
Work developed outside of the big capital, which is kind of
interesting as well, and it kindof mixes with the punk movement.
(07:06):
But before we go there. So there's something that's
quite striking in her biography,which is that she was groomed by
her step grandfather. So there's this really
terrifying situation within the family home whereby at the very
right age of 3, she was groomed by being shown pornography and
(07:31):
then she ended up, you know, being molested by this person.
So this event in her life propelled a lot of things in
her. And what I found quite admirable
and at the same time unsettling is that she's very able to talk
(07:52):
about this as a traumatic event that is very much connected to
her work. And at the same time talk about
desire and talk about the appearance of fascination with
bodies at a very young age and her own compulsiveness and her
own desire and her own form of lust in that same time.
(08:17):
So it's quite interesting to seethat she holds these two things
that would have been contradictory, which is to being
the victim of sexual assault andat the same time still having a
nascent form of sexuality and desire and then developing into
(08:39):
someone who's really attracted to marginal forms of sexuality
connected with issues of identity, etcetera.
So that's really, I think, one of the cool themes of the
exhibition and also of her life.She talks a lot about how gender
roles were so observed and so enforced in that space.
(09:01):
And in that time she goes to Wigan and she goes to a bookshop
and finds Jermaine Greer's book The Female Eunuch with an
amazing John Holmes cover. So a design cover that is going
to be incredibly nurturing for her own creativity, which is a
(09:26):
female body hanging on a sort ofa rod and also with handles.
So there's this curvy shape, andthen there's this kind of
domesticity of the image that certainly turns the female body
(09:47):
into functional objects of the home.
I mean, you just think about that and it's like, you know,
growing up in, you know, a very working class neighborhood and,
you know, not a big city in the UK at that time.
I mean, she's growing up in a post war UK that is trying to,
(10:09):
you know, become more contemporary.
So much of popular culture is being born in this time.
So it's like your your cultural reference from being, you know,
a very young person is so small.And then suddenly sort of
there's this boom of magazines and books and Jermaine Greer and
(10:29):
all of these ideas about sexuality that have, you know,
busted down the doors. Thank God, you know, given her
background that she was able to have some access, the access she
did have to those ideas. I imagine they were life saving
in some sense. You know, you think of the her
work and the story she can tell through her work and how she can
(10:52):
express through her work, givingher agency over these narratives
of desire and objectivity as a woman.
And you know that that certainlyperhaps helped her through that
trauma. Yes, the empowering aspects of
(11:14):
having access to those images and being able to manipulate
them is huge. Exactly.
It's huge for her. And thank you for saying that,
because it also reminds me of something that she says, which
is that at the time there were only two channels, which is
something I can relate to in Portugal in the 80s and you as
(11:36):
well. So it's very generational.
Although she's quite older than us, it's, it's still affected
us. And she talks about boredom.
So she talks about not being able to be entertained by TV
because there was nothing. And then even when there was
something, it was probably not geared towards people her age.
(11:56):
And so she talks about drawing alot, and she's fascinated by
glamorous princesses and glamorous women.
So she draws a lot of female bodies with luscious clothing
and dresses in these magnificentspaces, which she interprets as
also being a sort of fascinationwith bigger, wider, richer
(12:19):
cultured spaces that she didn't have access to in her working
class little home. And so she starts obsessively
drawing. And she also finds in, I think,
a magazine illustrations of the great Aubrey Beardsley, who was
(12:40):
an immense artist in weirdly a very short time because she
died. He died when he was 25 S in the
last decade of the 19th century.And he was this very
accomplished draughts person. She he would draw illustrations
for books for wonderful Oscar Wilde's plays.
(13:02):
And so he was quite famous, but he was also a bit decadent,
which is a term she uses at times.
So he he drew these intricate patterns very pre Art Deco, and
he would draw little penises and, you know, kind of very
(13:24):
sexualized images or erotica. And he kind of inserted these
little details into the drawings.
And so apparently when he illustrated Oscar Wilde's play,
he would include caricatures of Oscar Wilde, who would be really
furious about it. And then the publisher
(13:45):
apparently spent ages looking atthe drawings, trying to see if
there was imagery that might have been, you know, complex to
deal with once it was published.Yeah.
And his drawing is line drawing in black and white.
Beautiful. And she talks about never really
(14:06):
having shoplifted in her life except for this rottering
number. I forget which kind of
rottering, which kind of thickness of the pen, but she
stole that to draw. And she talks about how that pen
(14:28):
in some ways kind of takes over the drawing and it's super
incisive. It's almost like cutting, which
is going to be important later. And how that allowed her to draw
like Beardsley and that. That's so interesting to me
because we're raising our kids in a time when there's access to
everything. And sometimes when you don't
(14:51):
have access to much, just a tinylittle thing can open this huge
gate to a whole new world that you have inside of you.
But that also comes from everything that you're looking
at. Yeah, which is so interesting
it. Is it's like how much choice is
good and useful? Do we, you know, how much choice
(15:13):
do we need in our lives and, andis productive?
I mean, is there a certain pointof beyond which you have an
abundance of choice that is suddenly stifling?
You know, having access to a lotcan be as terrifying as having
access to nothing, basically. That's incredible in her
biography. And so of course, at a certain
(15:35):
point, she does reconnect with the big city, so she goes and
studies graphic design in Manchester Polytechnic.
So that's a big time for her because in 1976, she goes to a
Sex Pistols concert and she meets everyone, basically.
She becomes long and lifelong friends with Morrissey.
(15:58):
She's still friends with him. And she meets the Buzzcocks, who
ask her. And that's, again, such a funny
and endearing story. So she meets the Buzzcocks and
they ask her, oh, So what do youdo?
And she says, well, I'm studyinggraphic design.
I do drawings and stuff and theysay, oh, do you want to do stuff
(16:20):
for us? And she says yes.
And so that's that's how it starts.
So easy, so easy, so simple. And so she produces in 77 that
cover for Orgasm Addicts, which is this very iconic image.
And of course the the sound is that punk sound.
(16:45):
So she gets involved. It's a great song.
Orgasm magic. But in 78 she also has her own
band called Ludus. Marina Warner in the catalogue
says something really interesting.
Which is so Ludus in Latin meansplay, playfulness.
(17:06):
But she also connected, connectsthe words to ludicrous.
She buys cameras. So she as soon as she goes into
Manchester Polytechnic, she stops painting and drawing
because she had some point she did paint and she also buys
(17:26):
cameras. And that at a certain point she
even had this idea of becoming the Diane Albus of the UK.
So she really was into photography and she wanted to
produce her own images. She would go.
So she was very in tune with thecounterculture.
She says that she could be wearing like bondage trousers,
(17:48):
go to one of these clubs, like for example, drag Queen Club.
So Dickies, she went to look to Dickies and Manchester and took
pictures of the drag Queens there and she felt safe.
She said. You know what?
What is really? Strange is that.
Going into the punk spaces was feeling safe for me.
(18:09):
That's where I felt that I was at the, you know, in the in the
safest of spaces because we could be whatever we wanted to
be. We could do whatever we wanted
to do. Whereas elsewhere I didn't feel
safe. And you know, famous last words
because when she already had started even taking pictures of
gigs, for example, she was attacked in the street by a
(18:33):
serial rapist. He was caught by the police a
few months later and she was carrying her cameras.
He so she he took a blade, stiletto blade her throat and
started like assaulting her. And she said, well, my friends
(18:53):
are coming, people are coming. I have a meeting with them.
So she's really started bartering with the person and
she said, and I have really expensive cameras and I can give
you my cameras. So he took the cameras and left,
didn't attack her. And apparently she found out
through the police that he rapeda woman that very night.
(19:16):
She was so traumatized that she did not take up photography and
did not touch a camera until thelate 90s.
And so she turned to photo montage.
And this is where, you know, it becomes a big kind of a desert,
not desert, but like a crossing of the desert for her because
(19:41):
she so she takes photo montage really serious that seriously,
as she was already doing in the 70s and and took that up as her
activity. And she says, you know, she's in
her 70s. And I think another take from
this exhibition, after having seen a lot of exhibitions of
(20:02):
older women who always practice,who always worked as artists,
and who deliver this life story to you, packaged with a nice
little. You know, ribbon and bow.
And she says, well, but this wasn't all straightforward.
(20:23):
Like it took me a long time to pull myself out of these States
and come to a clarity of what I was doing in terms of my own
production. So the title of the exhibition
is connected to her band. It's the title of the NLP or
(20:45):
second album Danger Came Smiling.
And it comes from one of her grandmother's novels, is a title
of like a sort of, I think a romance novel of some kind.
Danger Came Smiling or maybe a thriller of some kind.
So from that time and into now, there is a sort of a a life that
(21:12):
was lived a family life until recently.
She was artist in residence at Tate St.
Ives in 2014. She got the Paul Hamlin
Foundation Award in 2017, and she was included in several
exhibitions. And he she's shown her work very
(21:35):
recently. So in her 60th decade into her
70th year, she's had this or late 50s, she's kind of had this
presence again in a more institutional world, let's say
(21:55):
of exhibitions. So recent solo exhibitions, for
example, include the one at Nottingham Contemporary
Kestnergel Shaft. Well done.
I, I, I, I went for it. You took.
A shot. Yeah, I did.
I did. You know, German listeners, I
(22:17):
apologize. I know there's a lot of you.
I apologize for this mispronunciation.
But this one, I'm going to ace. I'm going to tell you right now.
And this one, this next one, I'mready.
That's it. And Museum of Modern Art PS1 and
(22:38):
group exhibition and exhibitionsand collections, as you can see
in the exhibition Tate Modern, Australian Center for
Contemporary Art, Tate Britain, Museum of Contemporary Art of
Chicago. So, and you have the privilege
of visiting an exhibition of someone who who has had a long
time producing her work because she needed to.
(23:01):
So this is a very specific kind of experience as an exhibition,
I find. And International Women's Day,
right? It's like it's, we're recording
the day after. And, you know, it was a great,
great thing to see around aroundthat time.
Yeah, absolutely. And we are going into the
(23:22):
exhibition right now after the break.
Yeah, happy to, Happy to. All right, well, welcome back
everybody. We are heading into the
exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.
It's on until the 5th of May, soyou have some time go over and
(23:43):
check it out. So this is the same space
obviously where we saw the Heggie Yang exhibition, but this
is sort of half of the space. The other half is has another
exhibition. So it's 4:00 rooms in total.
It's a retrospective, so it's obviously looking at the full
expanse of her work. And the rooms are entitled
(24:06):
Grammar, Glamour, Seduction and Cut.
So lots of of, of great materialin all of them.
But so it starts off. So this is work that she started
when she was at Manchester Polytechnic in 1976.
And she had, you know, abandoneddrawing and she was going for,
(24:28):
you know, photo montage and really doubling down on that, as
you mentioned. So she's got a bunch of images
from men's interest magazines, which is like cars, DIY
pornography and women's interestmagazines, which is like fashion
and homemaking and romance. And she is using all of these
(24:52):
images to kind of gather into a single image.
And she has a very distinctive kind of visual style.
She's kind of starting to cultivate this very distinctive
style that she has of, you know,mashing these different ideas
together to create something new.
And in this room grammar, she has a whole kind of floating
(25:18):
wall that in the middle of the room that has images with
different mouths, different lipstick mouths kind of pasted
on, and all of the mouths are sort of a bit oversized and a
bit different in subtle and not so subtle ways.
A bit grotesque bit. Grotesque.
(25:40):
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, it's, the image is
exactly the same and the only difference is the mouths.
And it's, I loved it. The, the exhibition kind of
peaked early for me and that I just found this fascinating.
I this aggregation of difference, these subtle
(26:00):
differences that make you feel vastly different about each
image. And then to see them all in
aggregate stacked up next to each other is just a really fun
work to regard. It's fun to stand in front of.
I mean, which is why you go to exhibitions, right?
But but yeah, I felt that reallyprofoundly with that piece.
(26:23):
And then it's another thing. So Sufiana Babri had a great
curtain. There's a great curtain in this
one, too. So it's this kind of meshy white
curtain that is sort of a horseshoe around this floating
wall. And just inside this meshy
curtain is these hanging masks. So if you're going to a
(26:47):
masquerade ball, you might put one of these things over your
face, but they are all these. Heads wearing the It's just
heads. That's true, yeah.
Wearing masks, which is even more haunting.
Yeah, it's like mannequin heads wearing these masks.
You're right. And they're just sort of
floating there, you know, disconnected from anybody,
(27:11):
disembodied. But they're extraordinarily
sexy. I mean one of them has like
tassels. I love, I love.
I took a picture of that one. It's the pink 1 isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like a hot magenta colour.
Yes. And it has, Yeah, those tassels
(27:31):
like the stripper would have over their nipples, you know,
and kind of swing them around and.
Yeah, that's beautiful. Eyes as nipples.
Yeah, love it. And nipples on the eyes.
Yeah. And.
And eyes on the nipples. Yeah, why not?
It's already kind of like inspired by her photo montage
works. Exactly.
(27:53):
But yeah, there's kind of like an overly sexy Lacy tassily, but
also a bit bondagey. You know, there's a lot of
images in this in these 4 rooms.I thought the ones of herself
were the strongest. I think she's a captivating
model and someone who can express so much, you know,
(28:14):
through her own, you know, through her own talent in front
of the camera as well as behind the camera.
But I thought that that was thatwas some of the strongest work
in here. But but yeah, I, I kind of there
was a resistance I had to it because I was like, I am already
uncomfortable and I did feel uncomfortable, like a lot of
(28:37):
this made me feel uncomfortable.But there was a there is more
charm, Yeah. And more, more sort of charm.
There was more dimension to the work rather than just trying to
shock me. You know, I, I like, I don't
know, I mean, maybe in Mike Kelly, it's like he was just
(28:59):
like, I kind of felt like he wasjust trying to shock, shock,
shock and isn't, you know, I don't know.
And I, I felt like I was worriedI might go in feeling like that
about her work. But I, you know, this is the
again, the great beauty of exhibitions as you go on a
journey with it, if you just kind of open your mind a little
(29:19):
and, and I really appreciated that about this exhibition.
It's funny because if we went with the same mindset, because
as we've spoken about before, photography for me is quite
exhausting, right with the, you know, the listeners.
If you haven't listened to the Daido Moriyama episode, it's a
(29:40):
big one on that, about the apprehensions about portrait
portraiture and photography in general and the massive presence
of photography in space. And I also had an apprehension,
and it's funny you should say that, how you reacted to the
image of the show. So the iconic image of the
Buzzcocks cover, which in the Buzzcocks cover is kind of
(30:03):
diluted by a monochromatic color, whereas in the exhibition
space and the poster of the exhibition is the original
version with the oily body, which is a very 80s body.
It's weird that it's a 70s image.
That's because it became the 80simagery of fashion and like
these oiled up bodies, super muscular but sensual and curvy,
(30:28):
with big breasts but not too big, not too small.
Like this idealized woman who is, you know, sporty and at the
same time works and is empoweredand wears stilettos but also
blazes and whatever. But it seems to preempt all of
that. But I had this apprehension
because I find photo montage tiresome, saying lots of things
(30:50):
at the same time and kind of gathering images that you
already have in your mind and then kind of reorganizing them
in ways that become symbolic andyou have to interpret.
But it's sometimes it's quite obvious what it's trying to say.
So I had big apprehensions. And when I saw the image of the,
of the juicy smiles nipples, I thought, OK, there's something
(31:17):
going on, that this is a good image.
This is doing something for sure, right?
And I was a bit more excited, I have to say.
So again, yeah, exhibitions are a journey, man.
They really are so so the rest of the room has images around
the sides and then there's a couple of kind of tabletop
(31:38):
exhibitions that have, I think, some of her magazines and notes
and. Listen, let me talk about those
later. Describe the room because those
are, wow, incredible. Well, let's go ahead there.
Let's start there. So we have these tabletop
images. Well, yeah, yeah, go ahead.
What? What?
(31:59):
So you have those tables behind with covers and the artwork she
did for Laddus, for her band. And those drawings are those
famous drawings that, well, not those ones that she talks about
in her childhood, but where Aubrey Beardsley comes back and
the marriage between Beardsley'sline, black and white drawings
(32:25):
and the punk geometric. Because her eyebrows are
triangles, right? She has the 80s eyebrows painted
on her face almost. And so they find themselves in
those covers with these beautiful drawings.
They are so incredible. I mean it.
(32:47):
And the, the, the drawings are just beautiful to gaze at
because they're so contemporary to those times.
And at the same time, they go and seek out Aubrey Beardsley
and say, this is probably what you would have been doing.
He was a dandy, and he had this very mysterious sexuality.
(33:08):
So he was accused because, you know, after the play he did the
illustrations for Oscar Wilde's play.
Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, as we know, and was accused of
being, I don't know what the term was at the time, but of
being homosexual, basically. And so there were suspicions
(33:30):
about Beardsley's sexuality. It is kind of thought now that
he was either asexual or had an incestuous relationship with his
sister, which I find weird because in the exhibition at the
at the Tape Britain a few years back in 21 I think, or 22, there
were some pictures of Mabel, hissister.
(33:52):
He was dressed as a man and seemed to gear more towards the
towards the lesbian aspect of sexuality.
But we don't know because in those times those things
couldn't be written about and busy actually asked people to a
friend to destroy his more more sexual obscene as he said
(34:14):
drawings after he died, which luckily wasn't done.
So there's also kind of this idea of what would have Beasley
have done and where are the issues in our society now, what
is accepted and what isn't. That marriage between Beasley
and the punk movement is kind ofsomething.
And the the music is quite good.Lotus, It's quite, it's quite
(34:36):
nice. The so that yeah, so that first
room has a lot of images of, youknow, kind of her early photo
montage. One whole section has is called
Pretty Girls and it's from 1977 and it is a series of naked
women with various kind of appliances and household items
(35:02):
for their heads. So kind of they're all in a
domestic scene. Think it's the same woman
actually. It's the same woman.
Yeah. On on several pieces of
furniture, basically completely naked in sexy posing like in pin
up poses. Yeah.
And they have like maybe a coffee pot for a head or, you
(35:28):
know, other items masking how they how they look.
You can see the birth of her ideas here, you know, and, and,
and kind of much more developed perhaps later on.
So. She works very early on and she
collects very early on pornographic magazines of
(35:48):
certain periods. So she goes back to the 40s, to
the 50s to the 60s and this becomes systematic across time
up until now. And she has an incredible quote
that connects the assault she suffered as a child and this use
(36:08):
of pornographic images. In an interview for The
Guardian, she talks about how she had to undergo the form of
therapy that was supposed to heal, which is based on eye
movement. That was supposed to heal
something that was happening to her so very recently, so late in
life, which was these recurring images that was coming back,
(36:30):
that were coming back to her, these visions that were very,
very vivid. So she says, quote, a whole new
swathe of imagery came up and itwas very, very vivid unquotes.
And so she describes these images that obviously are
related to her assault. And she says, quote, I was
somehow recalling the ballet books I used to have aged three.
(36:54):
I think that's kind of grooming begins with the handling of the
child's body in a certain way indomestic spaces.
In my montages I reverse engineer what a paedophile
spends their time engineering unquotes and that is incredible.
(37:15):
I mean that's just, there's so many layers to this.
So the ballet. So she was fascinated by ballet
images, which is what I meant when I said that she was already
looking at these images of bodies for to be watched, doing
elegant, beautiful, creating beauty and noting that men and
(37:40):
women were wearing makeup. So there's a form of dragon
ballet that she was really drawnto, and she found that that was
the place to be. That's where she wanted to be.
But those image was also the ones that she associated.
So that pleasure she had, which at that point was visual
pleasure, obviously aesthetic pleasure, were connecting to the
(38:03):
images that she was being shown by a member of her family that
were explicit images and sexual images.
And so she kind of like associated both.
And in this room you can see youcan have a very surface reading
of these images, which is echoedby the texts, which I find
(38:27):
really problematic because they solve the images for you.
I love that there's text in exhibitions.
I really respect that job. I write as well for exhibitions,
But I am really worried that thesubtleties of her work kind of
(38:48):
go out of the window with those texts that resolve quite quickly
what she's doing and kind of connecting the imagery to women
rights and to the role of women in domestic interiors.
When there's also a layer of pure admiration for women's body
(39:10):
and an intentional relationship and pleasure with sex and sex
that is given to you in the voyeuristic sense.
On the printed image that also comes in Playboy.
She collects a lot of play Playboy magazines with Truman
Capote texts and with artists who sometimes illustrated those
(39:33):
magazines. So there's a real connection and
there's a taboo. And she, she says in an
interview, no one talks about, no, she doesn't say that there's
a book about porn which starts with no one talks about their
consumption of porn. It's the 20% of the images and
(39:54):
the searches on the Internet. It's a lot.
Wow. And no one talks about it.
Yeah. So that's a really important
point because as you say, these are, you know, the first images
that she's working with. There's actually one which has a
(40:14):
woman on the kitchen counter inside a pan emerging from the
pan. She looks a bit like one of
those prehistoric Venus little amulet sculptures.
And then there's a mixer on her head.
And then there's eyes and a mouth on the mixer, and it looks
a lot like the Germaine Greer cover of the magazine.
(40:34):
And there's a sausage jar on theforeground, and you don't know
exactly what was added and what wasn't.
And the degree of absurdity of the images, the source of images
kind of pops out as well. So my fear of the photo montage
(40:55):
images being a bit overwhelming was diffused in this room.
Because she is surgical, Yeah. She is precise, yeah.
And she's very minimal in what she adds on to the images.
Yeah, you really feel the start of something because it's like
later on there's some photo montages that she does that are
(41:17):
just so just so layered, like she's using so much more that
the feel for line and composition.
You can feel it just all all of her years of life and experience
kind of coming together there. So that is grammar.
And then we go to glamour. And she was, you know, sort of
(41:42):
interested in these glamorous women from Liverpool and from,
you know, kind of the urban centers around where she grew
up. And she has a section in this
next room that is dedicated to what she calls working class
drag clubs near where she near where she was.
(42:05):
And it's just really lovely, intimate pictures of of of these
people kind of putting on their glamour and putting on literally
the clothing of it, but putting on the internal kind of
machinations of it as well. And she has the she she images,
(42:28):
which is the self portraits. These are bigger portraits, self
portraits. And she'll have, she's dressed
in kind of like a old castaway dress with a bit of lace at the
top. She has strings and strings of
pearls around. Her mom's pulse.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, she. Borrowed her mom's pearls.
Yeah, and they're, I, I, you can't help but notice, like some
(42:51):
of them are quite choker, you know?
I mean, they're very close to the neck.
And then she kind of, she has herself, her face partially
covered in bandages or Saran wrap or really clever ones where
she has cut out the like the lower half of a woman's face
(43:13):
from a magazine, it looks like, and matched it up to her own
face almost perfectly. And then there's, you know, some
kind of quotes in there as well.Some I am your death behind my
flesh Does my skull smile. You know, kind of like.
Those are the lyrics of a lot of.
Oh right, OK, gotcha. I miss that.
(43:35):
That's why the text is so weird,because you look and you think,
yeah, this looks like a conceptual piece.
And then you read the text and you think, this doesn't sound
like texts of conceptual pieces.And yeah, because they are texts
that she used to shout as a as aband member.
And then you have a video of heras well in the middle of that
(43:57):
room. Oh, right, yeah.
Do you want to talk about the video?
Yeah, so the video shows 2 aspects of her practice in those
days, which were bodybuilding. That's why I'm saying like,
there's a lot of things, there'sa lot of interviews out there of
her. So I knew quite a bunch of
things about her and I thought, oh, I know everything, you know?
But then you see an image of herbodybuilding.
(44:20):
So she at some point got interested in the idea of the
transformation of the body. And so she is filmed lifting
these weights with these shorts and this very serious stunts.
And I think she's wearing quite a bit of makeup.
So it's quite an ambivalent, ambiguous image.
(44:41):
And then you have another image which is her in concert wearing
pieces of meat that she would then take out and reveal a huge,
black, huge dildo emerging from her body.
And so that's when she was performing with letters with
with with her band. So there's all these aspects to
(45:04):
her where she's exploring and that's when you start seeing
that the narrative that you might have had because you've
listened to an an interview before of what happened to her.
You know, the way she was groomed is nuanced because she's
also talking about her own desire and her own interest in
(45:26):
this is not my expression, but deviant, you know, forms of
sexuality or marginalized identities who are associated
with different forms of sexual of sexuality.
And she doesn't put it out there.
Is it being her sexuality, whichI found really interesting.
There's a a fluidness of the drag Queens in the corner.
(45:49):
It's just a a bunch of photos and it got me thinking like, I'm
glad that's that's a horrible thing to say because what
prompted that was a horrible assault.
But I'm glad that she reverted to a more creative practice
rather than photography because those are pretty, there's those
are great images. But I think she has so much to
(46:11):
give in terms of her own practice and her old photo
collage and photo montage. And there's really this
masterful presentation of what it means to be a woman who wants
to be more than just what the press or the society or a
(46:37):
certain class as well, the working class, you know?
She. Comes from a specific point of
view. Wants women to be.
So I think there is much more toher than just this sort of
surface level critique of the role of women in society.
(46:57):
Yeah, as much more to her than that.
I couldn't help myself. And this is a terrible thing,
but the last time I was in that space was for Hegie Yang and and
she just went all over the place.
Like Hegie Yang had so many different types of expression,
right? I mean, she had, you know, you
(47:20):
know, in some of those rooms shehad installations of her moving
artworks around the world. So she had a palette with
literally, you know, all of her things packaged up in another
room. She had some sculptures that
she'd done. She, you know, had the the the
(47:41):
paper. Mesmerizing mesh, you.
Know exactly I mean, she, she was.
Shamanic folding the blinds inspired the blinds.
Everywhere, I mean, you know, she did so many, so many
different types of things. And there was part of me as I
was going through this exhibition that was saying that,
you know, I was sort of thinking, you know, she she's
(48:03):
really done this one thing, you know, the photo montage.
I mean, she's obviously done a bit of of photography and you
know, you know, music drawing some other bits certainly around
the side. But like her, her through line
is definitely this photo montageand you can see her deepening
(48:27):
within that. And and there was part of me
that was like a bit disappointedthat because this is a
retrospective, I wanted to see more of those tangents and kind
of where she pushed out into other areas.
And so I was doing some comparison which which is never
I think that useful, but because.
(48:49):
She's done other things. Yeah, for sure, for sure.
I mean. But I agree that the main line
of work is the photo montage forsure.
But it but it did. I also was trying to catch
myself there because within the photo montage you can see so
much development. You know, you can see her ideas
(49:09):
forming and developing and her her eye for line and design and
competition. And you know, is she talked
about, you know, the fact that you can have, you know,
different time. You can go across time and get a
magazine from the 60s and a magazine from the 90s and a
magazine from now and, and combine all of those elements
(49:33):
together in a way that is just completely unique and special
for photo montage, you know, should we move to the next room?
Sure. Seduction.
So she there's a quote there at the start of the room that says
to be trained in glamour was often also to be trained in the
art of seduction. So she's big on the etymology of
(49:55):
words and the word seduction originally meant to lead astray.
So the, the, this, this room contains a lot of floral imagery
as well. So kind of rather than having
(50:15):
the domestic items, you know, covering certain portions of, of
people's bodies or having the the men's or women's interest
magazines represented, it's moreabout having, you know, a rose
covering strategic spots of men or women's bodies.
(50:35):
And the way that she's doing this, and I don't even know how
to describe it. I mean, it's very sexy images,
right? Like there's some of sort of
orgies almost where there's several people naked together
giving each other. Some pleasure so striking.
Which one? There's three women together,
(50:58):
and she placed the flower in theway that just deconstructs the
sexual dynamic, and suddenly you're looking at these women
and thinking, what were they looking at?
How were they doing this? What led them there?
(51:22):
And she says about flowers, Flowers are basically so quotes.
Flowers are basically nature's pornography.
It's like, come over here and beattracted to me.
And the quotes, so they're stillsuper sensual, but it's like
she's deviating sensuality to something much more open,
visceral and just the sheer pleasure of the body opening up
(51:47):
to you and calling you and seducing you.
And at the same time, and she talks a lot about this.
She went, she spends a lot of time with these images to the
point where she says that she feels smells.
So for her, Playboys from the 60s have smells of pipe smoke.
(52:08):
Bacon, she mentioned. Bacon so she has synesthesia,
she kind of has these ore traumais bringing a lot of stuff.
She's very vague about that. And she says that there's she
goes into a sort of trans and she looks at these women and she
feels like she's releasing them.So maybe now is the time to say
(52:30):
that she uses a scalpel yeah, tocut the images.
So the these images are quite fantastic also in the way
they're associated together because it looks like Photoshop
and it preempts Photoshop because they're cut with huge
precision. She uses a scalpel.
And so the scalpel, she comparesit to the rot ring.
So that line pen that she used to use.
(52:53):
And there's an incredible continuity and she feels like
she's still drawing, but she's taking these images, she's
cutting them, She's spending a lot of time and she thinks about
these women and she uses glue. So she says, it's funny because
no one asks me about the glue. And for me it's the most
important thing because that's the mess.
(53:16):
It's messy, it's horrendous. You've drawn your tableau,
you've put everything together and then is the moment where you
have to just take your finger, you know, humidify it with your
tongue. I don't know how she does it.
Lift the thing and then put someglue on it.
And she says that she uses like 99 P glue from the High Street.
(53:37):
And that glue is quote like the ghost that haunts every first.
Montage. And I associate glue to semen.
I'm sorry, dear listeners, but for me, when I was listening to
her, I was like, and maybe female, you know, excretions,
(54:04):
let's say. It feels like the pleasure.
It feels like the mess of the pleasure, the end of it.
And there is something and the excitement and there's something
about cutting. So she talks about forensic
nature of the images and the surgery that she operates
(54:30):
because a scalpel and she says like I was attacked by a
stiletto blade. I had a stiletto blade held to
my throat. So the blade is attacks you and
can can kill you or can harm you.
But if you're doing surgery, then it can heal you, so there's
the potential of cutting to heal.
(54:52):
I'll leave it there. It's a complex subject, but
there's something to it for sure.
In the middle of the room, there's this giant sculpture,
the one that has, it's like a, it's essentially like a cut rug,
I guess. And it's a colorful rug and it's
(55:12):
sort of spirals upward. And so it's connected to
something hang from the ceiling.So it's, you know, it's pretty
large. And then there's eyes that are
sewn into it. So it's tufting.
It's called tufting. It's the it's a sort of gun that
goes into the fabric or the canvas and pierces it and kind
(55:36):
of leaves the the yarn. She so someone else did that for
her. She made the pattern.
And so it's kind of like those eyes that are that she colleges
that she applies to other elements.
So it's there's an element of the reoccurring eye with Daida
Moriyama as well. Actually, there's a relation
(55:56):
there as well is in the in that thing that is kind of like an
orange peel hanging from the ceiling.
It's very thin and it kind of spirals at the center of the
space. That's a really good description
of it, an orange peel and it's called diagrams of love,
marriage of eyes did that in 2016.
(56:19):
Then sort of against one wall issomething is some images that
are enormous. So it's three huge images and
the center image is the biggest,like it's sort of floor to
ceiling almost. And it's women.
(56:39):
It's it's people covered in likecolorful goo and it's called
splotching. Splashing.
Splashing. That's it.
Splashing. And it it comes from sort of
this Eroticism of being covered in food scraps and.
Foods, mushy food, it's called. It's a sexual fetish.
(57:03):
Splashing. Yeah.
And you cover yourself with viscous liquids and and viscous
mushy food or basically. And it's yeah, fetish.
I mean it's a niche fetish like tickling or whatever, but it
does exist. It might be more niche than
(57:24):
tickling, I imagine, but it's sothe, so there's a, there's the
two images on the side are of women covered in this and then
in the middle there's a couple of people covered in it.
And I thought it was interestingthat they're clothed, so they're
under so much of this goo and this colorful goo that is just
(57:46):
streaming down their faces and their bodies, but they actually
have clothes on underneath. Which I noticed that too.
I found this very odd. I thought they would be naked.
Me too. It's it's her and a friend.
It's two women. And they did that after she was
feeding her father. He had a stroke and he could
(58:08):
only eat that kind of food, jell-o and custard and that kind
of thing. And and she did these photos by
using that kind of food on herself and her friend and I and
associating it with a sexual fetish.
And I thought that's peculiar because I thought they would be.
(58:30):
So it would be a freeing thing to just get naked.
So I, it's kind of a thing whereyou, you can't prevent yourself
from thinking, is this a sexual fetish for her or is it just the
imagery and the aesthetic that she's using for her arts?
You know, that I, I, and it doesn't matter.
(58:50):
I don't need an answer. I'm not curious.
It is just a question that pops up in, in kind of this thing of
where does the lifestyle stop and the arts commences?
And do they overlap? Are they the same?
And I think that's an interesting question because
there's this idea that certain people live as arts, you know,
(59:11):
drag Queens and drag kings and so many people who are
entertainers and their lifestyleand their clothing and what they
are and what they do becomes to a certain extent, a performance.
You know, there's a performativeaspect to it.
And she did do performance. And I think at a certain point
it kind of overlaps. But I think the plasticity and
(59:32):
the visual creativity at the endof the day is the most important
thing for her. And on the other side, there's a
lot of photo montages from Playboy magazines of the 60s, I
think. And there's one which is called
A daughter's gift. And it's a woman again, with the
flat posing like peanut poses, revealing her breasts, probably
(59:57):
revealing her genitalia, but thegenitalia is covered with white
roses. And there's a painting in the
back that was added because it'sa bit wonky.
It was added to the image and there's kind of a, a yellow
margin on three sides and cut onthe left side.
(01:00:17):
And she's wearing these boots, which at a certain point in, in,
from the, the 60s onward were kind of a symbol of liberation
and empowerment. And, and also in, in S&M, the
dominate, the dominatrix wears boots often.
So it's a symbol of empowerment.And it's called the daughter's
(01:00:39):
gift. And it's associated with that
time where she was taking care of her dad.
Apparently she was grieving her mom.
So it was a very difficult period for her.
She was grieving, she was caringfor a parent, and then her
language is almost incestuous. And the relationship with
Beardsley comes again in this idea of the incest and the
(01:01:02):
desire coming from within a domestic space that is not safe
from transgression. And that room is unsettling, was
very unsettling to me. Not the fetish.
Couldn't care less. I mean, obviously I could never,
ever get close to that horrendous texture.
(01:01:22):
Yeah, splashing is not for me, let's just say that.
But I found the images really interesting and pleasing.
They're very colorful. There's a lot of yellow in
there. But then there's this incestuous
presence. And the the the orange peel made
me think of a story told by Louise Bourgeois.
There's a video of Louise Bourgeois peeling an orange and
(01:01:43):
saying that her dad was very inappropriate and he would peel
oranges. And as she goes, she peels the
orange. I hope I'm remembering this
right. And he would peel the orange,
revealing a sort of phallic shape because she's clearly
sharing something that was horrendous to her, Louise
Bourgeois. And so Linda's work, for all the
(01:02:06):
apprehension I had, really conquered me.
Like I was in it, loved it, but I was so tired.
Because it is all about finding your way as a woman who seeks
pleasure and who likes other women's bodies and likes your
own body and feels empowered by boobiness, genitalianness,
(01:02:32):
secretions, body liquids. And at the same time, the only
place you find is in this loop between seduction, danger,
glamour, the glamour of it all and sex.
And that kind of never ending loop where you feel caught as a
woman all the time. And it's something that I cannot
(01:02:54):
disentangle and that I find really tiring at this point,
nearing my 50th decade in the world.
There's a whole history of Pierre Molyneux, who took
pictures of women with her, their skirts up so you could see
their naked bodies from waist down.
And then you couldn't see her, their faces or their torsos.
(01:03:15):
There's Hans Belmer with, you know, she had this breastplate
that she used when she was, was she boxing at some point?
Listen, she had this huge amountof activities that then she uses
in some photo colleges where sheputs herself image of her
younger self. So they're in from the 10s or
(01:03:36):
the 20s in the 21st century, so quite recent images.
There's so much in that loop that she explores constantly.
And I don't know, how about you?How did you feel at this point
in the exhibition? Yeah.
I mean, I, you know, I felt like, and this is complete
(01:03:58):
conjecture, right? Like, I have no idea.
But there was knowing a little bit about her past.
I thought, you know, is what a great thing for her to be able
to have some agency over these narratives and to be able to
direct, you know, I mean, she's creating them, right?
(01:04:19):
And she's putting them out there, you know, about women's
role in the world and their relationship to sex, etcetera.
She's creating her own, her own story there.
And, and I think, you know, that's hopefully that's a very
(01:04:40):
liberating channel for her to express.
And so maybe her, her, her private life is freer because of
it. You know, is, is less encumbered
with. I mean, I have no idea.
Of course, you know, it's like, but I know that it, it can work
that way for when people find those outlets and those
(01:05:02):
challenge channels, especially as she has done at such a high
level. But yeah, it was a lot more to
take in than I thought. You know, I mean, I, I sort of,
yeah. I, you know, the, I remember
when I first moved to New York in 1998, you know, going to
this, going to this artist opening and it was a, it was a
(01:05:27):
young person doing photo montageand not very well.
Like it was, you know, it was a first stab at it kind of thing.
And I remember thinking, oh, gosh, this has really been done
a lot. You know, this is the late 90s
by that point, you know, and, and so when I was, you know,
(01:05:49):
getting ready to go see her, I had sort of thought like, oh,
this is all going to be things that I will have seen before.
But I think there is something about letting the depth that
you're talking about really sinkin and that is very heavy.
Like it is really heavy and it is very sobering about how much
(01:06:11):
has changed and kind of not as much and how much is going
backwards. There's so much more to it than
meets the eye. And it's nice to go through an
exhibition and just feel surprised and, and have that
journey of resistance and then kind of intrigue and awe and
wonder and, you know, kind of beleft in a place that that makes
(01:06:35):
you want to know more. So yeah, that's great.
Thank you so much, Emily. Thank you for visiting this
exhibition with me. And until next time, thank you
so much for listening guys, and have a good one.
Until the next episode, all. Right, see you soon.
Hi, welcome to Exhibition Estas,the podcast where we visit
exhibitions so that you have to.And this time I'm very happy to
tell you that I, Joanna Pierre Nervous will be hosting this
episode with Emily Harding, who is back to talk about Linder and
her exhibition Danger came smiling at the Haywood Gallery.
(00:27):
And I'm particularly happy that she comes for this episode
because she does love photography and Linda's work
somehow has something to do withit, although she cuts it,
reassembles it. Basically, she works with photo
montage, but in a way that is absolutely breathtaking and also
(00:50):
a way to run towards the danger,to quote kind of a favorite book
of mine by Sarah Polley. And again, I will remind you
that you can contribute either through our website or through
the link in the shows notes. Thank you so so much to those
who have been donating, who've become members of exhibitionists
(01:16):
or those who have chosen to go for maybe a more substantial
donation as a one off, thank youso much.
This means a lot to me because it is such a pleasure to be in
your eardrums and on YouTube andSpotify also in your presence as
(01:37):
a video. But it is also a lot of work.
And so to see that you value this work is really, really
meaningful. So thank you so much to those
who supports exhibition NISTAS and to to those who cannot do
it. There's others who do, so this
is for everyone. The content of exhibitionistas
(02:00):
will always be 100% accessible, whether you donate or you don't.
So thank you. And without further ado, let's
do this. Hello and welcome to Exhibition
Listers, the podcast where we visit exhibitions separately and
(02:21):
then compare notes during the recording of the episode.
You'll be very happy to know that today I am Co hosting with
Emily Harding. She is here, she is back and I'm
so delighted to have her here with me.
We are going to talk about Linda's exhibition Danger came
(02:43):
smiling at the Hayward Gallery. So we're going back to the
Hayward, Emily. Yeah, I know.
Yeah, Great stuff. And it is so exciting to be back
to Anna. Nice to see you and so good to
be the other exhibitionist. Is that are listening?
Yes, we are in your eardrums or in the space around you
sonically or maybe in video form.
(03:05):
Available on Spotify and YouTube.
Let's talk about our exhibition which is Danger Came Smiling.
Open until the 5th of May at theHayward Gallery and the artist
in focus is Linda. So did you know her?
It's all the. Image The cover image for the
(03:27):
exhibition was familiar. I didn't know how to place it,
but I knew that I had seen it before and basically it's a very
sexy, slim woman who's looks like she has some kind of oil on
her and she's completely naked. Instead of nipples, there's a
couple of mouths pasted over herbreasts, which is really
(03:48):
unsettling to see. Like teeth?
Say the least, yeah. Where nipples should be like
Ouch. And then her head.
It's a laundry utensil. Yes.
Yeah, So. So, yeah.
So it's a giant iron over her face.
I was familiar with that, but I wasn't familiar with her.
I mean, I I didn't know anythingabout her.
(04:10):
After we after I got into the exhibition, it was there a lot
of links being made in my mind, but I wasn't actually aware of
her. She's been a presence in the UK
and probably internationally because that image was used in
the, I think, 1977 album of the Buzzcocks.
(04:34):
It was used on that cover. So obviously that image rang a
bell to a lot of people, but most of us didn't know who had
made it. And so the person who actually
did that collage is Linda, who now is the focus of this
exhibition. So she it's a solo exhibition of
this woman's 50 years of work. She is actually 70.
(04:57):
She's now 71 years old, and she has this massive body of work
that you can discover in this exhibition.
So I will maybe just introduce Linda, her life, which is quite
eventful. I mean, she was at the right
time, at the right place and at the wrong time in the wrong
(05:18):
place many a times. And then after the break, you'll
take us through the exhibition, if that's OK Emily sounds good.
All right. So Linda Sterling, as she named
herself as, born Linda Mulvey inLiverpool in 1954.
So she comes from a working class background.
(05:39):
Her dad was a bricklayer and hermother was a hospital cleaner
and she lived happily in Liverpool and, you know, she was
10 years old. When she was 10 she moved to a
little place near Wigan in basically a very rural setting
(06:00):
and a very small countryside town where she was.
She felt very confined and she felt kind of her world reduced
quite a great deal because she says that she loved being in
Liverpool. She loved particularly looking
at the women in the street and the way they adorned themselves,
(06:21):
their fashion styles, even though it wasn't her own style.
She just loved looking at people, at glamorous people, at
people well dressed and culture and all of the activity and the
the noise of the big city. So this was quite daunting to
her. She talked about how all of the
(06:41):
very glamorous people were coming from Liverpool in her
sort of in her world there. So it was like London was sort
of another planet, you know? I mean, the big cosmopolitan
Center for her was Liverpool, which is, yeah, just lovely her.
Work developed outside of the big capital, which is kind of
interesting as well, and it kindof mixes with the punk movement.
(07:06):
But before we go there. So there's something that's
quite striking in her biography,which is that she was groomed by
her step grandfather. So there's this really
terrifying situation within the family home whereby at the very
right age of 3, she was groomed by being shown pornography and
(07:31):
then she ended up, you know, being molested by this person.
So this event in her life propelled a lot of things in
her. And what I found quite admirable
and at the same time unsettling is that she's very able to talk
(07:52):
about this as a traumatic event that is very much connected to
her work. And at the same time talk about
desire and talk about the appearance of fascination with
bodies at a very young age and her own compulsiveness and her
own desire and her own form of lust in that same time.
(08:17):
So it's quite interesting to seethat she holds these two things
that would have been contradictory, which is to being
the victim of sexual assault andat the same time still having a
nascent form of sexuality and desire and then developing into
(08:39):
someone who's really attracted to marginal forms of sexuality
connected with issues of identity, etcetera.
So that's really, I think, one of the cool themes of the
exhibition and also of her life.She talks a lot about how gender
roles were so observed and so enforced in that space.
(09:01):
And in that time she goes to Wigan and she goes to a bookshop
and finds Jermaine Greer's book The Female Eunuch with an
amazing John Holmes cover. So a design cover that is going
to be incredibly nurturing for her own creativity, which is a
(09:26):
female body hanging on a sort ofa rod and also with handles.
So there's this curvy shape, andthen there's this kind of
domesticity of the image that certainly turns the female body
(09:47):
into functional objects of the home.
I mean, you just think about that and it's like, you know,
growing up in, you know, a very working class neighborhood and,
you know, not a big city in the UK at that time.
I mean, she's growing up in a post war UK that is trying to,
(10:09):
you know, become more contemporary.
So much of popular culture is being born in this time.
So it's like your your cultural reference from being, you know,
a very young person is so small.And then suddenly sort of
there's this boom of magazines and books and Jermaine Greer and
(10:29):
all of these ideas about sexuality that have, you know,
busted down the doors. Thank God, you know, given her
background that she was able to have some access, the access she
did have to those ideas. I imagine they were life saving
in some sense. You know, you think of the her
work and the story she can tell through her work and how she can
(10:52):
express through her work, givingher agency over these narratives
of desire and objectivity as a woman.
And you know that that certainlyperhaps helped her through that
trauma. Yes, the empowering aspects of
(11:14):
having access to those images and being able to manipulate
them is huge. Exactly.
It's huge for her. And thank you for saying that,
because it also reminds me of something that she says, which
is that at the time there were only two channels, which is
something I can relate to in Portugal in the 80s and you as
(11:36):
well. So it's very generational.
Although she's quite older than us, it's, it's still affected
us. And she talks about boredom.
So she talks about not being able to be entertained by TV
because there was nothing. And then even when there was
something, it was probably not geared towards people her age.
(11:56):
And so she talks about drawing alot, and she's fascinated by
glamorous princesses and glamorous women.
So she draws a lot of female bodies with luscious clothing
and dresses in these magnificentspaces, which she interprets as
also being a sort of fascinationwith bigger, wider, richer
(12:19):
cultured spaces that she didn't have access to in her working
class little home. And so she starts obsessively
drawing. And she also finds in, I think,
a magazine illustrations of the great Aubrey Beardsley, who was
(12:40):
an immense artist in weirdly a very short time because she
died. He died when he was 25 S in the
last decade of the 19th century.And he was this very
accomplished draughts person. She he would draw illustrations
for books for wonderful Oscar Wilde's plays.
(13:02):
And so he was quite famous, but he was also a bit decadent,
which is a term she uses at times.
So he he drew these intricate patterns very pre Art Deco, and
he would draw little penises and, you know, kind of very
(13:24):
sexualized images or erotica. And he kind of inserted these
little details into the drawings.
And so apparently when he illustrated Oscar Wilde's play,
he would include caricatures of Oscar Wilde, who would be really
furious about it. And then the publisher
(13:45):
apparently spent ages looking atthe drawings, trying to see if
there was imagery that might have been, you know, complex to
deal with once it was published.Yeah.
And his drawing is line drawing in black and white.
Beautiful. And she talks about never really
(14:06):
having shoplifted in her life except for this rottering
number. I forget which kind of
rottering, which kind of thickness of the pen, but she
stole that to draw. And she talks about how that pen
(14:28):
in some ways kind of takes over the drawing and it's super
incisive. It's almost like cutting, which
is going to be important later. And how that allowed her to draw
like Beardsley and that. That's so interesting to me
because we're raising our kids in a time when there's access to
everything. And sometimes when you don't
(14:51):
have access to much, just a tinylittle thing can open this huge
gate to a whole new world that you have inside of you.
But that also comes from everything that you're looking
at. Yeah, which is so interesting
it. Is it's like how much choice is
good and useful? Do we, you know, how much choice
(15:13):
do we need in our lives and, andis productive?
I mean, is there a certain pointof beyond which you have an
abundance of choice that is suddenly stifling?
You know, having access to a lotcan be as terrifying as having
access to nothing, basically. That's incredible in her
biography. And so of course, at a certain
(15:35):
point, she does reconnect with the big city, so she goes and
studies graphic design in Manchester Polytechnic.
So that's a big time for her because in 1976, she goes to a
Sex Pistols concert and she meets everyone, basically.
She becomes long and lifelong friends with Morrissey.
(15:58):
She's still friends with him. And she meets the Buzzcocks, who
ask her. And that's, again, such a funny
and endearing story. So she meets the Buzzcocks and
they ask her, oh, So what do youdo?
And she says, well, I'm studyinggraphic design.
I do drawings and stuff and theysay, oh, do you want to do stuff
(16:20):
for us? And she says yes.
And so that's that's how it starts.
So easy, so easy, so simple. And so she produces in 77 that
cover for Orgasm Addicts, which is this very iconic image.
And of course the the sound is that punk sound.
(16:45):
So she gets involved. It's a great song.
Orgasm magic. But in 78 she also has her own
band called Ludus. Marina Warner in the catalogue
says something really interesting.
Which is so Ludus in Latin meansplay, playfulness.
(17:06):
But she also connected, connectsthe words to ludicrous.
She buys cameras. So she as soon as she goes into
Manchester Polytechnic, she stops painting and drawing
because she had some point she did paint and she also buys
(17:26):
cameras. And that at a certain point she
even had this idea of becoming the Diane Albus of the UK.
So she really was into photography and she wanted to
produce her own images. She would go.
So she was very in tune with thecounterculture.
She says that she could be wearing like bondage trousers,
(17:48):
go to one of these clubs, like for example, drag Queen Club.
So Dickies, she went to look to Dickies and Manchester and took
pictures of the drag Queens there and she felt safe.
She said. You know what?
What is really? Strange is that.
Going into the punk spaces was feeling safe for me.
(18:09):
That's where I felt that I was at the, you know, in the in the
safest of spaces because we could be whatever we wanted to
be. We could do whatever we wanted
to do. Whereas elsewhere I didn't feel
safe. And you know, famous last words
because when she already had started even taking pictures of
gigs, for example, she was attacked in the street by a
(18:33):
serial rapist. He was caught by the police a
few months later and she was carrying her cameras.
He so she he took a blade, stiletto blade her throat and
started like assaulting her. And she said, well, my friends
(18:53):
are coming, people are coming. I have a meeting with them.
So she's really started bartering with the person and
she said, and I have really expensive cameras and I can give
you my cameras. So he took the cameras and left,
didn't attack her. And apparently she found out
through the police that he rapeda woman that very night.
(19:16):
She was so traumatized that she did not take up photography and
did not touch a camera until thelate 90s.
And so she turned to photo montage.
And this is where, you know, it becomes a big kind of a desert,
not desert, but like a crossing of the desert for her because
(19:41):
she so she takes photo montage really serious that seriously,
as she was already doing in the 70s and and took that up as her
activity. And she says, you know, she's in
her 70s. And I think another take from
this exhibition, after having seen a lot of exhibitions of
(20:02):
older women who always practice,who always worked as artists,
and who deliver this life story to you, packaged with a nice
little. You know, ribbon and bow.
And she says, well, but this wasn't all straightforward.
(20:23):
Like it took me a long time to pull myself out of these States
and come to a clarity of what I was doing in terms of my own
production. So the title of the exhibition
is connected to her band. It's the title of the NLP or
(20:45):
second album Danger Came Smiling.
And it comes from one of her grandmother's novels, is a title
of like a sort of, I think a romance novel of some kind.
Danger Came Smiling or maybe a thriller of some kind.
So from that time and into now, there is a sort of a a life that
(21:12):
was lived a family life until recently.
She was artist in residence at Tate St.
Ives in 2014. She got the Paul Hamlin
Foundation Award in 2017, and she was included in several
exhibitions. And he she's shown her work very
(21:35):
recently. So in her 60th decade into her
70th year, she's had this or late 50s, she's kind of had this
presence again in a more institutional world, let's say
(21:55):
of exhibitions. So recent solo exhibitions, for
example, include the one at Nottingham Contemporary
Kestnergel Shaft. Well done.
I, I, I, I went for it. You took.
A shot. Yeah, I did.
I did. You know, German listeners, I
(22:17):
apologize. I know there's a lot of you.
I apologize for this mispronunciation.
But this one, I'm going to ace. I'm going to tell you right now.
And this one, this next one, I'mready.
That's it. And Museum of Modern Art PS1 and
(22:38):
group exhibition and exhibitionsand collections, as you can see
in the exhibition Tate Modern, Australian Center for
Contemporary Art, Tate Britain, Museum of Contemporary Art of
Chicago. So, and you have the privilege
of visiting an exhibition of someone who who has had a long
time producing her work because she needed to.
(23:01):
So this is a very specific kind of experience as an exhibition,
I find. And International Women's Day,
right? It's like it's, we're recording
the day after. And, you know, it was a great,
great thing to see around aroundthat time.
Yeah, absolutely. And we are going into the
(23:22):
exhibition right now after the break.
Yeah, happy to, Happy to. All right, well, welcome back
everybody. We are heading into the
exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.
It's on until the 5th of May, soyou have some time go over and
(23:43):
check it out. So this is the same space
obviously where we saw the Heggie Yang exhibition, but this
is sort of half of the space. The other half is has another
exhibition. So it's 4:00 rooms in total.
It's a retrospective, so it's obviously looking at the full
expanse of her work. And the rooms are entitled
(24:06):
Grammar, Glamour, Seduction and Cut.
So lots of of, of great materialin all of them.
But so it starts off. So this is work that she started
when she was at Manchester Polytechnic in 1976.
And she had, you know, abandoneddrawing and she was going for,
(24:28):
you know, photo montage and really doubling down on that, as
you mentioned. So she's got a bunch of images
from men's interest magazines, which is like cars, DIY
pornography and women's interestmagazines, which is like fashion
and homemaking and romance. And she is using all of these
(24:52):
images to kind of gather into a single image.
And she has a very distinctive kind of visual style.
She's kind of starting to cultivate this very distinctive
style that she has of, you know,mashing these different ideas
together to create something new.
And in this room grammar, she has a whole kind of floating
(25:18):
wall that in the middle of the room that has images with
different mouths, different lipstick mouths kind of pasted
on, and all of the mouths are sort of a bit oversized and a
bit different in subtle and not so subtle ways.
A bit grotesque bit. Grotesque.
(25:40):
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, it's, the image is
exactly the same and the only difference is the mouths.
And it's, I loved it. The, the exhibition kind of
peaked early for me and that I just found this fascinating.
I this aggregation of difference, these subtle
(26:00):
differences that make you feel vastly different about each
image. And then to see them all in
aggregate stacked up next to each other is just a really fun
work to regard. It's fun to stand in front of.
I mean, which is why you go to exhibitions, right?
But but yeah, I felt that reallyprofoundly with that piece.
(26:23):
And then it's another thing. So Sufiana Babri had a great
curtain. There's a great curtain in this
one, too. So it's this kind of meshy white
curtain that is sort of a horseshoe around this floating
wall. And just inside this meshy
curtain is these hanging masks. So if you're going to a
(26:47):
masquerade ball, you might put one of these things over your
face, but they are all these. Heads wearing the It's just
heads. That's true, yeah.
Wearing masks, which is even more haunting.
Yeah, it's like mannequin heads wearing these masks.
You're right. And they're just sort of
floating there, you know, disconnected from anybody,
(27:11):
disembodied. But they're extraordinarily
sexy. I mean one of them has like
tassels. I love, I love.
I took a picture of that one. It's the pink 1 isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like a hot magenta colour.
Yes. And it has, Yeah, those tassels
(27:31):
like the stripper would have over their nipples, you know,
and kind of swing them around and.
Yeah, that's beautiful. Eyes as nipples.
Yeah, love it. And nipples on the eyes.
Yeah. And.
And eyes on the nipples. Yeah, why not?
It's already kind of like inspired by her photo montage
works. Exactly.
(27:53):
But yeah, there's kind of like an overly sexy Lacy tassily, but
also a bit bondagey. You know, there's a lot of
images in this in these 4 rooms.I thought the ones of herself
were the strongest. I think she's a captivating
model and someone who can express so much, you know,
(28:14):
through her own, you know, through her own talent in front
of the camera as well as behind the camera.
But I thought that that was thatwas some of the strongest work
in here. But but yeah, I, I kind of there
was a resistance I had to it because I was like, I am already
uncomfortable and I did feel uncomfortable, like a lot of
(28:37):
this made me feel uncomfortable.But there was a there is more
charm, Yeah. And more, more sort of charm.
There was more dimension to the work rather than just trying to
shock me. You know, I, I like, I don't
know, I mean, maybe in Mike Kelly, it's like he was just
(28:59):
like, I kind of felt like he wasjust trying to shock, shock,
shock and isn't, you know, I don't know.
And I, I felt like I was worriedI might go in feeling like that
about her work. But I, you know, this is the
again, the great beauty of exhibitions as you go on a
journey with it, if you just kind of open your mind a little
(29:19):
and, and I really appreciated that about this exhibition.
It's funny because if we went with the same mindset, because
as we've spoken about before, photography for me is quite
exhausting, right with the, you know, the listeners.
If you haven't listened to the Daido Moriyama episode, it's a
(29:40):
big one on that, about the apprehensions about portrait
portraiture and photography in general and the massive presence
of photography in space. And I also had an apprehension,
and it's funny you should say that, how you reacted to the
image of the show. So the iconic image of the
Buzzcocks cover, which in the Buzzcocks cover is kind of
(30:03):
diluted by a monochromatic color, whereas in the exhibition
space and the poster of the exhibition is the original
version with the oily body, which is a very 80s body.
It's weird that it's a 70s image.
That's because it became the 80simagery of fashion and like
these oiled up bodies, super muscular but sensual and curvy,
(30:28):
with big breasts but not too big, not too small.
Like this idealized woman who is, you know, sporty and at the
same time works and is empoweredand wears stilettos but also
blazes and whatever. But it seems to preempt all of
that. But I had this apprehension
because I find photo montage tiresome, saying lots of things
(30:50):
at the same time and kind of gathering images that you
already have in your mind and then kind of reorganizing them
in ways that become symbolic andyou have to interpret.
But it's sometimes it's quite obvious what it's trying to say.
So I had big apprehensions. And when I saw the image of the,
of the juicy smiles nipples, I thought, OK, there's something
(31:17):
going on, that this is a good image.
This is doing something for sure, right?
And I was a bit more excited, I have to say.
So again, yeah, exhibitions are a journey, man.
They really are so so the rest of the room has images around
the sides and then there's a couple of kind of tabletop
(31:38):
exhibitions that have, I think, some of her magazines and notes
and. Listen, let me talk about those
later. Describe the room because those
are, wow, incredible. Well, let's go ahead there.
Let's start there. So we have these tabletop
images. Well, yeah, yeah, go ahead.
What? What?
(31:59):
So you have those tables behind with covers and the artwork she
did for Laddus, for her band. And those drawings are those
famous drawings that, well, not those ones that she talks about
in her childhood, but where Aubrey Beardsley comes back and
the marriage between Beardsley'sline, black and white drawings
(32:25):
and the punk geometric. Because her eyebrows are
triangles, right? She has the 80s eyebrows painted
on her face almost. And so they find themselves in
those covers with these beautiful drawings.
They are so incredible. I mean it.
(32:47):
And the, the, the drawings are just beautiful to gaze at
because they're so contemporary to those times.
And at the same time, they go and seek out Aubrey Beardsley
and say, this is probably what you would have been doing.
He was a dandy, and he had this very mysterious sexuality.
(33:08):
So he was accused because, you know, after the play he did the
illustrations for Oscar Wilde's play.
Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, as we know, and was accused of
being, I don't know what the term was at the time, but of
being homosexual, basically. And so there were suspicions
(33:30):
about Beardsley's sexuality. It is kind of thought now that
he was either asexual or had an incestuous relationship with his
sister, which I find weird because in the exhibition at the
at the Tape Britain a few years back in 21 I think, or 22, there
were some pictures of Mabel, hissister.
(33:52):
He was dressed as a man and seemed to gear more towards the
towards the lesbian aspect of sexuality.
But we don't know because in those times those things
couldn't be written about and busy actually asked people to a
friend to destroy his more more sexual obscene as he said
(34:14):
drawings after he died, which luckily wasn't done.
So there's also kind of this idea of what would have Beasley
have done and where are the issues in our society now, what
is accepted and what isn't. That marriage between Beasley
and the punk movement is kind ofsomething.
And the the music is quite good.Lotus, It's quite, it's quite
(34:36):
nice. The so that yeah, so that first
room has a lot of images of, youknow, kind of her early photo
montage. One whole section has is called
Pretty Girls and it's from 1977 and it is a series of naked
women with various kind of appliances and household items
(35:02):
for their heads. So kind of they're all in a
domestic scene. Think it's the same woman
actually. It's the same woman.
Yeah. On on several pieces of
furniture, basically completely naked in sexy posing like in pin
up poses. Yeah.
And they have like maybe a coffee pot for a head or, you
(35:28):
know, other items masking how they how they look.
You can see the birth of her ideas here, you know, and, and,
and kind of much more developed perhaps later on.
So. She works very early on and she
collects very early on pornographic magazines of
(35:48):
certain periods. So she goes back to the 40s, to
the 50s to the 60s and this becomes systematic across time
up until now. And she has an incredible quote
that connects the assault she suffered as a child and this use
(36:08):
of pornographic images. In an interview for The
Guardian, she talks about how she had to undergo the form of
therapy that was supposed to heal, which is based on eye
movement. That was supposed to heal
something that was happening to her so very recently, so late in
life, which was these recurring images that was coming back,
(36:30):
that were coming back to her, these visions that were very,
very vivid. So she says, quote, a whole new
swathe of imagery came up and itwas very, very vivid unquotes.
And so she describes these images that obviously are
related to her assault. And she says, quote, I was
somehow recalling the ballet books I used to have aged three.
(36:54):
I think that's kind of grooming begins with the handling of the
child's body in a certain way indomestic spaces.
In my montages I reverse engineer what a paedophile
spends their time engineering unquotes and that is incredible.
(37:15):
I mean that's just, there's so many layers to this.
So the ballet. So she was fascinated by ballet
images, which is what I meant when I said that she was already
looking at these images of bodies for to be watched, doing
elegant, beautiful, creating beauty and noting that men and
(37:40):
women were wearing makeup. So there's a form of dragon
ballet that she was really drawnto, and she found that that was
the place to be. That's where she wanted to be.
But those image was also the ones that she associated.
So that pleasure she had, which at that point was visual
pleasure, obviously aesthetic pleasure, were connecting to the
(38:03):
images that she was being shown by a member of her family that
were explicit images and sexual images.
And so she kind of like associated both.
And in this room you can see youcan have a very surface reading
of these images, which is echoedby the texts, which I find
(38:27):
really problematic because they solve the images for you.
I love that there's text in exhibitions.
I really respect that job. I write as well for exhibitions,
But I am really worried that thesubtleties of her work kind of
(38:48):
go out of the window with those texts that resolve quite quickly
what she's doing and kind of connecting the imagery to women
rights and to the role of women in domestic interiors.
When there's also a layer of pure admiration for women's body
(39:10):
and an intentional relationship and pleasure with sex and sex
that is given to you in the voyeuristic sense.
On the printed image that also comes in Playboy.
She collects a lot of play Playboy magazines with Truman
Capote texts and with artists who sometimes illustrated those
(39:33):
magazines. So there's a real connection and
there's a taboo. And she, she says in an
interview, no one talks about, no, she doesn't say that there's
a book about porn which starts with no one talks about their
consumption of porn. It's the 20% of the images and
(39:54):
the searches on the Internet. It's a lot.
Wow. And no one talks about it.
Yeah. So that's a really important
point because as you say, these are, you know, the first images
that she's working with. There's actually one which has a
(40:14):
woman on the kitchen counter inside a pan emerging from the
pan. She looks a bit like one of
those prehistoric Venus little amulet sculptures.
And then there's a mixer on her head.
And then there's eyes and a mouth on the mixer, and it looks
a lot like the Germaine Greer cover of the magazine.
(40:34):
And there's a sausage jar on theforeground, and you don't know
exactly what was added and what wasn't.
And the degree of absurdity of the images, the source of images
kind of pops out as well. So my fear of the photo montage
(40:55):
images being a bit overwhelming was diffused in this room.
Because she is surgical, Yeah. She is precise, yeah.
And she's very minimal in what she adds on to the images.
Yeah, you really feel the start of something because it's like
later on there's some photo montages that she does that are
(41:17):
just so just so layered, like she's using so much more that
the feel for line and composition.
You can feel it just all all of her years of life and experience
kind of coming together there. So that is grammar.
And then we go to glamour. And she was, you know, sort of
(41:42):
interested in these glamorous women from Liverpool and from,
you know, kind of the urban centers around where she grew
up. And she has a section in this
next room that is dedicated to what she calls working class
drag clubs near where she near where she was.
(42:05):
And it's just really lovely, intimate pictures of of of these
people kind of putting on their glamour and putting on literally
the clothing of it, but putting on the internal kind of
machinations of it as well. And she has the she she images,
(42:28):
which is the self portraits. These are bigger portraits, self
portraits. And she'll have, she's dressed
in kind of like a old castaway dress with a bit of lace at the
top. She has strings and strings of
pearls around. Her mom's pulse.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, she. Borrowed her mom's pearls.
Yeah, and they're, I, I, you can't help but notice, like some
(42:51):
of them are quite choker, you know?
I mean, they're very close to the neck.
And then she kind of, she has herself, her face partially
covered in bandages or Saran wrap or really clever ones where
she has cut out the like the lower half of a woman's face
(43:13):
from a magazine, it looks like, and matched it up to her own
face almost perfectly. And then there's, you know, some
kind of quotes in there as well.Some I am your death behind my
flesh Does my skull smile. You know, kind of like.
Those are the lyrics of a lot of.
Oh right, OK, gotcha. I miss that.
(43:35):
That's why the text is so weird,because you look and you think,
yeah, this looks like a conceptual piece.
And then you read the text and you think, this doesn't sound
like texts of conceptual pieces.And yeah, because they are texts
that she used to shout as a as aband member.
And then you have a video of heras well in the middle of that
(43:57):
room. Oh, right, yeah.
Do you want to talk about the video?
Yeah, so the video shows 2 aspects of her practice in those
days, which were bodybuilding. That's why I'm saying like,
there's a lot of things, there'sa lot of interviews out there of
her. So I knew quite a bunch of
things about her and I thought, oh, I know everything, you know?
But then you see an image of herbodybuilding.
(44:20):
So she at some point got interested in the idea of the
transformation of the body. And so she is filmed lifting
these weights with these shorts and this very serious stunts.
And I think she's wearing quite a bit of makeup.
So it's quite an ambivalent, ambiguous image.
(44:41):
And then you have another image which is her in concert wearing
pieces of meat that she would then take out and reveal a huge,
black, huge dildo emerging from her body.
And so that's when she was performing with letters with
with with her band. So there's all these aspects to
(45:04):
her where she's exploring and that's when you start seeing
that the narrative that you might have had because you've
listened to an an interview before of what happened to her.
You know, the way she was groomed is nuanced because she's
also talking about her own desire and her own interest in
(45:26):
this is not my expression, but deviant, you know, forms of
sexuality or marginalized identities who are associated
with different forms of sexual of sexuality.
And she doesn't put it out there.
Is it being her sexuality, whichI found really interesting.
There's a a fluidness of the drag Queens in the corner.
(45:49):
It's just a a bunch of photos and it got me thinking like, I'm
glad that's that's a horrible thing to say because what
prompted that was a horrible assault.
But I'm glad that she reverted to a more creative practice
rather than photography because those are pretty, there's those
are great images. But I think she has so much to
(46:11):
give in terms of her own practice and her old photo
collage and photo montage. And there's really this
masterful presentation of what it means to be a woman who wants
to be more than just what the press or the society or a
(46:37):
certain class as well, the working class, you know?
She. Comes from a specific point of
view. Wants women to be.
So I think there is much more toher than just this sort of
surface level critique of the role of women in society.
(46:57):
Yeah, as much more to her than that.
I couldn't help myself. And this is a terrible thing,
but the last time I was in that space was for Hegie Yang and and
she just went all over the place.
Like Hegie Yang had so many different types of expression,
right? I mean, she had, you know, you
(47:20):
know, in some of those rooms shehad installations of her moving
artworks around the world. So she had a palette with
literally, you know, all of her things packaged up in another
room. She had some sculptures that
she'd done. She, you know, had the the the
(47:41):
paper. Mesmerizing mesh, you.
Know exactly I mean, she, she was.
Shamanic folding the blinds inspired the blinds.
Everywhere, I mean, you know, she did so many, so many
different types of things. And there was part of me as I
was going through this exhibition that was saying that,
you know, I was sort of thinking, you know, she she's
(48:03):
really done this one thing, you know, the photo montage.
I mean, she's obviously done a bit of of photography and you
know, you know, music drawing some other bits certainly around
the side. But like her, her through line
is definitely this photo montageand you can see her deepening
(48:27):
within that. And and there was part of me
that was like a bit disappointedthat because this is a
retrospective, I wanted to see more of those tangents and kind
of where she pushed out into other areas.
And so I was doing some comparison which which is never
I think that useful, but because.
(48:49):
She's done other things. Yeah, for sure, for sure.
I mean. But I agree that the main line
of work is the photo montage forsure.
But it but it did. I also was trying to catch
myself there because within the photo montage you can see so
much development. You know, you can see her ideas
(49:09):
forming and developing and her her eye for line and design and
competition. And you know, is she talked
about, you know, the fact that you can have, you know,
different time. You can go across time and get a
magazine from the 60s and a magazine from the 90s and a
magazine from now and, and combine all of those elements
(49:33):
together in a way that is just completely unique and special
for photo montage, you know, should we move to the next room?
Sure. Seduction.
So she there's a quote there at the start of the room that says
to be trained in glamour was often also to be trained in the
art of seduction. So she's big on the etymology of
(49:55):
words and the word seduction originally meant to lead astray.
So the, the, this, this room contains a lot of floral imagery
as well. So kind of rather than having
(50:15):
the domestic items, you know, covering certain portions of, of
people's bodies or having the the men's or women's interest
magazines represented, it's moreabout having, you know, a rose
covering strategic spots of men or women's bodies.
(50:35):
And the way that she's doing this, and I don't even know how
to describe it. I mean, it's very sexy images,
right? Like there's some of sort of
orgies almost where there's several people naked together
giving each other. Some pleasure so striking.
Which one? There's three women together,
(50:58):
and she placed the flower in theway that just deconstructs the
sexual dynamic, and suddenly you're looking at these women
and thinking, what were they looking at?
How were they doing this? What led them there?
(51:22):
And she says about flowers, Flowers are basically so quotes.
Flowers are basically nature's pornography.
It's like, come over here and beattracted to me.
And the quotes, so they're stillsuper sensual, but it's like
she's deviating sensuality to something much more open,
visceral and just the sheer pleasure of the body opening up
(51:47):
to you and calling you and seducing you.
And at the same time, and she talks a lot about this.
She went, she spends a lot of time with these images to the
point where she says that she feels smells.
So for her, Playboys from the 60s have smells of pipe smoke.
(52:08):
Bacon, she mentioned. Bacon so she has synesthesia,
she kind of has these ore traumais bringing a lot of stuff.
She's very vague about that. And she says that there's she
goes into a sort of trans and she looks at these women and she
feels like she's releasing them.So maybe now is the time to say
(52:30):
that she uses a scalpel yeah, tocut the images.
So the these images are quite fantastic also in the way
they're associated together because it looks like Photoshop
and it preempts Photoshop because they're cut with huge
precision. She uses a scalpel.
And so the scalpel, she comparesit to the rot ring.
So that line pen that she used to use.
(52:53):
And there's an incredible continuity and she feels like
she's still drawing, but she's taking these images, she's
cutting them, She's spending a lot of time and she thinks about
these women and she uses glue. So she says, it's funny because
no one asks me about the glue. And for me it's the most
important thing because that's the mess.
(53:16):
It's messy, it's horrendous. You've drawn your tableau,
you've put everything together and then is the moment where you
have to just take your finger, you know, humidify it with your
tongue. I don't know how she does it.
Lift the thing and then put someglue on it.
And she says that she uses like 99 P glue from the High Street.
(53:37):
And that glue is quote like the ghost that haunts every first.
Montage. And I associate glue to semen.
I'm sorry, dear listeners, but for me, when I was listening to
her, I was like, and maybe female, you know, excretions,
(54:04):
let's say. It feels like the pleasure.
It feels like the mess of the pleasure, the end of it.
And there is something and the excitement and there's something
about cutting. So she talks about forensic
nature of the images and the surgery that she operates
(54:30):
because a scalpel and she says like I was attacked by a
stiletto blade. I had a stiletto blade held to
my throat. So the blade is attacks you and
can can kill you or can harm you.
But if you're doing surgery, then it can heal you, so there's
the potential of cutting to heal.
(54:52):
I'll leave it there. It's a complex subject, but
there's something to it for sure.
In the middle of the room, there's this giant sculpture,
the one that has, it's like a, it's essentially like a cut rug,
I guess. And it's a colorful rug and it's
(55:12):
sort of spirals upward. And so it's connected to
something hang from the ceiling.So it's, you know, it's pretty
large. And then there's eyes that are
sewn into it. So it's tufting.
It's called tufting. It's the it's a sort of gun that
goes into the fabric or the canvas and pierces it and kind
(55:36):
of leaves the the yarn. She so someone else did that for
her. She made the pattern.
And so it's kind of like those eyes that are that she colleges
that she applies to other elements.
So it's there's an element of the reoccurring eye with Daida
Moriyama as well. Actually, there's a relation
(55:56):
there as well is in the in that thing that is kind of like an
orange peel hanging from the ceiling.
It's very thin and it kind of spirals at the center of the
space. That's a really good description
of it, an orange peel and it's called diagrams of love,
marriage of eyes did that in 2016.
(56:19):
Then sort of against one wall issomething is some images that
are enormous. So it's three huge images and
the center image is the biggest,like it's sort of floor to
ceiling almost. And it's women.
(56:39):
It's it's people covered in likecolorful goo and it's called
splotching. Splashing.
Splashing. That's it.
Splashing. And it it comes from sort of
this Eroticism of being covered in food scraps and.
Foods, mushy food, it's called. It's a sexual fetish.
(57:03):
Splashing. Yeah.
And you cover yourself with viscous liquids and and viscous
mushy food or basically. And it's yeah, fetish.
I mean it's a niche fetish like tickling or whatever, but it
does exist. It might be more niche than
(57:24):
tickling, I imagine, but it's sothe, so there's a, there's the
two images on the side are of women covered in this and then
in the middle there's a couple of people covered in it.
And I thought it was interestingthat they're clothed, so they're
under so much of this goo and this colorful goo that is just
(57:46):
streaming down their faces and their bodies, but they actually
have clothes on underneath. Which I noticed that too.
I found this very odd. I thought they would be naked.
Me too. It's it's her and a friend.
It's two women. And they did that after she was
feeding her father. He had a stroke and he could
(58:08):
only eat that kind of food, jell-o and custard and that kind
of thing. And and she did these photos by
using that kind of food on herself and her friend and I and
associating it with a sexual fetish.
And I thought that's peculiar because I thought they would be.
(58:30):
So it would be a freeing thing to just get naked.
So I, it's kind of a thing whereyou, you can't prevent yourself
from thinking, is this a sexual fetish for her or is it just the
imagery and the aesthetic that she's using for her arts?
You know, that I, I, and it doesn't matter.
(58:50):
I don't need an answer. I'm not curious.
It is just a question that pops up in, in kind of this thing of
where does the lifestyle stop and the arts commences?
And do they overlap? Are they the same?
And I think that's an interesting question because
there's this idea that certain people live as arts, you know,
(59:11):
drag Queens and drag kings and so many people who are
entertainers and their lifestyleand their clothing and what they
are and what they do becomes to a certain extent, a performance.
You know, there's a performativeaspect to it.
And she did do performance. And I think at a certain point
it kind of overlaps. But I think the plasticity and
(59:32):
the visual creativity at the endof the day is the most important
thing for her. And on the other side, there's a
lot of photo montages from Playboy magazines of the 60s, I
think. And there's one which is called
A daughter's gift. And it's a woman again, with the
flat posing like peanut poses, revealing her breasts, probably
(59:57):
revealing her genitalia, but thegenitalia is covered with white
roses. And there's a painting in the
back that was added because it'sa bit wonky.
It was added to the image and there's kind of a, a yellow
margin on three sides and cut onthe left side.
(01:00:17):
And she's wearing these boots, which at a certain point in, in,
from the, the 60s onward were kind of a symbol of liberation
and empowerment. And, and also in, in S&M, the
dominate, the dominatrix wears boots often.
So it's a symbol of empowerment.And it's called the daughter's
(01:00:39):
gift. And it's associated with that
time where she was taking care of her dad.
Apparently she was grieving her mom.
So it was a very difficult period for her.
She was grieving, she was caringfor a parent, and then her
language is almost incestuous. And the relationship with
Beardsley comes again in this idea of the incest and the
(01:01:02):
desire coming from within a domestic space that is not safe
from transgression. And that room is unsettling, was
very unsettling to me. Not the fetish.
Couldn't care less. I mean, obviously I could never,
ever get close to that horrendous texture.
(01:01:22):
Yeah, splashing is not for me, let's just say that.
But I found the images really interesting and pleasing.
They're very colorful. There's a lot of yellow in
there. But then there's this incestuous
presence. And the the the orange peel made
me think of a story told by Louise Bourgeois.
There's a video of Louise Bourgeois peeling an orange and
(01:01:43):
saying that her dad was very inappropriate and he would peel
oranges. And as she goes, she peels the
orange. I hope I'm remembering this
right. And he would peel the orange,
revealing a sort of phallic shape because she's clearly
sharing something that was horrendous to her, Louise
Bourgeois. And so Linda's work, for all the
(01:02:06):
apprehension I had, really conquered me.
Like I was in it, loved it, but I was so tired.
Because it is all about finding your way as a woman who seeks
pleasure and who likes other women's bodies and likes your
own body and feels empowered by boobiness, genitalianness,
(01:02:32):
secretions, body liquids. And at the same time, the only
place you find is in this loop between seduction, danger,
glamour, the glamour of it all and sex.
And that kind of never ending loop where you feel caught as a
woman all the time. And it's something that I cannot
(01:02:54):
disentangle and that I find really tiring at this point,
nearing my 50th decade in the world.
There's a whole history of Pierre Molyneux, who took
pictures of women with her, their skirts up so you could see
their naked bodies from waist down.
And then you couldn't see her, their faces or their torsos.
(01:03:15):
There's Hans Belmer with, you know, she had this breastplate
that she used when she was, was she boxing at some point?
Listen, she had this huge amountof activities that then she uses
in some photo colleges where sheputs herself image of her
younger self. So they're in from the 10s or
(01:03:36):
the 20s in the 21st century, so quite recent images.
There's so much in that loop that she explores constantly.
And I don't know, how about you?How did you feel at this point
in the exhibition? Yeah.
I mean, I, you know, I felt like, and this is complete
(01:03:58):
conjecture, right? Like, I have no idea.
But there was knowing a little bit about her past.
I thought, you know, is what a great thing for her to be able
to have some agency over these narratives and to be able to
direct, you know, I mean, she's creating them, right?
(01:04:19):
And she's putting them out there, you know, about women's
role in the world and their relationship to sex, etcetera.
She's creating her own, her own story there.
And, and I think, you know, that's hopefully that's a very
(01:04:40):
liberating channel for her to express.
And so maybe her, her, her private life is freer because of
it. You know, is, is less encumbered
with. I mean, I have no idea.
Of course, you know, it's like, but I know that it, it can work
that way for when people find those outlets and those
(01:05:02):
challenge channels, especially as she has done at such a high
level. But yeah, it was a lot more to
take in than I thought. You know, I mean, I, I sort of,
yeah. I, you know, the, I remember
when I first moved to New York in 1998, you know, going to
this, going to this artist opening and it was a, it was a
(01:05:27):
young person doing photo montageand not very well.
Like it was, you know, it was a first stab at it kind of thing.
And I remember thinking, oh, gosh, this has really been done
a lot. You know, this is the late 90s
by that point, you know, and, and so when I was, you know,
(01:05:49):
getting ready to go see her, I had sort of thought like, oh,
this is all going to be things that I will have seen before.
But I think there is something about letting the depth that
you're talking about really sinkin and that is very heavy.
Like it is really heavy and it is very sobering about how much
(01:06:11):
has changed and kind of not as much and how much is going
backwards. There's so much more to it than
meets the eye. And it's nice to go through an
exhibition and just feel surprised and, and have that
journey of resistance and then kind of intrigue and awe and
wonder and, you know, kind of beleft in a place that that makes
(01:06:35):
you want to know more. So yeah, that's great.
Thank you so much, Emily. Thank you for visiting this
exhibition with me. And until next time, thank you
so much for listening guys, and have a good one.
Until the next episode, all. Right, see you soon.
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