interview by Summer Bowie
photography by Hazel Gaskin
Nothing is a better testament to the ineffable power of printed matter than the fact that you are holding a print magazine in the 21st century. No one is tracking how long you will stay on this page and measuring it against your identity markers or browsing habits. There is no cookie policy. It’s just you, the images, the text, and the paper. What memories or feelings will this content summon within you as you consume it? If you’re anything like Linder, your sensual experience with turning the pages and inhaling the bouquet they have absorbed might give rise to an uncontrollable urge to reach for the scissors. Known for her iconic photomontages that contrast the incongruous gender representations respective to men’s and women’s magazines of the 20th century, Linder has always had an expert facility for hijacking images. She collects these flotsam and jetsam of Western popular culture and connects them in ways that mirror the hidden synaptic connections within our collective unconscious. Forever beseeching the muse, Linder finds ways of luring her in a multitude of media, including music, dance, markmaking, and printmaking. Her career has been an endless conjuring of that undefinable feeling when the muse comes to possess you and time stands still. Linder may find her in a Playboy, a song, an atlas, or a dress. Each might contain just one part of her that is begging to be reunited with the rest of itself. If you find part of her in this magazine and you feel so compelled, we won’t hold it against you. We won’t even know.
SUMMER BOWIE: Hi, good to see you. Thanks so much for doing this.
LINDER: Oh, thank you. I’ve just been spending most of the day driving through the English Lake District, which was the real cradle of Romanticism. The poet John Ruskin was there, William Wordsworth, and Beatrix Potter. They have a lot of great secondhand bookshops. So, I went there to find material to make new works for Andréhn-Schiptjenko’s booth at Art Basel Paris.
BOWIE: Wow, you must be telepathic because I was just about to ask you what you did today. What did you find?
LINDER: One of them is an atlas of dermochromes. These were books that were produced—full of cases of syphilis—for doctors out in the country who had minimal training. There’s a lot of genitalia in here. Oh, it’s really quite peculiar. I also got a beautiful book of ballet from exactly the same period [shows book]. It’s an extraordinary ballet called The Green Table. Have you heard of it?
BOWIE: Yes, it’s about a war room table, by Kurt Jooss. Oh yeah, that’s gorgeous.
LINDER: There are so many wonderful photographs in here. And I got a huge portfolio from Paris at the turn of the 20th century. It’s full of the most extraordinary illustrations. So, that was my Monday. When one is too much in need of finding that right image, it somehow escapes you. Sometimes I sit there, and the muse does not turn up. I’m just there, I have all the most beautiful material, I have lots of time, and nothing happens. In that case, I usually go for a walk and try to trick the muse when I get back. It’s best when things just find you.
BOWIE: You open the door and let the invitation do the work for you.
LINDER: Exactly that. There’s an English saying, Chance favors the prepared mind. It’s like going on a first date. You’re open to invitations, but at the same time, you’re quite cool. You want the gods to gently lay these treasures at your feet, and they did today, so I’m very happy. As I was driving back from the lakes, I was listening to the BBC, and they’re talking about the meetings between Zelenskyy and Starmer and Trump, asking questions about how they plan to choreograph it all. It was quite strange after getting this book from a ballet about peace negotiations. It was a great reminder that it’s not just the arts that are choreographed.
BOWIE: Of course, we have the theater of war, and diplomatic negotiations are one of the highest forms of theater. You’ve also taken inspiration from recent technologies like deep fakes, but you’ve never actually worked with digital media. Can you explain why?
LINDER: I worked a little bit with AI, but I found it too easy. I like a slight struggle, as if one is making a jigsaw puzzle, but the lid has been lost. So, I have no idea what the image will be. With the images I’ve just shown you, I would begin to lay those out—lots and lots of images. It’s quite contemplative at first. I look at all those images and think what could I put in to hijack them? I want to take them to a place they shouldn’t go. I just love that sinful moment of cutting up a precious book. Whereas with digital media, there’s no sensation, no perfume, no sense of weight of the original object. I’m just devoted to print media. I love the smell of it. These books have quite a musty, moldy smell right now. For me, that signals that it’s time to work. I like the sensuality of working with very old newsprint. Sometimes when I apply glue, I get an olfactory shock from whatever the paper has absorbed, things like pipe tobacco or a bacon smell.
BOWIE: You’ve also done some works with India ink recently. What inspired you to start making marks on the paper?
LINDER: On the weekend that Roe v Wade was being debated, I had been thinking about my youth, when there were just two channels on TV and the Abortion Act [England, Scotland, and Wales, 1967] was being passed. I was always drawing and painting. I had such a crush on Aubrey Beardsley at the time, and I loved his drawings of small fetuses in bell jars. I began to think about how I could go back to making marks and how I could make a large pen. I suddenly looked at a roll-on deodorant, and I thought, if I empty that, and if I put ink in, that’s like a huge pen, and I was so excited. I was sitting there, drawing, looking at Shunga, all sorts of references, and doing these drawings of fetuses in these watery worlds, really peculiar. I love them because the ink comes out really quickly, so you have to keep the pen drawing very quickly. I did that, and then that dreadful news when it was overturned. That’s maybe why I’ve not gone back to those drawings just yet. I had more than one abortion when I was young, and one of the places I went to was in Liverpool. I remember young women from Ireland were there, because it was still illegal for them. They would all tell their moms they were going to see a friend in Liverpool. The guilt was tough. You would think that things would get better, but the opposite happened.
BOWIE: Now, it’s easier to get an abortion in Ireland than in most parts of the US. Is the making of the work a very emotional process for you?
LINDER: It’s deeply, deeply pleasurable. It feels very sort of reparative, as if time stands still. I don’t know whether I’ve been cutting out for five minutes or an hour. It’s deeply pacifying and exciting too. I’m a detective, thinking, what’s the muse up to? If I find a fabulous portrait of somebody, I’m thinking, where shall I position her? What kind of room would she be in? It’s that aesthetic arrest I get with a certain image, and I just know I have to work with it, but then the work begins.
BOWIE: A few years ago, you did EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing] therapy, and it had a profound effect on the way the work felt for you. Can you talk about that?
LINDER: In 2018, I was invited by Art on The Underground to stay for the summer to design these huge billboards around one of the stations in London. It was all set up to be this really wonderful summer, and then I began to have very intense flashbacks from my childhood. I’ve done a lot of therapy over the years to process the incest I experienced, so I naively thought it was no longer lurking in the darkness of my psyche. Suddenly, my psyche was throwing up this new crop of images from my childhood, and it was very shocking. I have a friend who works with sex offenders in prisons to try and rehabilitate them. So, I asked her what treatment she uses, and she said it’s EMDR and that I should try it. I found a woman who practices it from California, and she took me to hell and back. It’s almost like a Victorian form of therapy, someone waving a wand in front of you in order to neutralize a past experience, but for me, it was incredibly profound, and at times very funny. The only problem was that after I finished my therapy, for about a month, I couldn’t work with pornography. I’d go and see my therapist, and she’d say, “How are you?” and I’d say, “I’m really good, but I’m looking at a pile of Playboys and there is no motivation to do anything with them. Everything I was shown as a young child has been neutralized. Can I have my money back?” Luckily, it only lasted for a short time, and then the images got their charge back.
BOWIE: What was it like in the ’90s, balancing this just-beyond-burgeoning art career with early motherhood?
LINDER: I was thirty-two when I got pregnant, and I’d read all those feminist books from age sixteen about healthcare and pregnancy, and I wanted to do it my way. I wanted to have my baby at home, but at my age, the National Health Service called it a geriatric pregnancy. They kept saying it might be a blue baby, but I did have my son at home, and because home births were very rare in Manchester at that time, the midwife brought all her student midwives in at midnight to watch my son being born. Then, at 8 AM, he still wasn’t born, so the new nurse came in with her student midwives, and my son was born to this adoring female audience who had never gotten a chance to see a home birth. It was wonderful. But being a working mother was difficult. I was photographing Morrissey on his tours for two years, and that was kind of manageable. I’d just go away for a while and come back to see my son. I had good family care. Now, my son is always part of the performances I make. I’m really lucky. He scores music for films, so that’s a good person to have in the family.
BOWIE: You were deeply intertwined in the whole late ’70s, post-punk Manchester scene, and you were the front woman for a group you formed called Ludus. What made you want to make music?
LINDER: If you go to a concert, usually there’s the audience, and then up on stage, elevated, is the superstar. I wanted to make music because for a very short period—’76, ’77, ’78—the gap between the audience and the stage just disappeared. There wasn’t any barrier. Post-punk was exciting because everybody would get up on stage and try and hit drums for the first time, or get hold of a trumpet, make some squeaky noise, or hammer a guitar. I had never sung in my life, but I knew that my larynx is capable of producing a variety of sounds, and it was very liberating. Ludus is Latin for play, so we would improvise a lot, and you could feel that ecstatic freedom where everybody’s really locked as one. I would say to everybody in an improvisation, “You can’t make a mistake,” which is a gorgeous way to work, because in this society where we’re all trying to prove how perfect we are—as mothers, artists, whatever—improvisation reminds you that nothing is wrong and nothing is right.
BOWIE: You’ve also produced a number of performance pieces with dancers of various disciplines. Why do you like working with movement artists?
LINDER When I was very young, every Christmas, my mum would buy me the new Princess Tina Ballet Book. Those books absolutely hypnotized me because both men and women had makeup on and were equally extraordinary. I just sensed that this obviously was going to be my destiny. I would beg my mum and dad for ballet lessons, and they would just laugh. They were gorgeous, but we were very working-class. In 2013, I was having a retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and I got in touch with the Northern Ballet company in Leeds. It was the best thing ever after years of looking at those books and finding deep sanctuary in the world of ballet, and they loved working with me because they could do things that were far removed from traditional ballet postures.
BOWIE: You create an interesting provocation for ballet dancers because there’s an unwritten hierarchy of dignity within the performing arts where ballerinas are at the top and sex workers are at the bottom. But you challenge them to tap into a side of themselves that is often reserved exclusively for erotic performers. You confront them with the notion that we’re all just taking on different forms of expression.
LINDER: It’s an empathetic leap into how that woman perhaps would have got up off that shag rug, or how she would have crossed a room, and how she and her friends would have interacted. I haven’t been able to work with anybody in the sex industry, but I did get to work with Mia Khalifa three years ago. She can do that lexicon of pornographic poses in her sleep. She was fluent in that language for a very slender part of her life, but she paid a huge price for it. It was extraordinary working with her, and I do really admire her being so outspoken.
BOWIE: Your performances have very striking costuming, and you have a very particular sense of style. Can you describe your sartorial sensibilities?
LINDER: I’ll be seventy in December, and it’s quite interesting to think about how one should look at my age. After about fifty, you start to feel like a vampire. You can’t see yourself mirrored back within popular culture. So it’s interesting to become invisible, but like in all the good fairy stories, if you’re invisible, then you have a certain agency. You’re not so easily definable. I’ve been working with my friend Ashish Gupta, who works purely in sequins. He has a studio in Delhi, and sequins can become highly politicized. We’re all supposed to just become invisible or muted. But when you have on one of Ashish’s head-to-toe sequined dresses, you feel armored. And because you can’t hide in sequins, you’re forced to lengthen the spine. You have to really own that. Some days, though, like today, I want to be totally anonymous, going around bookshops looking quite normcore. I’ve got my hair in a bun and I’m doing my perverse shopping in peace.
BOWIE: What is it about that experience that makes you want to go unnoticed?
LINDER: When I was little, I cut up my best dress, and I still don’t know why I did it, but I remember the pleasure of doing that. About a year ago, I told a bookseller that I make collage, and he wouldn’t sell me an encyclopedia because it was too precious. Today, I told someone that I was buying a birthday present, and now I’m looking at these exquisite books, and I’m in that moment of hesitation because I know I’m about to cut something up. Some books, like the ones I got today, I may never find anywhere else. There’s always this moment when I have to take a deep breath because I have so much respect for the printed word and illustration. And then, of course, seconds later, I’m having a great time cutting. I’m cutting all the best bits out of every book and every magazine.