London-For half a century, the artist Linder brought a scalpel to the images of pop culture which define the Euro-American culture. Working mainly with photomontage, its surgical dissections and its monstrous rejection offer an overview of the insidious intersections of the gender, desire and commercialism at the heart of the imagery of patriarchal capitalism. Linder: The danger came smiling Offers a relevant and in-depth overview of Linder's work, sailing on the ways that the artist has moved mercurial between the categories, from the stage of Fine Arts to documentary photography to the wild world of punk music and beyond.
Some of Linder's first photomontages remain the most powerful. For example, a set of non -title works in the mid -1970s combined images of contemporary advertising with pornographic images of women to create dark comic parodies of domestic life. In one piece, the shirtless of a woman emerges from a frying pan resting on an elegant kitchen worktop. She has a mixer for a head, with eyes and lips cut with fashion photo sessions. In another, a lingerie woman seems to pose for a giant camera in her room, but she has a vacuum cleaner for a face.
Likewise, in the 1977 series Pretty girlsA naked feminine model poses in the classic “pin-up” of the installation around a domestic space, its face masked by spying photographs of articles such as coffee makers, record players and irons. By digging in the visual language of pornography and advertising intended for women, these images effectively overturned the societal hypotheses deeply rooted on the roles and desires of women. Here, the domestic space is transformed of an idealized paradise and marketed into a dystopian site of dystomorphia, control and surveillance, in which the boundaries between women and the object are blurred.
In many of his most recent works, Linder avoids domestic objects for succulent images of flowers, often using them to obscure pornographic scenes, just like the figure sheets of classic sculpture. In these pieces, Linder draws attention to the complex symbolism of flowers, which mark the key events of life, from birth to marriage to death; Show romantic intentions; represent femininity; And act like Memento Mori in the tradition of still life. In Linder surgical interventions, women and plants become hybrids, captured in a state of metamorphosis which speaks of the fluidity of the genre, and positions bodies and flowers as resistance sites against the binary of the patriarchy.
Linder's World is one of the punk contempt for the rules, filled with subversion and impertine beauty. It repeatedly exaggerates the aesthetics of desire until they reach absurdity or grotesque, demonstrating how our expectations and aspirations are constantly manipulated by patriarchy and capitalist consumerism for unrealistic or non -sustainable ends. In this context, the cut becomes a transformational act which dissects time and space, creating a simultaneous isolation and combination language which is also incisive today as half a century ago.
Linder: The danger came smiling Continue to the Hayward Gallery (Southbank Center, Belvedere RD, London) until May 5. The exhibition was organized by Rachel Thomas with Gilly Fox, Katie Guggenheim,, And Charlotte Dos Santos.
