Interview

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One of Linder’s most recognizable works of art first appeared on the sleeve of the 1977 Buzzcockssingle “Orgasm Addict.” On the cover, Linderutilized what would become her signature mass-media collage strategy to adorn or violate—or, really, both—a classical nude female torso with mouths at the nipples and a household iron in place of the head. By the time the single was released, Linder Sterling, born in 1954 in Liverpool, had already become a fixture in the Manchester punk and post-punk scene out of which bands like The Fall, Joy Division, the Buzzcocks, Magazine, and The Smiths emerged. In many ways, her collage works from the period have much in common with the subversive practices of punk: Ripping things apart and reassembling them was a way of showing the counterfeit quality and construction of any social image. But Linder’s art went even beyond the rebellion of her underground musical counterparts. Much like Hannah Höch in the Weimar era, Linder fused capitalism, sexuality, violence, feminism, desire, morbidity, and hope in her collages. Those fantastic and yet quotidian works have gained perhaps even more biting currency in today’s culture. Lipsticks, television sets, mouths, household appliances, nude bodies—nothing and everything are sacred in her realm.

Linder has transformed herself many times as an artist since those first collages. She performed as the lead singer in the art-punk band Ludus. She’s applied those assemblage tactics to photography and her own portraiture (most recently in a series with flowers). She’s even combined her radical aesthetic with her love of spectacle in a number of performance pieces, including one last October that involved black veils, antlers, a gold metallic dress, and a white horse on the beach for the Tate St. Ives’s Dark Monarch exhibition.

Next month, Linder is set to show new works at the Sorcha Dallas gallery in Glasgow and stage a special performance at the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. One constant in her life has been her relationship with the musician Morrissey. The two met in Manchester in the mid-1970s and quickly became friends. While Linder and Morrissey have continued to work around and alongside each other—in 1992, Linder published an intimate collection of photographs, Morrissey Shot, from her travels with him on a world tour—this interview marks the first time they have spoken publicly since 1979, when Morrissey interviewed Linder for a U.K. fanzine. Their questions and answers, written back and forth between each other over a span of weeks, are as much inventories of two poetic masterminds as lyrics all their own. When Morrissey wrote his first questions for this interview, he closed his letter with the following message to Linder:

“I shall love you till that final stretch of sand that the sea never quite reaches is finally swathed by crashing waves. Or, perhaps longer . . . if there’s time.”