Linder’s “Where the tongue slips it speaks truth”

Why look at images? As the spectacle playing out on our screens separates us ever further from lived reality, it can feel difficult to justify going around the galleries to see more second-order representations of the world. This is especially the case when so much of the art currently being exhibited in London seems (inadvertently or otherwise) to serve the same passivizing function as the information delivered through social media and rolling news channels, offering up easily legible impressions of outrage or grief that drain viewers of that energy that might otherwise be devoted to action, on however small a scale. And then you come across a small exhibition of photomontages by a veteran punk, and you have one plausible answer.

These razor-sharp assemblages of found photographs, each around the size of a magazine or record cover, exploit our unconscious fascination with images of power, sex, and violence even as they dismantle the purposes to which those images are put in a mediated society. In this respect, they represent a continuation of the themes that have shaped Linder’s work in the half century since she broke into the national consciousness as designer of the cover for Buzzcocks’ 1977 debut single “Orgasm Addict.” And yet here the bright, level anger of her early collisions of pop culture with pornography are enriched by allusion to mythological narratives in which death and desire are inextricably connected.

The show’s titular work combines black-and-white photographs of Greco-Roman statuary with a cut-away of a crop-haired androgyne with startling oval eyes and a five-pointed star shaved into their head like that of Marcel Duchamp in Man Ray’s Tonsure (1919). These images carry ambiguous but affective associations (skinheads, New Wave film, female collaborators, Joan of Arc, imperial power, the conventions of classical beauty…), and the effect is comparable to the encounter in a dream of some strange composite of absent friends and unmasked fears. If photomontage is, like psychoanalysis, an archaeological form, with the print archives of popular modernity standing in for the collective unconscious, then Linder’s dredged-up monsters unsettle our understanding of ourselves and the societies that shaped those selves.

The title of work and show suggest that “truth” emerges only when we evade the watch of a conscious mind that has internalized society’s prejudices. It follows that a work of art cannot, if it is to be truthful or “free,” simply serve to illustrate an idea or to support a cause, however laudable. And so the strongest works here are those that for different reasons—not always obvious—resist easy legibility or attribution. The Echo from a Thousand Labyrinths (2024), with its surrealist defacement of a Roman bust, might at first seem straightforward in its rejection of patriarchal power. And yet the artist’s repeated return to these portraits betrays a fascination with the aesthetics of classical authority that cannot so easily be explained away. If Linder is an heir to John Heartfield and Hannah Höch, then her desire to disrupt is both more ambivalent and more general.

“Détournement,” wrote Guy Debord, “is the antithesis of quotation.”1 Leaving aside the irony of using a quotation to claim that quotation cannot produce new meaning, these works succeed when they resist the temptation to “quote” an authority and follow the more irreverent impulse to appropriate and overturn. A series of press photographs of Brigitte Bardot overlaid with porcelain figurines feel, for instance, overdetermined. Punning titles such as In the bardo I (2025) might nod to Maurice Blanchot’s classification of pictures that have lost their connection to the real world as “ghostly” or “after” images (a literalism not helped by Bardot’s death just a fortnight prior to the show’s opening), but the association of this twentieth-century icon with fragile statues of the Virgin Mary feels too easy to read.

That works such as Vantage-grounds in the changing chaos (2025)—with its combination of Constructivist patterning, twentieth-century technologies, and vintage pornography—rely for their affective charge on a degree of nostalgia does not diminish their vitality (and here the comparison to ghosts is a useful one). As punk was a return to the anti-authoritarian principles of pop music, so Linder’s resuscitation of obsolete images reasserts the freedom that is lost when a popular medium is hijacked to serve the order it once threatened to undermine. Which is to say, following Debord, when it is reabsorbed into the spectacle through which social relations are mediated. Whether this liberatory program can be enacted via the sale of unique works of art as opposed to through, say, the sale of pop songs or magazines, is another question. 

Nevertheless, in their attempt to reclaim the visual grammar of printed matter for insurrectionary purposes, Linder’s ghosts and monsters offer a model of how other originally democratic media—now taken over by oligarchs of a different order of power even to the press barons who controlled the twentieth-century publishing houses from which her images are culled—might be reclaimed. These are the issues which should concern everyone who produces “content” in the present. One reason to look at images, even now.