Linder: ‘Danger Came Smiling’ Review

Nestled in the Hayward Gallery’s brutalist concrete, ‘Linder: Danger Came Smiling’ takes its lead from the violent beauty of its surroundings. Inexplicably, this is the first retrospective of the feminist visionary’s work, but she is well loved: an adorable older male gallery worker taps me to say I “just missed, five minutes ago” Linder herself taking a tour. I needn’t have worried: the power and charisma Linder holds doesn’t need to be witnessed to be felt. Though modest, the exhibition is well-marketed and visited, as well as apparently hiring fan-only staff: I overhear another Southbank Centre employee gushing about her ‘aura’ as a lecturer in room three.

Wondering around, shoulders clenched from my 10k steps across the river- my contribution to the tip jar labelled ‘beach body’ that never seems to be full - such shallow thoughts scatter as soon as I step into Linder’s aura, instantly welcomed into the sisterhood. Active since the 70s, Linder has been at this feminist grindstone under many guises: an artist, front woman of a punk band, sought after album cover artist, a carer, a collaborator, and a figurehead of a front line that had never been fought quite this way before. Walking through these rooms feels like she’s someone that I’ve always known, a friend, finally getting her dues.

Room 1 is bejewelled with trademark photomontage work - strange and congruent images of naked women in pornographic poses, heads replaced with domestic items or bang-on- the-nose Georgia O’Keefe fauna. Anatomy, sex, and perceived ‘desired items’ of domestic drudgery are married in a kind of surgery, savagely making true the ol’ goddess of the kitchen whore in the bedroom dichotomy. Pride of place is her flagship image; a Buzzcocks album cover featuring a grotesque yet glamorous creature that, thanks to the angle of the iron that has replaced her head, is sporting an androgynous pixie cut, complete with red-lipsticked smiles as nipples.

Room 2 features further photomontage highlights, and excitingly, brand new work - carefully curated in her usual inimitable sexually explicit style. In a ‘secret’ pink-walled corner is her 70s and 80s celebration of the then-suppressed but still flowering drag scene in the North, featuring surprisingly simple and honest black and white shots of queens in working men’s clubs. But men do not escape the scalpel: photos of homosexual pornographic acts are altered to Linder’s lens: crotches become high-end sports watches, heads become oak end tables, cars interrupt pleasure, replaced by aspirational machismo.

Wherever Linder is, conversation follows: In Room 3, someone utters ‘I studied her at GCSE’ - a phrase that makes me feel oddly jealous for my youthful angsty teen self, who would have grabbed onto her at sixteen and never let go. Her singular name, murmured so often causes me to start: it has a striking resemblance to my mother’s - a deeply domestic and loving person but also creative, and similar in age. The thought of these similarities pulls at me as I visit the prints she created as she cared for her parents both immediately before and after their passing. These photomontages of silver screen stars once comforted Linder in youth but here replaced with sea monster heads and large, surreal conch shells, devoid of her usual humour and moving in their personal nature.

A surprising secret theme is collaboration - Linder accrued a loyal following in photographers and creatives that helped deliver her vision - something that feels incongruous with her singular signature style, but is reconciled in the way this allows her to shout more clearly with more voice, somehow also emulating that welcoming Northern warmth. She is also not afraid to dip into the pot and reference: Only Fans stars and fairytale heroines alike get the Linder treatment. To read a particular blurb, I bend at the hips. I do so without thinking, then realise. I feel like one of Linder’s Ladies, bent over in the middle of the gallery - fully clothed, but accidentally coquettish and suddenly vulnerable. Viewed. It kind of feels premeditated. I force myself to hold, read, then rise. Five minutes later, a man of over forty bends just as I have done. It is not the same.

Far from being sharp, confrontational and therefore open to the accusation of having no philosophy and baselessly angry - Linder is the contrary- what she has read, studied, experienced is all there like a visual bibliography; the exhibition is a tour of her life as much as it is a storied and impressive CV. It’s easy to spit ideology in your face, cleverer to use art forms to access truth. This exhibition, her work nudges you in the ribs - its a warm laughing smile after lectures in the local, laughingly taking on the misogynist in the corner. It, much like the artist, is gentle in approach, but forceful in delivery.