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Against Interpretation, Linder, 2012.
"One day in 1976, a then-22-year-old Linder Sterling was sitting alone in her room. In front of her was a sheet of glass, a surgeon's scalpel, and stacks of magazines. Half were women's lifestyle magazines and the other half pornography — two different worlds, one in which women are decorators and bakers, and in the other, props for male fantasy. However, with a few precise cuts of the scalpel, a woman's face became a blender or her genitals a gigantic oozing meringue, and this interrupted both fantasies. In these early, untitled works, the pornographic appetite is revealed as commodification, the desire for appliances and impossibly photogenic food shown to be so many kinds of eroticism. Linder's collages are not mere punk provocation or cheap surreal absurdity. She is far too precise and devastating for that. She vivisects collective desires, disturbing the smooth functioning of our fantasies about sex, gender, and the good life.
This month, Blum & Poe in Los Angeles has mounted a retrospective of Linder's work, from the collages of the 1970s to her new bodies of collage work, including The Paradise Experiments, Postliminal Rites, and Revolutionary Hardcore Formula. There are also glimpses of her recent work in photography, ballet, film, and performance. Most of Blum & Poe’s show is drawn from her major career retrospective Linder: Femme/Objet mounted at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris this past spring.
Linder,
Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, September 12–October 26, 2013
