Colluding With The Codes of Pornography
By: Lily Hannigan
Tags: Pornography, Art History, Feminism, Paris, Art

In February 2013 I left the cafe I’d been working at since leaving school, and went to Paris, with no real plan other than to be in Paris. The stories I loved told me that was the first and most important step, so I didn’t worry about the ones to follow.

I stayed with a friend in an ambitiously converted studio, totalling about 4 square metres, replete with makeshift mezzanines and a showerhead over a toilet. These features were testament to the high price of space in the city. Every flat we found ourselves in, save one rented by a Canadian with dubious motives, was replete with fold-out appliances, cantilevered beds and tiny sets of tables and chairs.

The time of year meant it was seriously cold and unusually quiet. Paris’s museums, galleries and grand houses provided a welcome reprieve from crouching in windowless apartments, and freezing in the cold streets.

People talk about queueing for the Louvre, but I never did. Being ‘under 26’ and visiting during what must have been the quietest weeks of the year for tourism, I could stroll straight into the city’s vast array of cultural venues. Naturally, I had hoped that going to Paris without a return ticket would be the beginning of an adventure — perhaps leading to a kibbutz in Israel or at least a tumultuous affair. Instead, all I really did was go to a lot of exhibitions.

One particular expo had a lasting impact on me: the first retrospective of the artist Linder Sterling. In the years following this show, her profile has risen considerably, with the acquisition of at least two works by the Tate Galleries, a high-profile commission by TFL, and significant artist residencies with Tate St Ives and Chatsworth House. But she was unknown to me (and to many) when I ventured round the exhibition titled Femme/Objet, before promptly going round a second time.

I’d turned up at the Musee d’art Moderne without checking the listings, and took a punt on an exhibition poster, featuring a glossy made-up woman, squinting out beneath the giant fuchsia lips and flowers that had been superimposed on top.

Pretentious and full of new-found feminism, I was a bit dubious about what this poster seemed to promise. In short, it looked a bit like an image you could find on an ASOS t-shirt, with diamontes spelling REBEL GIRL.

Obviously, I got over myself and went in, because despite this niggling dubiousness, something about the exhibition electrified me. And it is due to this experience that I ended up writing my undergraduate dissertation on the artist, and following her career in the successive years.

Detail of She/She (1981), printed 2007 Image rights: Tate © Linder

Linder is principally known for her photomontages (or collages). She takes printed material, generally magazines from the late 20th and very early 21st century, and overlays new elements to make works that are at turns humorous, grotesque and erotic. The source material for these pieces tends to be a combination of pornographic magazines and ‘women’s’ magazines, which means they are rarely larger than 30cm x 20cm.

Displaying works of this size in a frame on a wall has one kind of effect, and it can be powerful (sometimes you can see two of her works displayed thusly in the Tate Galleries). But for Femme/Objet, these small compositions of printed material had been digitised and blown up in great rectangular lightboxes. The lightboxes measured approximately 70cm by 1 meter and were positioned in the middle of the gallery space as well as the perimeter. The work was afforded a generous number of rooms, along with purpose-built temporary alcoves, some of which were flushed a feminine pink; some of which were almost entirely blacked out.

In one of these cordoned off spaces, you could view a recording of Linder’s performance at the Hacienda with her band Ludus, in which she rips off a skirt made from discarded butcher’s meat to expose a large black strap-on dildo, and proceeds to scream and girate for the crowd.

Still taken from a recording of Ludus’s performance at the Hacienda

This singular performance is another version of Linder’s approach to collage: combining material from two disparate spheres, keeping the fissure between the two visible, and forcing erotic items, normally concealed, into spaces they weren’t intended for.

The Musee d’art Moderne describes Linder’s work as ‘unrelentingly feminist.’ For Paul Bailey it is ‘uncompromisingly political.’ While Tate has summed Linder up as a ‘radical feminist.’ Pornography, and sex work more broadly, has divided feminists for decades. But what these statements infer is that Linder’s work is unequivocally ‘anti-pornography.’

And if we were in any doubt, Linder herself assures us that:

‘Pornography had its own debased codes, and my intention was to understand them. Not to ‘borrow’ them and never to collude with them.’

The more I’ve returned to Linder’s work, the more this has irked me. Firstly, because it plants her work firmly on the side of anti-porn feminism, foreclosing the conversations I think it opens up. And secondly because it is so patently untrue! If Linder’s work has depth or power, it comes from the source material that has preoccupied her for so many decades.

Whoever designed the layout for Femme-Object seems to have understood this. The dimly lit gallery, neon lightboxes and secluded areas to view Ludus’s explicit performance at the Hacienda are all reminiscent of sex shops and fetish clubs: neon lit walls and fleshy pink chambers, half obscured by thin curtains like a boutique brothel.

Photograph of Femme/Objet

At the time I thought I’d found the exhibition engrossing because I had it to myself, and was encountering work that was loudly and unequivocally critical of objectification. Now, I wonder if the reason I got a buzz off going about the exhibition was principally because I was in this setting, surrounded by visual stimuli designed to turn people on.

Some have called this dynamic ‘sweetening the pill’ — where artists overlay discreet didactic messages with easy-to-digest entertainment. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. The pornography isn’t coating and it hasn’t been anesthetized either.