Wildly overdue, Danger Came Smiling, the first London retrospective of artist and musician Linder, places her in two significant contexts. The first is Manchester in the late 1970s, where Linder made her name as the singer in Ludus (whose second album titles this exhibition), establishing herself as a distinctive voice in a national post-punk scene that included female-fronted bands such as The Au Pairs, Delta 5, The Slits and X-Ray Spex. Linder also provided the collage that was the centrepiece of Buzzcocks’ 1977 single Orgasm Addict, as well as Magazine’s 1978 Real Life. 

The second, and least explored, is a long line of female artists who influenced her collages, most visibly the Dadaist Hannah Höch, who made savage satires of the Weimar Republic’s male authority figures and the 1920s media construct of ‘the New Woman’, but also European and North American post-war feminist artists who used video and performance to challenge patriarchal attitudes and explore ways the female body could be used in art beyond depiction in paintings by men. These strands come through in the four large rooms of the Hayward’s career overview, which brings Linder’s photomontage, photography, sculpture, performances and costume design to a new, wider audience, capturing the spirit of an artist still working into her seventies.

Linder Sterling was born in Liverpool in 1954, her father a bricklayer and her mother a hospital cleaner. She discovered collage in 1976 when studying graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic, stumbling on the work of artists including not just Höch but Max Ernst and El Lissitzky in Dawn Ades’ then-just-released Photomontage. Linder’s photomontages — sourced from pornography, fashion magazines, consumer catalogues and elsewhere — remain her best-known works, and are well represented here. The Buzzcocks cover, an image of a topless woman with smiling lips over her breasts and an iron for a head, features prominently, and was used for the exhibition’s poster, meaning that once again it finds a mass audience, appearing in Tube stations across London. As well as documenting the Pretty Girls series (1977) of naked women with consumer goods such as radios, TV sets and vacuum cleaners over their heads, the first room situates Linder in the Manchester post-punk scene, showing her contribution to its DIY aesthetics: a vitrine features a flyer for a Joy Division gig at a Factory night in 1978, which introduces some of her familiar imagery, such as women’s eyes and lips detached from the body, in this case placed unnervingly on a lettuce while a torso merges into a guitar tuner at one end and a cassette player at the other. A screen projects footage from Ludus’ Bonfire Night 1982 concert at the Hacienda, with Linder in a bodice made of chicken caracasses, wearing a strap-on. Linder was making a statement in protest against Tony Wilson’s club projecting pornography on the venue walls, in a coordinated response with other women who left red-dyed tampons on bar tables. This action, widely credited with having influenced Lady Gaga’s meat dress at the 2010 MTV Awards, never features in Manchester’s innumerable nostalgic tributes to itself.

As Manchester’s post-punk morphed into the 1980s independent scene and ultimately Britpop, from The Smiths to Oasis, Linder stayed in touch with the music world — the curators are careful not to let her well-known friendship with Morrissey overshadow her output or reputation, with just a small photo of Linder painting the former Smiths frontman’s nails as testament to it. Engaged with consumerism and gender relations, Linder was well placed to tackle Thatcherism, with its embrace of competitiveness and social conservatism, but for all the confrontation in her work, her responses are never obvious, and retain a sharp sense of humour. She/She (1981) turns the language of advertising, as a photographer called Birrer captured a heavily made-up Linder in conventional glamour shots, as well as tying cellophane around her face. Using a transparent material, she undermines what looks like an attempt to escape the male gaze — a typed fragment of poetry reads ‘come find me when I’m hiding / hiding but still not knowing’. These contrast strikingly with the colour images of Linder bodybuilding in an all-make gym in 1983. Four years into the Conservative government, these playful photographs raise fascinating questions: is the artist adopting Thatcher’s logic, as a woman competing with men strictly on their terms, or is she asserting power and control over her own body? Is she possibly doing both?

The menacing nature of male heterosexuality, and a determination to stare unflinchingly back at it, and to unsettle it, forms the core of Linder’s work — hence the retrospective’s title. In the catalogue, she discusses traumatic encounters with family members and strangers. But such a basic biographical reading does a disservice to the work, and especially the renaissance she had in the 2010s, at a time of feminist resurgence in the arts and media. Again, Linder was in tune with the moment, with her sex-positive attitude and inclusive approach to trans people (as seen in her photographs of Manchester drag queens from the 1970s), as well as the memetic quality of her images. The influence of Surrealism — which has also returned to fashion in recent years, with the role of women artists such as Eileen Agar Ithell Colquhoun being emphasised — comes out more in Linder’s later photographs, with black-and-white images of women being covered with roses or seashells, borrowing iconography from Salvador Dalí and the French Surrealist filmmaker Germaine Dulac.

The exhibition includes several images from 2024, showing how Linder continues to evolve amidst another cycle of (limited) feminist gains giving way to intense right-wing reaction. The images again resist such simple contextual interpretation, in part because she still works with physical media, particularly magazine covers, rather than opportunistically pivoting to digital, and in part because of the continuity of imagery with her 1970s work — eyes and lips are no longer cut away from the face but bodies are still adorned, obscured or defamiliarised with flowers or animals. The work in Danger Came Smiling recalls John Peel’s observation about Linder’s similarly enduring Manchester contemporaries The Fall — always different, always the same — and this travelling retrospective will hopefully remind audiences of just how long, and how effectively, she has been manipulating the languages of commercialism.