Linder: Femme/Objet

Linder: Femme/Objet is the catalogue for the first full retrospective of the British artist Linder (Linder Sterling, b. 1954), staged by the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC in 2013 and tracing four decades of photomontage.

Structured like a magazine, the 112-page volume accompanies an exhibition of nearly 200 works (photographs, photomontages, light boxes, costumes, and performance documentation) curated by Emmanuelle de l'Ecotais and shown at the ARC from 1 February to 21 April 2013. Co-published by Paris Musées and Walther König, it reproduces roughly eighty works alongside essays by museum director Fabrice Hergott and de l'Ecotais, plus an interview between Linder and Morrissey.

Linder's photomontage splices pornography, fashion advertising, and appliance catalogues into one image. It extends a lineage of political collage running through John Heartfield and, most directly, Hannah Höch's Weimar-era critiques of the “New Woman.” The title Femme/Objet names that critique: cut faces and catalogue bodies stage the female figure as commodity, carrying Dada and Surrealist concerns into a punk and post-punk register. The retrospective marked a major European institutional endorsement of that work Linder continues to exhibit internationally, represented by Modern Art, London.