Observer New Review Q&AArtInterviewLinder Sterling: 'Lady Gaga didn't acknowledge I wore a meat dress first'
Sean O'HaganThe artist recalls the thrill of punk, graveyard walks with Morrissey and her 'audacious' porn collagesYou are currently artist in residence at Tate St Ives. What does that entail?
I'm the guinea pig for the new artist-in-residence programme. It's a very liberated sphere insofar as it doesn't have any outcome or expectation. I don't have to produce anything. I think it may be reverse psychology, though. I've been here two months and it is a very creative environment. The light is extraordinary and something softens around time down here at the edge of the land. I'm in studio 5, where Ben Nicholson worked. It's the only one without a view of the sea. He did not want to be distracted and I've come to understand that. Let's just say the consciousness of the modernist artists is palpable.
You seem to have connected with the spirit of Barbara Hepworth, too.
I have, belatedly. She was a blind spot for most of my life, but I've been researching her for four or five years since I did my performance piece, Allentide, here on Halloween night, 2009. [Part of The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art.] I was invited to visit her sculpture garden at night. It was a beautiful night, when the veils between the worlds are very thin. We were encouraged to feel our way around on this damp, dark, wet night. I made a connection with her and her work through feeling rather than seeing. It was a kind of belated epiphany.
I guess a lot of people still equate you with punk and that provocative sleeve for Orgasm Addict by Buzzcocks in 1977. How important was punk in terms of your development as an artist?
Crucial. When I went to art school in 1973, I was the only member of my family who had education beyond the age of 14. I had to prove to my family that it was justified. But, by 1976, I had become a bit bored by drawing, by my own relentless mark making, so I shifted to the scalpel and destroyed all my drawings. That was a very punk thing – to do something dramatic out of boredom and sweep away the past. So, there was a great synchronicity at work. My practice chimed with the moment. I suddenly found myself in the midst of people who seemed to be thinking along similar lines about the world: Jon Savage, Pete Shelley [Buzzcocks], Howard Devoto [Buzzcocks and Magazine].
Collage was absolutely crucial to punk: from fanzine art to the music and the clothes.
Yes. It was the medium in a very real way. For me, it was about making sense of the world. With collage, you make things wrong to make them right.
You attended the now famous Sex Pistols' performance at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in June 1976. Was it as exciting and galvanising as received wisdom has it?
Oh yes. It was a docking station. The first time I could plug into something new and exciting in its confusion. You just knew something was going on just because it was so different to anything else. There was no attempt at professionalism or entertainment. Things were always on the verge of disintegration onstage and yet there was also this incredible energy emanating from these very glamorous urchins. It was a radical change of gear. I remember thinking, "Oh, I have not been here before and I don't even have the language to describe what it is." It really was the last great British underground.
And it inspired you to form your own group, Ludus.
That was a very natural progression. I was collaging myself. Initially it was nerve-racking to step out on to a stage, but I have never been that comfortable with being comfortable.
In 1982, a few decades before Lady Gaga, you performed at the Hacienda in a meat dress. Did it rankle that she attracted so much publicity for repeating the gesture?
A little bit. The lack of acknowledgment. Our generation always acknowledged our influences. That does not seem to happen so much any more. You have to do it, though, otherwise people don't go on the great journey of discovery that impelled you to become an artist. An artist is not hermetically sealed off from the world. History, after all, is one big dressing-up box.
One person who has acknowledged your influence is Morrissey. You are one of the very few people to emerge from Autobiography with your reputation enhanced.
Oh, that book. [Laughs] We do have an extraordinary friendship. It has endured and grown. It took me two decades to realise that I did have a very gifted circle of friends back in the 70s and 80s in Manchester – Morrissey, Devoto, Shelley, Barry Adamson. It was bohemian in a way, but not consciously so. We were all curious together.
You are the subject of at least one Morrissey song, Cemetery Gates by the Smiths. Tell me about those graveyard walks.
Oh, we just walked and talked. We had very little money and lots of the same books rattling around in our heads. Morrissey was reading all the same feminist texts as I was, so we shared the same language and the same discontents. I remember we discussed sexism in the media a lot. Why did the BBC commentator refer to "the men's 100-metres race" and then to "the girls' 100-metres race"? We wrote letters of complaint about that one. [Laughs]
Do you still consider yourself a political artist?
Well, I cut my teeth on the great feminist writers as a working-class teenager. The personal is political and all that. It was a big thing. Still is. It helps me navigate my life.
Your work seems to have become more mystical as you have grown older.
Oh, I've always had an interest. It's always been there.
You've had two big retrospectives recently in Paris and Hanover, where the whole breadth of your work was on display: performance, collage, fashion, graphic art. But you seem to be a bit neglected here in Britain.
I agree! [Laughs] I work quietly away, ever hopeful.
So what have you learned from all this?
A very Morrisseyesque thing, actually: that audacity is important. Whether creating a fanzine with Jon Savage in 1976 or cutting up and collaging porn images or walking onstage at the Hacienda in a meat dress – there was always an element of audacity involved.
It's not just provocation. To be audacious requires a certain style also. I think it's ultimately about making one's mark, about what you would leave behind if you went under that No 8 bus. I remember being 16 in Wigan and reading about the original feminist protesters and thinking, "They left their mark. They threw their darts into the bullseye."
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