Danger Comes Smiling

Linder Sterling, known professionally as Linder, is one of those artists whose influence is so thoroughly woven into visual culture that it can be easy to miss how radical her original intervention was. Linder emerged from the ferment of Manchester’s punk and post-punk scene in the 1970s, where art, music, and protest collided with volatile energy. As a student at Manchester Polytechnic, she began cutting and recomposing found images, helping to define a language we now take for granted: the cut-and-paste body, the sabotaged advertisement, the glamour image turned inside out. 

These early works moved rapidly beyond the page: appearing on fanzines, posters, and most famously on the 1977 cover of the Buzzcocks’ single Orgasm Addict, a now-legendary image that fused erotic fragmentation with pop provocation. Around the same time, Linder formed the band Ludus, whose confrontational performances blurred music, sculpture and ritual. At a 1982 concert at Manchester’s Hacienda, she appeared draped in raw meat, a gesture that functioned as both spectacle and protest, prefiguring later debates around the commodification of women’s bodies and the limits of endurance as art.