It’s been a long time since Linder was sexy. That’s not because her incisive bust-ups of bodies and ideas are any less compelling than the still circulating visions of, say, Barbara Kruger, but because Linder’s second-wave feminist propositions were ruthlessly superseded by another set of objects.
Take the iconic 1976 photomontage of a nude woman with an iron for a head which Linder made for a Buzzcocks album cover. This modest yet outrageous image, now in the Tate collection, serves as the exhibition’s key marketing asset. That the artist remade it in 2015 as a larger-than-life lightbox says as much about her fight as the fact that this new work remains available for purchase.
Linder just about survived the demise of the print pictorial magazine. Her costume and sculptural works from the last decade are intriguing but understandably limited in number at the very end of the stuffily hung show that gets only a small part of the Hayward’s otherwise cavernous spaces. They make the diminishing returns of Linder’s and her peer’s demands poignantly evident.