The Big (double) Review: Linder and Mickalene Thomas at the Hayward Gallery ★★★½

Linder: Danger Came Smiling

Linder saw the path that society had laid out before her and she said, no thanks, not for me. Despite the liberation promised by the swinging sixties and the sexual revolution, post-war Britain was still a conservative, traditional place, and the British artist’s future as a northern working-class woman (she was born in Liverpool in 1954) was clear: housework, child-rearing, home-making and a long, slow, dull trudge towards the grave. That was not to be Linder’s lot.

So she went to Manchester Polytechnic to study graphic design in the 1970s, got involved in the nascent punk scene and decided to dedicate herself to kicking against the norms—and the man. This exhibition, full of her signature photomontage collages, is a riot of titillating humour, subversive imagery and outright rebellion.

It begins with Linder at her most emblematic. Her untitled 1976 photomontage of a nude woman with grinning mouths for nipples and an iron for a head is the ultimate Linder image: a semi-erotic “up yours” to gender norms and societal expectations that, as the cover of the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict (1977) single, was catapulted so forcefully into the cultural landscape of the time that it has become part of the aesthetic fabric of modern Britain. She was still a student. What a way to kick off your career.

And there is loads more where that came from. All of these early photomontages are a collision of pornography, consumer electronics and societal critique. A woman jabs a fork into her eyes while embracing a man, a guy’s privates are replaced with a Hoover vacuum cleaner, a bedroom is filled with giant cameras. Over and over again, nude women’s bodies are combined with irons, kettles and washing machines. None of it is subtle, it is blatant in its anti-mainstream, anti-conformity messaging. And that is why it works.

Punk fetish

Linder was not just an artist, she was a musician too, the singer of the punk band Ludus. The artwork for their LPs is displayed in vitrines—all angular, stark and glamorous in geometric black and red.

Then there is a display of masks made of lingerie, created for Howard Devoto, the lead singer of the Buzzcocks and later Magazine. They are obscene and silly but at the same time serious and satirical. Punk always liked toying with fetish and kink, but Linder took that further than almost anyone else of her era.

But the thing is, Linder’s early work had such a strong visual identity and such a fierce set of ideals that she seems to have spent the rest of her career basically ripping herself off. The show is full of photomontages from the past 20 odd years that, for the most part, could have been done in the 1970s. Hoovers and irons have been replaced by flowers, but the main thrust and aesthetic of the work has remained the same.

It is just too repetitive to work over this many rooms, and you feel like the curatorial team could and should have done more with video and sound (videos of Linder performing in a meat-dress with Ludus were in Tate Britain’s recent Women in Revolt! exhibition) to create something a bit more all-encompassing and special.

There are other things here: photographs of The Smiths’ frontman Morrissey and drag performers, images inspired by sploshing (Google it), shoes with long blonde hair, costumes for a ballet, a cabinet of glass sculptures that is barely explained. There is nothing wrong with any of it—but the early work casts a shadow too big for anything else to emerge.

• Linder: Danger Came Smiling, Hayward Gallery, London, until 5 May
• The Art Newspaper's rating: the art ★★★★; the show ★★★; overall ★★★½
• Curators: Rachel Thomas with Gilly Fox and Katie Guggenheim
• Tickets: £19 (concession available)

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

Collage, sensuality, glamour and a bold rejection of norms and expectations are an approach that Mickalene Thomas shares with Linder. The US artist uses a similar set of tools to hammer a similar set of conceptual nails: but instead of humorous punk rebellion, Thomas’s work is joyful, defiant and celebratory.

Her huge canvases are a collision of collage and rhinestones. They glitter in the light, studded with sequins and diamanté pebbles; they are part-lavish and extravagant, part-teenage girl’s notebook. Throughout, Thomas is placing Black women into new art historical contexts: a reclining Olympia-n nude, an odalisque, a bit of side-on Vermeer. But these are not the gleamingly pale models of Flemish art or neoclassicism, these are Black women, reclaiming the canvas, reclaiming space in art history.

It is a clever bit of confrontational defiance. Because where an odalisque was a concubine, and Édouard Manet’s Olympia was being dutifully attended to by a Black servant, Thomas’s paintings are acts of subversion, appropriating these art historical narratives to glorify Black female beauty.

Chaotic collages

Domesticity appears over and over. Two living rooms have been built in the second gallery, replete with Donna Summer LPs and deep shag carpet, filling the space with the lush sounds of 1970s disco. These interior settings are from the artist’s own life, with bronze casts of her late mother’s bracelets and shoes, upholstery inspired by her grandmother. It is a celebration of coming together, of family, of the way you shape your surroundings and the way they shape you.

Upstairs, Thomas’s collage approach goes haywire: vast canvases mix photography, painting and rhinestones with patches of pixelation. They are chaotic, almost totally out of control, and they are the best works here.

There is more domesticity too: images of Thomas seeming to wrestle with herself are shown in a private, wood-panelled boudoir with bean bags for your relaxed viewing pleasure.

It is not all good, and it does not all work. It is not made especially clear why there is a huge display of houseplants, and the more political work about resistance and riots feels like it has been dealt with a bit superficially.

And even if I personally find it all too glittery and chintzy, Thomas’s aesthetic is inarguably unique and very neatly defined—it all looks blatantly and obviously like Mickalene Thomas, and no one else. All the endless references in her work—to Claude Monet, to police violence, to Eartha Kitt and supermodels—combine into a collage of cultures and influences, a celebration of beauty and confidence, provocation and resistance. This is joy as resistance, and it is totally infectious.

• Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, Hayward Gallery, London, until 5 May
• The Art Newspaper's rating: the art ★★★; the show ★★★★; overall ★★★½
• Curators: Rachel Thomas with Thomas Sutton
• Tickets: £19 (concession available)

What the other critics said

In a five-star review in The Standard, Martin Robinson says: “Here are two perfectly complementary exhibitions that really do rip apart socio-cultural depictions of women with considerable force, and create something new.”

Hettie Judah in an equally effusive five-star Guardian review writes: “The juxtaposition is superficially odd: Thomas is glitzy exuberance; Linder, surgical cool. Thomas is monumental. Linder is often confined ... Yet the pairing proves surprisingly canny.”

And while Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph felt similarly positive about Linder (four and half stars) he was less taken with Thomas (one star): “Compared with Linder’s complex, superbly scathing creations, this is supersized fast-food art, as culturally nutritious as a Big Mac.”