MASQUERADE BOOKS July - August 1997
An interview with Anne Van der Linden. By Marti Hohmann

Anne Van der Linden is a french artist whose works have been collected in “Heavy meat”, “Systèmes sexuels” and most recently “Livrées aux chiens !”. With Costes, in 1996 she presented and performed in a musical-trash opera “ based on speed, hysteria, rigidity and excretions.” Of her paintings, writer June Shenfield has said: “For me, her works are important not only because she is a woman who dares to brake taboos and show a rarely acknowledged side of sexuality, but also because she does this honestly, without hiding the darkness from us-the darkness of our nightmares, as well as our meaningful dreams.”

MH : How would you describe your work?
AVdL : I present stagings of people, small theatrical plays in tight space. I tell stories in a descriptive and meticulous manner; I use colors to evoque strong sensations. Encounters between the sexes interest me the most. I show social dramas; that’s my way of getting people to relate to each other, through the bias of sexuality.

What is the role of sexuality in the plastic arts?
Sexuality is the blueprint for all human relations: tender, sensual, loving, conflictual. Sexuality is simple, like language : I don’t think I’m wrong in suggesting this. For me, it’s a motivating principle at the very base of humanity. Sexuality is essential, powerful, and active. There is a sort of purity there that interests me.

What is the function of violence in your work?
Ther is always some form of constraint in my canvases. My figures never have the sensation of achieving orgasm freely, In the sense of expanding or blossoming in the flesh. Something always stops it rather violently; a situation explodes. That’s perhaps symptomatic of my own relation to the world: my own tendency to drift towards both suffeing and pleasure.

One often sees the interior of bodies in your paintings. Why ?
I like to show the internal functioning of the body, which we’d prefer to keep secret; it represents the hysterical side of us, the side that responds to pleasure and pain by manifesting corporeal symptoms. But I like to add to the bodily interior, just for fun: worms, flowers, or daily objects, like part of a vacuum cleaner. I like representing the quotidian, in all it’s misery : housewifery, puttering around in the garage,objects, life’s difficulties, the banal.

Why?
It touches me; it also provides supplementary relief to the use of the body in my work. To show only scenes of people in the process of tearing eachother would be too abstract.

At the same time, there are extraordinary objects in your paintings. Very large penises, for example.
Are you making fun of the male body?
No, I think a big cock is very pretty. The penis is beautiful. I don’t know if one can say this in America, but in France I can say without irony that I have a great admiration fot the phallus. The longer it is, the prettier it is. A big penis reminds me of the female womb, the origin of the world, our roots.

Yet you don’t show balls very often, just the penis.
I don’t like balls, so I don’t paint them.

Tell me about this drawing, in which a woman is cutting a penis into pieces.
It’s a big cake, so of course she cuts it: she is generous, and she wants to share. Maybe there’s a revenge aspect, but this cock is mine, so I doubt it.

The cock is yours?
I know some feminist artists have drawn butterflies and flowers to represent the female sex- I’ve done this too-but now I prefer to use the phallus. I don’t see why the penis should be the sole property of men. Whenever I get a cock in front of me, I use it as if it were mine

I understand, but I wonder how you defend youself against charges of penis envy.
I don’t want to have to choose between the phallus or the vagina when I paint someone. That’s reducive. For me, the hermaphrodite is fascinating, nearly divine. One may be a women and yet, at certain moments, a man. And as I said, when Imake love, my partner’s penis is also my own. What is sex about if not an exchange or fusion of bodies, a dissolution of frontiers taking place in delirium?

Some American theorists suggest that gender is as changeable as clothing.
That there is nothing “natural” in sex.
Yes, but at the same time cerain functions are exclusively feminine: menstruation, for example. But it’s true there are parallel discourses between the sexes. At cerain moments, I may speak from the perspective of a woman or a man.

What did feminists of the 1980s fail to understand?
Well, men became the enemy, didn’t they? Feminists cultivated a sort of hatred for men? I found that ridiculous: I love men. In feminism, one often came up against prohibitions or hindrances: don’t do this, watch out for that. But I have always needed to express everything I feel. Hating men, or even disdaining them, goes against my own sexual desires: one must simply try to see men as they are, in their reality.

Why did you call one of your paintings “Cinderella”?
Cinderella humiliates herself: she does housework, she is at her sister’s service. In the painting, I show her cutting her own pubic hair.

Why ?
It represents castration, don’t you think ? After all, Cinderella dresses badly; she’s timid; her sisters and her mother prevent her from growing up and becoming a woman; she is isolated from her own feminity. When she cuts off her pubic hair, she shears off little morsrls of herself so that others can make us of them.

You also make use of fantastic, rather hallucinatory images of animals.
Animality has always interested me. I have lived through situations in which I was in the middle of nowhere and I needed to depend upon my instincts to survive. I have come to appreciate the strenght of instinct; it’s the legacy of our bestial origins. No doubt I’m also acknowledging a debt to the Surrealists in my use of animals. It’s fun: at a certain moment, I see a rabbit progenitor, the rabbit from whom the whole world descends, so I put him in a painting.

With regard to your palette, you seem to prefer shades of red. Why ?
When I was young, I loved red! Now it correponds to my sensuality. It’s also evocative: the color of blood.

One might say that red evokes menstruation...
Absolutely. I have my period every month, so of course I talk about menstruation in my work.Besides, I have the impression that we don’t talk enough about it. From the1950’s onward, women have been trying to represent menstruation artistically, but it was a taboo topic for centuries. And in spite of what I said earlier, I do have a feminist side; in fact I am preoccupied with the feminine in my work. It’s important to acknowledge those interests.

You also paint strong women; their bodies are anything but classically beautiful.
Probably because I often use myself as a model! Transference is also operating; it’s as if I am able to project myself into many different roles. But I stole the image you’re looking at (three women in leather miniskirts and high heels) from the S/M magazine Demonia.

Yes, but did you do so ironically? Are you making fun of fetishism?
No, it’s not a joke. The title of the painting is “The war”. The bodies of these women remind me of soldiers: they evoke the suffering of war. That’s why I put the fighter planes in the sky.

Do you consider yourself as an erotic artist?
No, I talk about sexuality in my work because I cannot do otherwise. People have always said that painting has an erotic element, as far as the representation of nudes is concerned. I guess so, but this is not necessarily true. I try to unveil the underworld of the psyche, the hidden drama of daily life, not make “sexy” images.
I don’t think of myself as an erotic artist because when I look at my paintings, they don’t excite me sexually. My work has a “rough and ready” ambiance, and it represents human sexuality, but a sort of personal malaise permeates it, and this malaise elicits a response that is anything but erotic.
A journalist once called me “Anne Van der Linden, the underground painter who farts and burps in the same color”. I like that.