The history of mirrors tells us that images first captured through reflections were alleged to be false distortions. But the lens has now curved to such a degree that being fictive is an integral part of being real. I often think of the Net as a mirror for multifaceted reflections and refractions.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, in Pierre Restany, “San Francisco and the Grande Dame of Digital Art,” Domus, no. 816 (June 1999): 118.
A pioneer of new media art, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the contours of identity and public life in a rapidly changing technological landscape. “Video and interactive systems became my tool for retracing personal history. It was a fortunate coincidence that as video was defining its language, I was finding my voice.”1 The artist made objects that she has compared to cyborgs as early as 19572 but, before working directly with technology, she created virtual worlds through public avatars. In 1968 she developed several pseudonymous art critics who published in the art press to make a name for Hershman Leeson. The fictional Gay Abandon, Herbert Goode, and Prudence Juris developed unique voices and contributed to real publications—Studio International and Artweek—at times taking up argumentative positions with one another.3 And for some five years beginning in 1973, the artist led a parallel public life as the fictional persona Roberta Breitmore, who possessed her own history, style, and driver’s license. In performative acts, Hershman Leeson reconstructed social and interpersonal spaces, challenging ideas about the real and the virtual.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, in Pierre Restany, “San Francisco and the Grande Dame of Digital Art,” Domus, no. 816 (June 1999): 118. ↩︎
Hou Hanru, “Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson,” in Lynn Hersman Leeson: Civic Radar, ed. Peter Weibel (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2016), 174. ↩︎
Peter Weibel, “Early Works,” in Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar, ed. Weibel (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2016), 38. ↩︎
Lynn Hershman Leeson was a freshly radicalized graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, when the Free Speech Movement began in 1964. She felt an urgency to capture the moral fervor. “It was a time,” the artist said, “that women were beginning to find their own identity and realize that they even had one. And not only did they have an identity, but they had no history.”1 In her documentary !Women Art Revolution (2010), Hershman Leeson, whose practice centers around issues of self and identity, used video technology to form identity and history through documentation. For more than forty years, she has interviewed women artists and curators, recording and archiving a seminal history of women’s art in the second half of the twentieth century.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, in interview with Jan Zivic, Davis, California, March 4, 2005, for !Women Art Revolution: Voices of a Movement, video, 19:28 minutes, available at exhibits.stanford.edu/women-art-revolution/catalog/nh641tk8276. ↩︎
From 1970 to 1983 Lynn Hershman Leeson created a series of “performance dinners” in San Francisco, each one honoring a close friend; through elaborate coordinations of table setting, dinnerware, props, music, and menus, each evening became an imaginative portrait of the featured guest.1 Ceramic dishes, like Lip and Bite Cup and Small Eye Plate (both 1976), were created for each dinner. “My plates turned the idea of eating inside out; pink protruding tongues licked edges of a salad,” described Hershman Leeson.2 At the time, she understood “performance” as theorized by sociologist Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), referring to an individual’s activities over a period of time, in the presence of a set of observers, which influence and are influenced by the observers. The viewers of these undocumented works were both spectator and agent—roles that resurface in the artist’s interactive video works.
Peter Weibel, “Performance Dinners,” in Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar, ed.* Weibel (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2016), 38. ↩︎
Lynn Hershman Leeson, quoted in a wall label for Performance Dinners (ca. 1976) in the exhibition Civic Radar, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, February 10–May 21, 2017. ↩︎
In 1984 Lynn Hershman Leeson completed the first piece of video art to use laserdisc technology. LORNA is an interactive video installation that enables users to lead the life of an agoraphobic avatar named Lorna. On screen, the protagonist’s tiny apartment is furnished with clothing, magazines, a television, a mirror, and a fishbowl. Each object is clickable with the remote control that allows the viewer to explore and intervene. Accessing videos and soundtracks about Lorna’s fears and dreams, her history and future possibilities, the chapters of her life are sequenced by the viewer, changing in meaning and possible outcome. The viewer exercises determination over Lorna’s fate, which has three possible endings: Lorna may shoot her television set, commit suicide, or move to Los Angeles.1 Informed by Hershman Leeson’s interactive performance works, LORNA broke the passive experience of consuming television. “Lorna’s passivity—presumably caused by her being controlled by media—is a counterpoint to the direct action of the player,” the artist explained.2 As the viewer comes to understand their control, LORNA is an empowering experience of transgressing mass-media control.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, “Private I: An Investigator’s Timeline,” in The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I, ed. Meredith Tromble (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 77. ↩︎
Lynn Hershman Leeson, “Private I: An Investigator’s Timeline,” in The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I, ed. Meredith Tromble (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 78. ↩︎
| words
