Lynn Hershman Leeson Interview
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an award-winning artist and prize-winning filmmaker based in San Francisco. Having held Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis and currently residing as Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute, Hershman has and continues to shape the practice of new generations of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her entire working archive from 1966 to 2002 was acquired by Stanford University Libraries in 2004, furthering her ties to artists and scholars in the greater Bay Area. Hershman’s work is touched by a drive towards innovation across and within genres, particularly in the realm of technology. As an early pioneer of interactivity and works for the Internet, Hershman would eventually conceive a sophisticated artificial intelligence in the form of Agent Ruby, based on a character from her film Teknolust (2002). Agent Ruby exemplifies Hershman’s work not only through its cutting edge technology, but also by creating an encounter with that technology which forces us to ask, as do many of her interactive pieces, what it is we really desire from technology.
As part of our pastforward exhibition in July / August 2009, current emerging artists were asked to respond to the work of eleven Lab alum whose work has made a mark on the contemporary art landscape. Lynn Hershman Leeson was one of those eleven artists, having shown at The Lab in 1986, 1987, and 1995.
As a supplement to that show, Hershman Leeson also agreed to be interviewed by Anna Bunting for our blog. The interview follows.
You started out in the sciences, and still seem to have an interest in science, and have found ways to bring that into your artwork. What first attracted you to making art?
My family has lots of scientists in it. I did art since I can remember. It wasn’t a conscious choice. I couldn’t do anything else.
Do you think that your interests in other disciplines and kinds of knowledge have affected the ways in which you conceive of art, both when you started out and as you continue to develop?
I do think it is more holistic and interdisciplinary, because I’m interested I’m interested in everything, it seems.
You have worked in a huge variety of media, including performance, film, installation, as well as the Internet and Second Life. In your project Agent Ruby, the viewer can actually interact and talk with Agent Ruby online. Now she can also be downloaded onto a Blackberry and be carried everywhere. It is interesting to see a piece of work change as technologies change. Do you feel that current and changing technologies dictate the kind of work you are making.
Actually in several cases I extended the technology before it existed. Hyper text, artificial intelligence, touch screens extended existing possibilities.
So you would say that your work has also influenced technology as it has influenced your work. Do you see this to be true of artists and art in general?
If we are lucky we can shape technology. There is a choice to make it utopian and influence it before it influences us.
How has this progression of tools and media changed your work or the way you work? Do you feel that your ideas emerge from the ways that technology affects our lives?
In many ways yes, but the issues of identity and surveillance seem stable and constant.
From 1974 - 1978 you took on the persona of Roberta Breitmore. What was it like for you to take on a totally different persona? Did she rub off on you in any way? Do you miss her? Did becoming Roberta teach you anything about being Lynn Hershman?
Roberta was a separate person from me. She revives periodically, most recently in cyber Roberta and the Second Life avatar. Her recreation seems to happen on its own.
What do you think about the differences in the way that identity was constructed in the 1970s as opposed to now? With current things like Facebook, or the GPS tracker iPhone application it is so easy to keep very personal tabs on everyone we know. It seems harder to disappear or reinvent oneself because these social networking systems leave a public trace that’s hard to control. Do you think that a project like Roberta Breitmore would work today?
No, if I tried to make Roberta today, I’d be arrested. I made her pre-computers. She tapped too far into the system for today’s legalities. I think it is the public trace that is interesting.
You have made three feature length films…
Four, the fourth hasn’t been released yet, and I hope to make the fifth this year.
How is the process of making these different from your earlier, shorter pieces?
They are harder, take longer and cost more.
How does the production differ? Is the process different for you knowing that these films will probably have a broader audience since they can be rented or shown at film festivals and not just viewed in galleries?
No, I just try to make something relevant.
Last year you had a show through SFMOMA as well as many other museums in the bay area called Life To The Power Of Infinity. Part of this work was digitally relocating exhibition materials into a site in Second Life, creating multiple worlds for your work to exist in. Can you talk about this idea and your work with the program Second Life? What do you think are the differences for someone to encounter your work in real space as opposed to virtual space?
Life Squared is an animated archive and a model of the art museum of the future. Life Squared is an experience in an online world, a prosthetic world of avatars, their buildings and goods. It raises questions about contemporary experience: real, synthetic, mediated, technology assisted.
The objectives of this project were to use innovative technologies to investigate archives and develop new digital models for introducing new forms of active engagement with them; to create a new context for the investigation of contemporary art; to expand the audience for archives and contemporary art; and to instigate a hybrid genre through which to rework cultural archives.
Rather than conventionally digitize conventional archive items such as texts, images, movies, and than make them available in a static repository, this project seeks to invigorate the archives through immersion, interactivity and play.
You’re currently working on a documentary called the Women’s Art Revolution. Can you talk a little bit about this project?
Women Art Revolution (a Formerly Secret History) is a feature-length documentary film that annotates the evolution of the feminist art movement in the United States using intimate interviews, provocative art, and rarely seen historical film and video footage.
Women Art Revolution (a Formerly Secret History) elaborates the relationship of the feminist art movement to 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements and explains how historical events, such as the all-male protest exhibition against the invasion of Cambodia, sparked the first of many feminist actions against major cultural institutions. It details major developments in women’s art of the seventies, including the first feminist art education programs, political organizations and protests, alternative art spaces such as the A.I.R. Gallery and Franklin Furnace in New York and the Los Angeles Women’s Building, feminist art publications such as Chrysalis and Heresies, and landmark exhibitions, performances, and installations of public art that not only influenced, but actually changed, the direction and history of art.
The film also questions the idea of narrative itself, and creates a ground breaking reshaping of information through an archive being built by Stanford, which will include all of the footage and allow for cross-linking.
Do you think your work has influenced any current up-and-coming artists and if so, whose work currently do you think is picking up on your ideas and pushing them forward?
I don’t know; people do not know the extent of my work.