Lynn Hershman Leeson. DiNA, 2004; installation view, Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2017. Courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photo: Charlie Villyard.

As a collective humanity we make technologies into which we implicitly and explicitly embed our ideologies. Cybernetic organisms (or cyborgs) not only simulate our appearance and capabilities, but reflect the underlying ideologies of who we are, and what we hope for, or fear. As artist Lynn Hershman Leeson used her seminal character Roberta Breitmore to imaginatively explore the personae of an alias, her work with female cyborgs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) also probes the ways we mirror ourselves. The prolific artist’s decade-long explorations in technology and gender are displayed in her rousing solo exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Civic Radar. Hershman Leeson’s female cyborgs and AI projects explore seduction, the performance of gender, and the tantalizing idea of creating new life-forms and reproducing ourselves, touching on the utopic and dystopic scenarios inherent in both. As the artist’s speculations mine the gender dynamic of female cyborgs, she invites viewers to take leaps of imagination when considering the believability, cognition, and emotional potential of cyborgs, while exploring how they reflect our identities, anxieties, and aspirations.

In Phantom Limbs (1985–ongoing), a series of black-and-white photo collages, the artist hybridizes her body with cameras, screens, mirrors, binoculars, and more—technologies and objects for looking, recording, and display. Through titling this body of work Phantom Limbs, the artist speaks of a spectral body, where an amputation patient may feel pain or sensation in the area of loss. Through being neurologically-rooted, this concept reveals the mind’s capacity to override the body. As a media artist, Hershman Leeson has an intimate relationship with visual apparatuses, which through habitual use may be an extension of her own body such that their absence may cause trauma. With the loss or concealment of her head in the works, the central location for our being and identity, the artist also critiques the ways that images replace the individuality of women in mass media, in this case presented as cyborgs.

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Lynn Hershman Leeson. The Infinity Engine, 2014-2017; multimedia installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the ZKM Center for Art and Media.

The retrospective spans work from 1963 to 2017 and showcases Hershman Leeson’s investigations of identity construction and the relationship between humans and machines through a variety of media, including interactive sculpture, photography, performance, film, collage, and installation. The exhibition confirms that the San Francisco native is undoubtedly a pioneer in the field of digital art, yet historically under-recognized in the United States, and the Bay Area in particular, despite being able to boast a significant number of technological firsts. Hershman Leeson was the first artist to make an interactive work on videodisc (Lorna, 1983–84), the first to use a touch screen as a responsive interface (Deep Contact, 1984–1989), one of the firsts to create artworks that exist on the internet (Agent Ruby, 2002) and to use artificial-intelligence software to communicate with viewers (Dina, 2003).[1] According to the artist, even in the mid-’60s her interest was in enabling viewers to engage, “talk back, to have a conversation, with the technology.”[2] There is much to marvel at in Hershman Leeson’s early use of interactive technology, but we should also consider: What kind of questions do Hershman Leeson’s works prompt us to ask in a contemporary context? Do they continue to disrupt normative social structures and systems of oppression, or do they now simply point to them?

Self Portrait as Another Person (1965) stands out from Hershman Leeson’s early Breathing Machine series (1963–1972); in it, a disembodied head hovers over an antiquated tape recorder in a compartmentalized acrylic cube. Positioned slightly below eye level, the face is cast from that of the Caucasian artist’s, but using a dark, greenish-brown wax as “a political gesture…to express her solidarity with the Civil Rights Movement.”[3] The mouth is closed, coated with red lipstick, and the eyes are shut, listless like a death mask. As we approach the object, our bodies trigger a motion sensor and a recording of the artist’s voice speaks: “What was your first sexual encounter? I’d like to know you better. Are you in love with anybody? Can you trust me? You seem so young. You seem so innocent.” Here, we are forced to consider the work’s racialized implications and eroticized inquires as they bump up against our own individual positionalities.

Lynn Hershman Leeson. Roberta Breitmore series, 1973–78, and CyberRoberta, 1986; installation view, Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2017. Courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Photo: John Foster Cartwright.

Framed much like that of a modern-day selfie, Hershman Leeson’s face becomes replaced with another alter ego in the Roberta Breitmore Series (1974–1978). In the long-term photography, performance, and video work, Breitmore wears a perky blonde wig, heavy makeup, and a geo-print sweater dress inspired by the likes of Mary Tyler Moore. CyberRoberta (1986) is a doll version of the Breitmore character, who watches as we wander the exhibition space around her. With a video camera installed in her left eye and a webcam in her right, the doll simultaneously records and projects our movements, which are live-streamed onto a small monitor nearby.

Lynn Hershman Leeson. Seduction of a Cyborg, 1994; color video; 7:17. Screenshot taken by the writer.

In Deep Contact (1984–1989) an early version of a touch screen is presented in a kiosk before a larger video monitor where Marion, a blonde, leather-clad sex kitten, knocks on the glass of the monitor. She invites us to touch parts of her body to determine our path through the video’s narrative, like readers navigating through a “choose your own adventure” book. When we select the path of “The Zen Master,” a digital rendering of fortune cookies dances across the touch screen before we see Marion twirl though a garden, sensually and dimly lit, in soft focus. Here, Orientalism and eroticism seem to go hand in hand. In another work, Seduction of a Cyborg (1994), we follow a young white woman (bearing close resemblance to CyberRoberta) as she undergoes a series of medical procedures to become one with internet technology. As she touches her computer screen, the artist’s voice narrates. A flurry of images showing scenes of impoverishment in Africa flip across the screen, giving the young women “immense pleasure.” She stares and smiles as 3D topographical renderings of the Earth spin before her, and a poppy ’90s song sings the chorus, “It’s so easy to be in a cage.” The film ends as she dies, her eyes locked onto the surface of the monitor as she cries digital tears that contain images of suffering black faces, including those of Rodney King’s.

In CyberRoberta, it is Hershman Leeson’s intent for viewers to “become not only voyeurs but also virtual cyborgs,” as the doll’s pink cherubic face, framed by shiny blonde locks, becomes “a mask for multiple expressions of identity capable only through global connectivity.”[4] In viewing this work alongside pieces like Deep Contact and Seduction of a Cyborg, we are left wondering what the consequences really are (and were) for positioning CyberRoberta’s face as a universal mask in an arena of intersectionality. Throughout the exhibition, the hoped-for subversion and disruption of heteronormative structures and tropes are hardly found; the face of “global connectivity” that is offered up reinforces a world vision unchallenged by the wake of postcolonial feminism, merely broadcast through a present-day lens.

Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar is on view through May 21, 2017.

[1] Hershman Leeson, Lynn, “The Raw Data Diet, All Consuming Bodies and the Shape of Things to Come,” Leonardo (MIT Press), vol. 38, no. 3 (2005), 208–212.

[2] From YBCA program booklet.

[3] From exhibition wall text.

[4]  http://www.lynnhershman.com/tillie-and-cyberroberta/.

Amie Siegel. Still from Provenance, 2013; HD video, color, sound; 40:30. Courtesy of the Artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York.

Lynn Hershman Leeson: There is a relationship in all of your work—from The Sleepers to Black Moon/Mirrored Malle, to Provenance—in the way it extends beyond the viewer’s first presumption. Can you talk about where your pieces actually end, if they are ever complete, or if they are designed to be perpetually incomplete?

Amie Siegel: The way I’ve been working recently is to create projects that have a constellation of works within them. They are distinct but interconnected works, shown together or separately to varied extents, depending on the piece. That’s true of Black Moon and Black Moon/Mirrored Malle as well as the new work, Provenance. The new film traces the furniture of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret backward from collectors’ homes to exhibitions to auctions to “restoration”—and finally to Chandigarh, India, where they originated, so to speak. Then, just this past Saturday, I filmed the Post-War and Contemporary sale at Christie’s in London, where the first in the edition of Provenance was auctioned. The film of the auction, Lot 248, is now a second element of the work—to be exhibited with the first. The third element predates the auction: the auction-catalog spread proof, embedded in Lucite. There are multiple objects, temporalities, and gestures, and they can mirror and complicate one another.

LHL: What happened at the auction? Does the person who bought it also own the furniture?

AS: There were multiple people bidding—in the room and on the phones. People had also left written bids for the piece. Naturally, my aspiration was to let it get up into higher figures not for monetary purposes but for screen time. [laughter] An auction lot can go by quite fast. I could have ended up with a twelve-second film. The multiple bids became an extended volley. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, given the wide dispersal of the furniture and the overlaps between design and art collecting, if the person who bought the film also owned some of the furniture.

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But we are no longer in the seventies.  What are women artists doing now? Seeing Hershman’s new work, shown at Gallery Paule Anglim alongside her earlier pieces, is an interesting exercise in seeing where we came from, who we are (even if the answer is multiple identities), and where we might be going.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Home Front," 1993-2011. 2-channel synchronized installation inside a dollhouse. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

Hershman’s newer work is just that: new. Techie-new. Considering the intrusion of technology into the body and body politics, this techno-feminism makes some sense. However, like much interactive and innovative media, her work sometimes trips on itself.

Is Home Front, 1993–2011, a dollhouse containing a small TV screen on which a couple engages in a marital argument, supposed to be physically difficult to watch?  True, the struggle to peer through the too-low windows does make one all the more aware of one’s own voyeurism (and the desire to see the argument escalate to violence), but it is nonetheless a potentially insurmountable obstacle to engaging with the work.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Anti Surveillance Suit Project, Sketch Part II," 2010. Digital pigment print. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

Alchemist Rod For The 21^st Century, 2010, a broom that detects traces of alcohol in the air, is certainly cool, but does its value as an art object transcend the “cool?” The installation of RAW/WAR, 2011, featuring user-submitted videos, screens in a wooden miniature theater navigable through sensor-equipped flashlights. This is actually an elaborate and clumsy way of showing a simple website that is far more interesting and engaging when viewed from one’s home computer.

The most successful pieces that incorporate interactive response are the creepy wigged masks that giggle or breathe when a sensor is triggered.  Ironically, these pieces are less recent, but are still potent in their commentary on the malleability of identity and the absence of a woman’s voice.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Giggling Machine 1," 1966, reconfigured in 2011. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

These works share gallery space with Hershman’s drawings, which whimsically outline her ideas with a humor not present in the pieces that make it to their aesthetically austere execution. Anti-Surveillance Suit, 2010, a sketch originally drawn decades ago, is updated, and is more pertinent than ever.

Perhaps her sketches are so enticing because they imagine the seemingly impossible, as opposed to that which is limited by the technology that is available. And if Hershman’s work is about technology, it is ironic that materials so humble as pen and paper better articulate the confines of the body and the ability of the imagination to free it from politics, the gaze, and social and biological boundaries.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Kicking Time On Your Own," 2009. Pen, ink, and watercolor. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work will be on display at Gallery Paule Anglim through August 20, 2011, along with work by Benji Whalen.  Hershman’s film !Women Art Revolution will play in at the Lumiere and Shattuck Theaters in the Bay Area from August 26 through September 1st, 2011.  Check the !W.A.R. website for details.