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Transcript (auto generated, there may be errors or inconsistencies)

Roddy Schrock:

So, I was at an artist’s retreat held at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in upstate New York maybe about five years ago. I was running late from my train to grab a seat in the back of the auditorium for the night’s event, and ended up sitting in the last row next to a solitary individual. It took me a couple of beats to realize I had sat down right next to Lynn Hershman Leeson. I regretted being late even more, and then at the end of the talk, again missed my chance to introduce myself; she disappeared during the applause before I could even fully register that she had been there.

That sense of always being in her wake, catching glimpses in peripheral vision, is how I’ve experienced her work since I first learned about her practice. Which brings us to last week, when I visited the New Museum’s second floor on a Sunday evening with a few friends and explored an expansive collection of Lynn’s work spanning five decades. Given the wide range and number of works, I was astounded when she mentioned that the New Museum show is about 10% of what was shown at ZKM a few years earlier. For those who may not know, ZKM is an extraordinary museum founded in 1989 focusing solely on what we’ve all called “media arts”—but in reality is just art, only a few years early.

So thrilled today to be able to have a conversation with her while her work is properly on view in New York until October 3rd. I began our conversation with a biographical inquiry: where’d she grow up? What did she do as a child? How did she become an artist who thrives in remixing and rewriting all the rules of what art is and who gets to make it?

Lynn Hershman Leeson: Um, well, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. And I think I spent most of my time in the Cleveland Museum of Art. That was kind of my saving place to go, and to learn about art, and to feel calm.

Roddy: Were there particular things that you saw there that provided that for you?

Lynn: Yeah, I used to look at the—they had a great collection of Rembrandts, of Turner, of Matisse, of African art—and they’re one of the best in the world. So it was a real sustaining privilege to be able to spend so much time there.

Roddy: Could you talk a little bit about some of your first experiences with technology?

Lynn: Yeah, my mother was a biologist, my father was a pharmacist; most people in my family were scientists. So when I was growing up, my brothers would do science performances in the hallway—you know, like you take two colors, you create another color. I never saw a difference between science and art; they’re all making things. You know, taking two things, making something else. They didn’t adhere to strict disciplines.

So the first real experience was when I did a drawing and wanted to Xerox it. In those days, Xerox took up half the room, and the drawing got caught inside the machine. I brought it out and it was all filled with ink and crumpled, but it was better. So that was when I realized that, you know, we have to have a partnership with these things rather than trying to master them.

Roddy: When did you first begin to think of yourself as an artist?

Lynn: It was much later, because... it was when I was thrown out of the University Art Museum in Berkeley because I showed a piece that had sound, and they said it was “media,” and media wasn’t art, and they wouldn’t let me show it. So I set up a room with a friend of mine, Eleanor Coppola, in a hotel. And it was those hotel rooms that I thought were really authentic and original. That was when I felt like that was the first legitimate piece of art I did, because it wasn’t relying on a history—wasn’t relying on painting and sculpture or drawing or the history I’d studied—but something that was invented in the moment.

Roddy: And was this in San Francisco at that time?

Lynn: It was in San Francisco around 1971 or so.

Roddy: Who were the people that visited that exhibition when you were putting it in hotels?

Lynn: Um, well it was meant to be open forever, so people could just go to the—one of the first site-specific works before “site-specific” had a name—but you could just go there and get a key and go in and look around and browse and stay as long as you wanted. But at the end of the year, it was given something in the paper as one of the 10 best shows of the year along with major exhibitions that were happening. So lots of people came because they could go 24 hours a day.

Roddy: And could you talk a little bit about how you were able to make work at that time? Were you finding funding opportunities?

Lynn: Yeah, I never had any funding until very, very recently—like in the last five years maybe—because nobody knew what I did, but they did know it wasn’t art. So most of the things in the exhibition were considered “not art” when I was making them. But I took all kinds of part-time jobs, whether it was selling shoes in Macy’s basement or selling towels. And then eventually I did get a job teaching, and then I was able to sustain myself with teaching jobs. That wasn’t until much later.

Roddy: Do you have a sense of what it was about your work that made people respond in that way?

Lynn: I don’t even think it was the work. I think it was the fact that I was a woman. In those days, women didn’t show in galleries. You know, they weren’t considered—it was not considered possible for a woman to be a legitimate artist. And then it was work that was experimental; it didn’t have the history that people wanted. It wasn’t drawing or painting, and nobody knew what to do with it, so they just didn’t show it.

Roddy: Were you following the work of others that were doing either sound work for galleries or media projects during that time?

Lynn: Um, I tried to, but no, that was pre-internet. You know, I was interested in Joseph Beuys, I was interested in Dante, and I took on various identities as a critic. That gave me some access that I wouldn’t have had otherwise to be able to see some of the works, but never had direct contact. There were people in the Bay Area, you know, like Tom Marioni and the Museum of Conceptual Art, but they also wouldn’t—you know, I was not part of the game. So I was kind of X’d out of any group that was exhibiting.

Roddy: And you took on these personas. One of the things that struck me so much when I went to the exhibition at the New Museum yesterday was the lengths you went to to build credibility around some of the persona that you did create. I think if I remember correctly, I saw a driver’s license, I saw apartment lease documents, other official government documents. And I have to ask: how did you do that?

Lynn: It was pre-computer. I just applied as Roberta. And because, one, she had no bad credit because she had no credit, I was able to get all these things. Nobody asked any questions. If I had done it 10 years later, I could have been arrested for identity fraud or theft, but it was at a time when nobody was tracking these things, so I was able to get away with it.

Roddy: The level of extraordinary change that’s happened throughout the world when it comes to the ability to shift one’s identity at one’s own will sort of evaporating in the age of machines and computers and so forth—do you have observations of just what that feels like, to sort of witness the amount of change that has happened?

Lynn: Of course, there’s been enormous, enormous change since the advent of the internet—being able to communicate globally and also to think in the wider span of just one’s own area. So that has opened up all kinds of keys to information that wasn’t readily available. I mean, we all travel with our own encyclopedia in our iPhone and can find information at our fingertips, literally. So, you know, it’s totally different.

Roddy: As well as the expansion of possibilities since the Cyborg was named 60 years ago—all the elements that come with “Cyborg” in living with all of the emphasis on technology that your work has focused on. I’ve always gotten the sense that you were most interested in the inner transformations that happen in the face of technology and scientific change.

Lynn: I think it’s both. I was interested in how technology affects individuals, as well as how individuals affect technology. But it’s really a very minor and select group of individuals that can affect technology; mostly it’s the other way, it’s reverse. So we can use technology as individuals in ways that are productive and utopian—it doesn’t have to be dystopian. It’s really all of our own personal views of what we could do with it.

Roddy: That also makes me think of an essay that’s included in the catalog for the New Museum show that you wrote in 1985 called “Politics and Interactive Media Art.” In that essay, you wrote about new technologies which would allow one to work from home, and you actually stated that we should be wary of this distributed activity because it may result in the quote-unquote “sense of isolation that only makes employees feel bereft and vulnerable to the imposition of new authority sources.” What are your thoughts on individuals’ relationships to authority in this hyper-mediated, hyper-technological age that you’ve seen evolve since you first wrote that essay?

Lynn: Yeah, I think the authority is media. And I used to think of it as a master-slave relationship—you know, like when you were doing early video editing. But I think it’s reversed. I think the globalization of technology and the reliance on it has put us in the role of sub-continent. And I think in many instances we’re not aware of how indebted and how overriding technology has become in individual life and decisions and possibilities.

Roddy: I’ve heard others describe this kind of current moment of mediation through social media and so forth as almost a “peer-to-peer propaganda,” which maybe doesn’t sound so distant from what you’re describing.

Lynn: No, it’s true. And also the propaganda is very often fictional. Well, I have to say that most of the inventions have been made by either pornography or the military. The military has created things that have a subtext of violence and assault, and I think that we’ve been contaminated really as a global species by some of the messages and possibilities of technology. So, you know, we don’t know... we also have invented these like feedback loops of fiction where things are perverted and you can’t really tell what the truth is.

Originally I thought, well, if you could see things from all sides like Cubism, you know, you get a different sense of how people are interpreting things, that would give you a broader range of making an accurate assessment of it. But I think what’s happened is that there’s so many extreme stories that it is very difficult to get a reliable sense of what truth is—what the truth of any story is. So almost everything that we see is fiction.

Roddy: Do you care to speculate on what that means for humanity?

Lynn: Well, I think that we really have to protect ourselves from what we absorb. You know, it’s like having a good diet or a limited diet of certain things, and that’s very hard to do when you become addicted to something. Yeah, so I think the major problems are ones of sustainability of the planet and also of doing away with greed, which is an overriding destructive force.

Roddy: Do you see technology playing a more positive role—which you were alluding to earlier, which that optimism is actually really refreshing to hear?

Lynn: I think it can. And, you know, I mean we created the piece actually in the New Museum—just finished it a week before the show went up—that purifies water. And this is a major thing because everybody was complaining that there’s too much plastic in water and what are we going to do. And this is something that uses electronic pulses to completely eradicate contaminants, including plastic. And also nature has created a system for getting rid of contaminants that it wouldn’t have done if there weren’t any contaminants. So, you know, I think we have to look for the metaphors of where we are and what technology is doing and how that relates on a more dimensional level and keep optimistic. Because technology is something that we’ve been given as a tool to help us survive, and we have to find ways to use this in a way that’s productive rather than the original kind of birthright in the DNA of technology often, which they say is destruction.

I do think it’s going to take a couple more generations to be able to invent things that are not just invented for war or for things like the, you know, this AquaPulse system that works for water. Things like different kinds of antibodies or injections to change DNA, where with just an injection in your arm, if you’re born blind because your DNA sequence is faulty, you could correct it. So there are lots that we could do on a very productive level if we let ourselves.

Roddy: It really reminds me of something that the artist Stephanie Dinkins said to me the other day. She works very closely with emerging AI systems and is really investigating its role in the larger culture, and she even said that she feels the potential would just be enormous if, as she put it, “humans would just get out of the way.” And I thought that was such an interesting way of phrasing it, and it feels like there’s some resonance with sort of what you’re saying.

Lynn: Well, but it’s something to bear in mind. I mean, you have to... I think that many coders and programmers aren’t aware of their own internal prejudices and how they’re making things; they’re coding things to reflect who they are, which reflects the cultural prejudice. So that we have to put that in mind.

Roddy: But one of the series that I saw from you for the first time yesterday when I was at the New Museum was called the Suicide Series, that I think you worked on starting in the 1960s, and I believe it continued for several years.

Lynn: Um, well when I started to do the Breathing Machines, you know, I had just come out of an illness where I was under an oxygen tent for about half a year, and there was a question of whether I would survive. And so I started to work with wax forms and wax faces. Some of them had sound and could breathe and could survive; other ones had wicks in them that burnt themselves out. So it was that whole life cycle of whether or not you can sustain yourself, and if not, then there’s a transformative process, particularly with working with wax, where something burnt itself out and it was almost like a performance of time that they didn’t survive. So that life-death thing was part of the original impetus in the philosophy of not just doing the breathing machines but doing the victims as well.

Roddy: And I guess just to describe to the listeners, so many of the works from that period were literally made of wax and were intended to either be burnt in a performance or took the form of masks on some occasions. And at least in the museum yesterday, as you were describing, would actually have a sound component that would be activated when you approached it. And I thought that also was such an ingenious way to include a sound art component in a gallery show. And the volume level was very low, and I kept seeing people that would be leaning right next to the machine to listen and it was very beautiful. Could you talk a little bit about the sound component in those works and how it was made and sort of maybe even what they’re saying?

Lynn: Yeah, well sometimes they would giggle or cough or laugh or just breathe. In one instance, it’s the sound of fire when there was a black church that was burnt. And in another case, it’s somebody that talks directly to you as you approach it and asks who you are and what you did that day and what you’re thinking about. You know, just very personal questions. Not unlike Agent Ruby, I have to say.

Roddy: Right, and Agent Ruby was a very early artificial intelligence system, I believe from the 90s if I’m not mistaken?

Lynn: 1998. And people would visit the website—it lived on a website and still does live on a website—and people would visit it and share dreams, share ideas, and Ruby would have a conversation with you. But from what I understand, also Ruby was learning as the information was collected and would grow in terms of the types of responses that she was able to deliver to the visitor.

Roddy: And you were doing that long before anybody else was remotely thinking about these things, as far as I can tell—at least in the art world.

Lynn: What I see... I mean, I had made a film called Teknolust, and in that film one of the cyborgs operated a lonely hearts line through the internet. So I wanted to replicate that kind of as an expanded cinema experience, just like the DNA I saw as expanded cinema. And so I thought, well if I’m thinking about it, why can’t this happen? So I worked with 18 programmers from around the world that I just put a call out to to try to figure something out that would do that. And you know, the result was Ruby, who’s 12 years older than Siri and probably 15 years older than Alexa, and also has a better sense of humor and is more...

But the problem is that nobody understood these works. You know, a lot of the works are not in the show—that I did as I said, this is about 10 percent of what I had in my retrospective in Germany—and nobody would show them. I mean it took like 23 years to show Lorna, which was the first interactive disc; people didn’t know what to do with these things. I had to wait—I made those sound pieces that you saw, the Breathing Machines, in the mid-1960s and the first time I was able to show them was five years ago because nobody would show them at all. So until the ZKM show, was the first time that they had shown anywhere. So, you know, while these things may be prescient and of their time—not of the past, not of a history—you don’t have prescient galleries or museums.

Roddy: That is true.

Lynn: Yeah, they rely on history and trying to do something that fits into a linear continuum of what they consider history. And so the, you know, the upside is it’s really exhilarating and exciting to be able to invent something with the tools of your time, or even invent the tools of your time. And on the downside is you may have to wait 30 or 40 years before you can exhibit them.

Roddy: One of the things that I perceive in your work—again, and this is just simply my perspective—but there’s a sense of playfulness in so much of what you do. And one of the pieces that I was really thrilled to see yesterday was Synthia Stock Ticker. And there were so many things that I loved about this piece. And I guess just to quickly explain for listeners: essentially it’s a sculptural piece, multimedia with a video screen contained within what used to have been a glass jar that might hold a stock ticker, a ticker tape. And in the video, Synthia, when the stock market is doing well, she goes to Rodeo Drive or she goes to the Gucci store, she goes on these huge shopping trips and is more excited and happy than one could even imagine. Stock market is not doing well, and Synthia is not doing well; Synthia is very unhappy and I believe drinking more than she should be, or you know, there’s a whole narrative there. But you know, the thing that I love though is like when nothing was happening on the stock market, when things were just sort of even, Synthia seemed to live a life of quiet despair.

Lynn: In those moments...

Roddy: I was wondering, I mean does that speak to kind of how you see capitalism functioning?

Lynn: Uh, well I think that we’re so reliant on our moods based on whether we’re making money, and that’s what the stock market’s about. So even if the stock market’s even, we don’t know what’s happening; there’s still an anxiety and tension about what it’s going to do and how that’s going to affect our life. And I think this is a lot about how stock market money and internet systems that increase our income affect us—they affect us emotionally and create all these wide gaps of behavior and appreciation of life.

Roddy: Lynn, I have to ask you: what’s next? What are you working on now?

Lynn: Um, well I’d like to do a piece about assault weapons because I think that’s one of our major issues. And also since this, I want to do a Cyborg who’s 60 years old looking back on her life at what went wrong and, you know, kind of meditations on the problems that erupted since she was born.

Roddy: Well you know, I really just appreciate all the work that you’re doing, and again, congratulations on a brilliant exhibition at the New Museum. It’s just such a pleasure to see. Margot did a great job, you know; I think that there’s a real cohesiveness in what she put together.

Well, and I guess briefly too to that point, I was also so thrilled to see the drawings and the collages. Is that a part of your practice that you’ve maintained over the years? Are you still actively developing two-dimensional work in that way?

Lynn: Yeah, yeah. It’s just very natural, and that’s how I can see things often—either with flow charts or drawings—clarifies how something can be made.

Roddy: Again, thank you, and I appreciate you taking a few minutes out of your afternoon to talk today.

Lynn: Well, thank you for inviting me. I’ll meet in person when I’m back.

Roddy: Well I do think we’ve gotten to a point where there is literally no distinction between our lives lived in and through technology and our day-to-day lived experience. I am sure Lynn’s work will continue to point to what the next version of this reality will be—whether it’s an upgrade or downgrade is, I suppose, up to us. Until next time, thanks for joining me at Informer, and I hope that you’ll join us again.