Agent Ruby (detail graphic), 1996-2002. Courtesy of the artist and Paule Anglim Gallery, San Francisco, Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York and Waldburger Wouters, Brussels.
Entering Lynn Hershman Leeson’s latest exhibition at Modern Art Oxford it’s easy to see why she’s been dubbed a pioneer when it comes to digital arts. ‘We can use technology to help or hinder our lives’, says the internationally acclaimed artist, ‘I seek out or invent technologies that help ideas become real’ in simple terms ‘I invent tools that don’t yet exist’. With an exhibition that impressively manages to span her entire career the upper galleries are filled with installations, video projections, photo montages and simple sketches, a pleasing variety that gives weight to the main preoccupations of identity that run throughout this intrepid artist’s work. ‘I’ve been making art for as long as I remember’ Hershman Leeson notes, ‘I never studied it, I just did it. But most of my family were scientists’. In “Origins of the Species (Part 2)”, the influence of this background is clear.
With an incredible track record of being the first artist to use technological innovations in her work it’s exciting to see such development in artistic practice placed in relative chronology. However it is actually some of the apparently less advanced sculptures that are all the more striking for their sparing use of technology. The collection that pervades the upper gallery known as “The Breathing Machines” (1965-70) present objects alongside tape recorded breaths, played out over and over, giving the sculptures an eerie presence to the point that one begins to wonder if something might burst out from within to engulf the entire exhibition. Another sculpture titled “Lunchbox” sits proudly like a prop from a Beckett play, a wax cast of a mouth mounted in the depths of a metal lunchbox. The upsetting juxtaposition was designed as a social commentary connoting the commonplace brutality of domestic violence, a simple image but a striking one; it soon becomes evident that these brutal but precise observations are Hershman Leeson’s currency.
Breathing Machine, 1967. Courtesy of the artist and Paule Anglim Gallery, San Francisco, Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York and Waldburger Wouters, Brussels.
One piece, “Lorna” (1983-4) – the world’s first interactive video art disc – focuses the audience’s attention on the object of the television. It’s a work that feels like a modern version of one of those choose-your-own-story books, allowing the audience to determine the fate of the central character, this time through the medium of the screen and simple remote control. Storyboards for the piece line one entire wall with intricate annotations, a visual mapping of Hershman Leeson’s obsessive tracking of the stories’ varying strands, as each outcome is carefully considered. Similarly the records of her site specific performance piece “The Dante Hotel” (1973) adorn an entire wall, photos and clippings once again reconstructing the past for the audience. These fragments, the paper trails that are left behind come to the fore. For the “Roberta Breitmore Project” (1974-78) the remnants almost overtake the project itself in which Hershman Leeson took on an alter ego. For “Breitmore” the artist changed her appearance, registered for credit cards, went on dates, she transgressed the boundaries of the systems we use to rule our lives in order to show the fragility of how we go about creating our identities in the 20th century. The remains of the life Hershman Leeson created become the very pieces we use to redraw and reshape her identity over time, the ripples of her actions overtake the actions themselves.
Installation view of Lorna, 1979-1984. Courtesy of the artist and Paule Anglim Gallery, San Francisco, Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York and Waldburger Wouters, Brussels.
You can feel a great fear in these paralyzing confrontations with the mechanisms of the modern world, wariness about the continually changing language of the digital sphere. Walking into one gallery the audience encounters pages and pages of script, a strange stage play dissected before our eyes of machine vs. human, the audience invited to participate as a sign invites us to ‘Chat with Ruby’. Machines seduce humankind, most obviously in the six-minute film “Seductions of a Cyborg” (1994) where we witness a girl becoming intoxicated by the screen. In a way, for a modern audience it’s all too familiar, the dreamy look of love the girl gains as she begins to caress the computer before her, reminiscent of too many late night Netflix visits: she’s hooked. As we recognise her addiction the film makes us wary of our own dependency on modern media and question the power of the screen in our own lives. In one shot the girl’s pupils become screens, it’s an image that feels all too well-known – who wasn’t warned as a child they would get square eyes from staring at a screen all day long?
With each ‘dose’ of the screen the girl’s immune system suffers but she remains unable to stop, her body becomes – in the words of the narrator – ‘a battleground of degraded privacy’. The distortion and fragmentation of the body is clearly another overarching theme, stemming from the same concerns of how one formulates identity these worries manifest overtly in the “Phantom Limb Series” (1986-7). The collection of photo collages present female bodies that are blended with a stark ferocity in and out of cameras, monitors, cathode ray tubes, all reproductive machinery stuck into alien yet strangely captivating forms.
Glowing Cat from The Infinity Engine (detail), 2013-2015. Courtesy of the artist and Paule Anglim Gallery, San Francisco, Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York and Waldburger Wouters, Brussels.
However it is the site specific installation of the “Infinity Engine” that steals the show, walking into the piece designed to mimic a genetic research lab, it feels more like entering a film set for a strange sci-fi, or embarking on a surreal scientific ghost train. The entire construction feels dystopian, a strange Brave New World hidden in the centre of Oxford’s dreaming spires. It’s evident that the piece was born out of a deep contemplation for Hershman Leeson: “Thinking about the most important aspects of being alive today, and understanding that programming the genome has resulted in a remarkable way of remaking life”. It’s evident she thrives off confronting and tackling these big subjects, boldly exploring the ramifications of experimentation with genetics and the fundamental dilemma of Man vs. Nature. “I want to do art that makes a difference’ Hershman Leeson confesses to Sleek. “For me politics and ethics are part of aesthetics”.
Text by Thea Hawlin
Lynn Hershman Leeson “Origins of the Species: Part 2” is on at Modern Art Oxford 29 May until 9 August 2015.