In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with multimedia artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with multimedia artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson. This was recording during a visit to her show, About Face, at San Francisco’s Altman Siegel Gallery. The show covered the last five decades of Lynn's career and work exploring the role of technology in the human condition.
Lynn's work is showing now at the SF Altman Siegel Gallery until July 8. CLICK HERE to visit the Viewing Room.
Visit Lynn's Website: www.LynnHershman.com
Follow Lynn on Social Media: Instagram @Lynn.l.Leeson of visit her Facebook Profile
About Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson:
Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. Cited as one of the most influential media artists, Hershman Leeson is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Over the last fifty years she has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, artificial intelligence, bio art, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is a recipient of a Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2017 she received a USA Artist Fellowship, and the San Francisco Film Society’s “Persistence of Vision” Award. In 2022, she was awarded a special mention from the Jury for her participation in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – The Milk of Dreams. In 2023, Pratt Institute of Art in NY awarded her with an Honorary Doctorate. Creative Capital awarded her with their Distinguished Artist Award in 2023. SFMOMA acquired the museum’s first NFT from Hershman Leeson in 2023.
Her six feature films – Strange Culture, Teknolust, Conceiving Ada, !Women Art Revolution: A Secret History, Tania Libre, and The Electronic Diaries are all in worldwide distribution and have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival and The Berlin International Film Festival, among others. She was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Prize for writing and directing Teknolust.!Women Art Revolution received the Grand Prize Festival of Films on Art.
Artwork by Lynn Hershman Leeson is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Tate Modern, The National Gallery of Canada, and the Walker Art Center in addition to many celebrated private collections.
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2023-06-06 - AIA - EP002 - Lynn Hershman Leeson
[00:00:00] Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: [00:00:00] For years, I couldn't show my work. I couldn't get a gallery. People in New York that wouldn't pay attention to me. They take two and three jobs to survive. And a lot of it wasn't me personally, it was the way women were treated. Remember in the sixties, they didn't show women in art galleries that it was unheard of.
So I think I deserve it.
Host Emily Wilson: [00:00:31] Welcome to Art is Awesome. The show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Emily Wilson as a writer in San Francisco, covering the arts, I see so many hardworking artists. I. Doing interesting work here in the Bay Area and I wanted people to know about them, so I came up with Art is Awesome.
Today we'll be talking with [00:01:00] multimedia artists and filmmaker Lynn Herschman Leeson. This is from a visit I made to her show about Face at San Francisco's Altman Siegel Gallery. The show covered the last five decades of Hershman Leeson’s career. And her work exploring the role of technology in the human condition.
Walking through the show, the artist stopped by one of her 1966 breathing machines, A wax head with a wig and a tape recorder that talks to you.
Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: [00:01:33] So this is a historic piece cause it's really the first media work anybody ever did. And you put your, you stand in front of it. See, it's hard because of the space to hear it, but if you listen, it talks to you.
Can you trust me?
Host Emily Wilson: [00:01:51] Sometimes it was hard being ahead of her time, like with her show more than 50 years ago at the University Art Museum in Berkeley.
Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: [00:02:00] The problem was these breathing machines were so early that they thought it wasn't art. I had one show at University Art Museum that they closed down when they showed these, and then nobody would show them and made them in 66, but they weren't really shown until 2014 in Germany.
Host Emily Wilson: [00:02:22] Her whole career, she's been exploring the same few ideas.
Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: [00:02:26] Like Duchamp said that if you're lucky, you have three ideas in your lifetime. They're, they're all the same idea, but they look different.
Host Emily Wilson: [00:02:32] Then she laughed and said maybe she didn't have three ideas
Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: [00:02:37] using technology like sound and sensors, which is really the AI and Cyborgs.
Maybe there's two.
The other one is about, you know, identity and loss of loss of self, where the blur of reality ends and what makes something fiction.
Host Emily Wilson: [00:02:56] Hershman Leeson studied biology as well as art at [00:03:00] uc, Berkeley. She says she's always loved science as well as technology.
Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: [00:03:05] When I was in high school, I tried to Xerox a drawing and it got caught in the machine and it was a really good drawing, but I was trying to get it out and it ripped and it was filled with ink.
I thought it was better, so I thought technology's not the enemy. It's our partner,
Host Emily Wilson: [00:03:37] But the show displays some sinister effects of technology. Such as surveillance and erasure of identity. In 1973, the artist started one of her most well-known bodies of work, which blurred reality and fiction. Hershman Leeson created a fictional character, Roberta Brightmore, and performed her going about her daily activities, such as getting a driver's license, an apartment, and putting an ad in the newspaper for a roommate.
Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: [00:03:50] With Roberta, you lose your identity if you try to imitate somebody's image of what you should look like.
But now, surveillances covert and you don't even [00:04:00] know your identity is being stolen and you're put on lists and you're deprived of, of your rights, essentially. So that's what I wanted, that that piece to be about, to make people aware how much they're losing without knowing it by, uh, just giving their identity away their digital identity.
Host Emily Wilson: [00:04:21] For years, Hershman Leeson fought for recognition now in her eighties. It's finally come. A couple years ago, she had her first retrospective in New York, and then she was invited to the Venice BI alley.
Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: [00:04:35] For years, I couldn't show my work. I couldn't get a gallery.People in New York wouldn't pay attention to me and I lived in basements.
You know, I had to take two and three jobs to survive. And a lot of it wasn't me personally, it was the way women were treated. I keep reminding them here. I say remember in the sixties, they didn't show women in, in art [00:05:00] galleries, you know, it was, it was unheard of, so I think I deserve it.
Host Emily Wilson: [00:05:12] This is the part of the show called Three Questions, where in every conversation I have with artists, I am with three questions to learn a little more about them. Starting with, what's your work routine?
Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: [00:05:25] I like to draw a lot and read and be alone a lot. I'm working on a project, um, like a video or the piece I did for Venice.
I am obsessive. I work on that all the time. But in between, it just depends on what's going on.
Host Emily Wilson: [00:05:43] What is the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area for you?
Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: [00:05:51] Sitting alone in my room. But the museums here have good shows. SFMOMA has some good shows right now. Seeing other, other work is important. So it maybe that. Yeah.
Host Emily Wilson: [00:06:10] And finally, when did you know that you were an artist?
Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: [00:06:15] I could never do anything else. So I remember that my brothers got lessons and we would go to the, uh, on Saturdays, we'd go to the Cleveland Museum, which is a great museum, and they would go to their lessons where they were told to draw and girls couldn't go to the lessons.
So I just wandered through the museums and I remember wanting to paint like they were, and I always was writing and drawing.
Host Emily Wilson: [00:06:42] And that's it for this week's episode of Art is Awesome. Thanks again to our guest, multimedia artist, Lynn Hershman Leeson Earlier this year, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired a piece by her, it's first non fungible token or N F T.
Currently she has a show at San Francisco's Altman Siegel Gallery through July 8th. It's from her Phantom limb series from the eighties, which deals with the effects of technology and mass media on women's bodies. You can get more info and link to her work in our show notes. In our next episode, we'll have a conversation with Ron Saunders.
He co-founded an organization for black artists in San Francisco, makes photographs and was recently chosen as a YBA Buena Center for the Arts 100 Honoree.
Art is awesome is a biweekly podcast dropping every other Tuesday. It was created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene go to of Go-To Productions. Our theme music is provided by Kevin McLeod with ACOM Tech, music, [00:08:00] music. Be sure to follow us on social media or visit our website till next time.