Dodie Bellamy on Lynn Hershman Leeson
“About Face” was an intimate, career-spanning exhibit, comprised of roughly forty items that explored Lynn Hershman Leeson’s ardour for masks. The most important tropes related together with her artwork—mirroring, replication, projection, cyborgs, screens, avatars, humor—have been represented right here, in a questioning of the divides between fantasy, the digital, and the actual. Organized nonchronologically, every artifact acted as a kind of hologram that references the entire. This work advised somebody deeply conversant in ungroundedness. It exuded the brilliance and caginess of the hypervigilant. The artist’s rigorous experimentation and a spotlight to element are impeccable, however, even at its most summary, her work delivers visceral and emotional punches.
It was a deal with to view “About Face” within the metropolis it was made in, the identical metropolis that has so formed my very own artistic output. The exhibit’s Thursday-evening opening was sparsely populated, largely with curatorial varieties who had been invited to the dinner that adopted. A number of weeks later, I returned on a Saturday afternoon, and the gallery was just about empty, as have been the galleries within the close by artwork mall, Minnesota Road Mission. I first encountered Hershman Leeson’s work a pair many years in the past in a bunch present at New Langton Arts, a seminal San Francisco nonprofit gallery that closed in 2008, which featured documentation of her Roberta Breitmore challenge, 1973–78, through which she lived an alternate existence because the invented character Roberta. The occasion was so packed you needed to battle your method to the artwork. The distinction between that reminiscence and the Altman Siegel exhibit’s white expanses, which develop vaster every time I take into consideration them, for me is tragic, pointing to bigger points in San Francisco’s struggling artwork scene. However then there may be an aura of the tragic to all of Hershman Leeson’s work.
In 2019, impressed by the quirky obituary my husband, Kevin Killian, wrote for artist Lutz Bacher, Hershman Leeson wished to rent him to jot down an obituary for her. He replied with a protracted electronic mail through which he declined her provide as a result of he himself was dying. They by no means received to satisfy in individual. A number of months later, at Kevin’s memorial, Hershman Leeson learn his electronic mail in its entirety. It was lovely and intense and bizarre—however solely after I watched the artist’s confessional video First Particular person Plural, The Digital Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson 1984–1996, simply earlier than going to “About Face,” did I notice that her interplay with Kevin was a part of her huge multigenre challenge. The obituary she proposed was yet one more type of portraiture, one other masks to don for an artist obsessive about personas.
Her willingness to be weak, to place herself on the road, instills every of Hershman Leeson’s avatars with a libidinal cost. A sculpture with a sound aspect, Self Portrait as One other Particular person, 1965, incorporates a face forged in wax that’s truly the artist’s personal, though a lot of it’s obscured by a protracted brunette wig. From an accompanying audiotape participant we hear her respiration—this sound was recorded when she was hospitalized in an oxygen tent on account of issues from a being pregnant. Her work all the time hyperlinks again to the non-public, even when the connection is obscured or projected onto a double. From The Digital Diaries: “I all the time instructed the reality for the person who I used to be.”
Like all one of the best private artwork, Hershman Leeson’s factors past itself. “About Face” explodes preconceived notions of what constitutes a self-portrait. The Infinity Engine: Glo Cat, 2013, a photograph of a luminous inexperienced cat that had been genetically engineered with a jellyfish gene, is as a lot an avatar for Hershman Leeson as her iconic Roberta’s Development Chart 1, 1975. It’s no accident that each works have been held on the identical wall. Right here, the distinction between make-up, cosmetic surgery, and genetic engineering was however a matter of diploma. When your artwork manufacturing originates out of the paradigms of 1 century, then continues into one other century with its very totally different paradigms, you both ossify or go searching. Hershman Leeson makes use of no matter tradition gives as much as her, eagerly partaking with the native tech trade. Thus, not solely has she managed to stay related, however her artwork can be nonetheless forward of its time.
— Dodie Bellamy
