♪ ♪
In the mid 1970s, maybe a little earlier,
I had done a sculptural painting of a man,
and a collector went to a gallery and bought the work.
♪ ♪
I wanted to meet him,
but the gallery didn't want me to meet him
'cause Lynn could be either male or female.
Somehow, he found out I was female
and he returned the work because he said that women
weren't good investments.
Women artists didn't make a good investment.
Um, he was wrong. [laughs]
[calm electronic music]
I did start out doing painting and drawing.
And then moved into sculpture.
Then sculpture with sound.
- ...Trying to remember who we are.
Video,
film,
artificial intelligence,
and computer-based work.
To me, they're all the same.
You know, you take a number of things and put them together.
♪ ♪
I do work that confronts where we are in society.
[sculpture whirs]
I came to the Bay Area
to go to graduate school at Berkeley.
[rock 'n' roll music]
It was the era of the hippies, Allen Ginsberg, and that
kind of radical thought.
And being a girl from Orthodox Jewish family in Cleveland,
it was just really opening your mind
to the fact that you don't have to do what you're told.
[calm jazz music]
I think that the early challenges
were getting somebody to show my work.
I remember walking the streets of Berkeley during that time,
and I thought, "Well, who needs a museum to tell you whether you're doing art?"
So with my friend Eleanor Coppola,
we opened up rooms in a hotel,
and people could check-in at the desk, get a key
Eleanor staged in her room a man who lived there.
I created fictional characters who might've lived there,
and bought props from around that neighborhood to redefine who those
characters could have been.
And it was a way of creating art in the world
that went beyond the walls that existed
It lasted nearly a year,
and finally somebody, went at two in the morning.
And I had wax body parts in there,
and people thought that it could have been a murder, and called the police.
The police came in and took everything.
And that was the end of that.
Glasses from the '70s.
- [laughs] - Big lenses.
- Here we go.
When I was in the room at the Dante Hotel,
I had artifacts of somebody who could have lived there
I thought, Well, what if this woman,
this fictional character, could be liberated,
live in real time and real space?
And that was the beginning of creating Roberta Breitmore.
So I would go out and dress as Roberta,
with different kinds of makeup as a blonde
and with a lot of things about her that were very different from myself
[ambient music]
Roberta did things broke that any single broke woman would do.
And she came to San Francisco, she needed a roommate to afford her rent,
so she put ads in the local newspapers.
♪ ♪
Roberta went to a psychiatrist.
She had a particular walk. She had particular gestures.
She had a language.
Roberta was able to get a bank account.
♪ ♪
She was able to get credit cards, which I couldn't.
♪ ♪
She was much more real, had more of a verifiable history than I did.
♪ ♪
I didn't think that Roberta would be a long-term performance.
I don't even think performance was a word in those days.
I don't know what she was.
She was an intervention in real life, in society.
And she lasted almost ten years, from 1972 to 1979.
♪ ♪
[film projector whirring]
I think if I had moved to New York
to become an artist as many people did,
I would not do the work I do now.
But because I live in the Bay Area, where you breathe technology,
the digital landscape here has changed the entire world.
And it's not insignificant that television was invented here.
♪ ♪
I think that we've become kind of a society of--of screens,
of different layers that keep us from knowing the truth,
as if the truth is, uh, almost unbearable,
too much for us to, uh to deal with,
just like our feelings.
So we deal with things through replication,
and through copying,
through screens, through simulation
through facsimiles and through, uh, fiction
and through faction.
[experimental electronic music]
I think that there is not a central answer to whether technology is utopian
or dystopian I think it depends on humans and how they use it.
[echoing chatter]
A lot of my work is interactive
in that it implicates viewers into making choices.
Interactivity in these pieces meant dealing with the possibilities in
technology that existed at the time.
So when "Lorna" was made, I used an interactive LaserDisc.
[water bubbling]
- I was afraid of everything.
- So you think you know her story.
Well, good luck. 'Cause you're all wrong.
Lorna's agoraphobic, she's afraid to go out
The reason she's afraid is because media projects all kinds of images of fear.
And all she does is watch television.
♪ ♪
And you control what you see,
and in doing so, you become implicated in
Lorna's life and control her future
[foreboding music]
Do you wanna put the hat down by the side?
Yeah, good.
- Do you want me leaning in any way, or just
- No. Just watching.
- In terms of drama, I'll just shoot something - Okay
This work, "VertiGhost," uses, in fact,
much of my history.
- That looks beautiful. - It looks more like it.
The premise was to do something that had to do with the Fine Arts Museum
and I I remember that Alfred Hitchcock shot a major scene from "Vertigo" there.
In the original film, the character Madeleine would go to the museum and
look at the portrait of Carlotta who was a distant relative of hers,
who had died and who suffered from mental illness
♪ ♪
- Okay, Yuli, you can come.
♪ ♪
You know, they're both stories of compulsion
about identity,
and copies, and copies of copies,
and not knowing who you are.
♪ ♪
Now I'm gonna have you walk around the bench
and sit exactly opposite than you are now.
♪ ♪
And in mine, it tells kind of the haunting story
of that history.
And telling the history releases
the ghost that we keep hidden.
- Camera, please. And action.
Putting the exhibition together for "VertiGhost"
was a total act of trust,
and improvising what we would do
- Three and four.
I like to collaborate.
I have this joke in my studio that I'm kind of like the idiot savant,
'cause I can't do anything.
So I come with an idea,
and then everybody else knows how to do certain parts of it.
And eventually it gets done.
- [laughs]
- So, um, this has been printed
on the back of this, and it's Plexiglas.
And we took the original image of Carlotta
and we're gonna put the camera on the wall
in back of the eyes
so that it picks up anybody walking through the room.
[Claudia] I'm sure it's gonna be quite startling.
- It's so bizarre. - It really is.
[laughs]
- [laughs] But are you happy with it?
- I am. Thank God. - Oh, good.
That's the most important thing.
- You know, you never know if these things are gonna work.
[chuckles]
♪ ♪
This is the way it works. Somebody sits on the bench.
There's a bouquet of flowers that has sensors in it.
That turns the camera on in the painting
The painting captures the image of the person who's looking at the painting
puts them in the 3D box to the de Young Museum which is at a different location
which is at a different location.
it's in Golden Gate Park and inserts the viewer there.
So it kind of ties all of them together, almost like a double helix
between the two buildings.
♪ ♪
I think that I'm asking viewers to consider
what it real, what isn't real
why we need to imitate something,
and the credibility of the things around us.
♪ ♪
I think it's great that finally my work has become part of a cultural history.
That finally I'm not in debt. [laughs]
For the first time ever.
I think I'm really lucky. I got a lot of freedom from being unknown,
where I could do anything I wanted to.
And now it's too late to change.
[laughs]
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