Lynn Hershman Leeson in "San Francisco" - Season 9 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

♪ ♪

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]

To learn more about Art21 and our

educational resources please visit us
online at pbs.org/art21

[Music]
art in the 21st century season 9 is

available on DVD
to order visit

shop.tbs.org or call 1-800 play PBS
this program is also available for

download on iTunes
[Music]