Episode 002: Lynn Hershman Leeson
Ben Fino-Radin 0:01
From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin. Welcome back, everyone. On today's show, I sit down with artists and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson. Now if you pay attention to the contemporary art world, and you're not familiar with Lynn's work, you must be living under a rock. Over the past seven years or so Lynn's work has been almost everywhere you turn. It hasn't always been that way, though…
Lynn Hershman Leeson 0:31
until just a few years ago, I mean, from 1984 till 2014, nobody would write about my work even though I showed it.
Ben Fino-Radin 0:39
Up until very recently, Lynn was, you could say your favorite artist's favorite artist: known and beloved by true connoiseurs of time based media art, but she really hadn't seen exhibition opportunities and the collecting of her work that would be commensurate with her status as such a colossal figure in the history of contemporary art. The art world can be notoriously obsessed with youth, but it can also reify the martyr like status of the "undiscovered genius" who toiled away in obscurity and wasn't "discovered" until after death. Lynn's story is one that warms my little art nerd heart because it is just so great to see someone get their roses while they are around to bask in the hard earned glow of their success. In our chat, we cover so much ground from the work Lynn's studio puts into preparing complex time based media art for collectors…
Lynn Hershman Leeson 1:40
We also give them manuals, they think the one for America's Finest is over 100 pages,
Ben Fino-Radin 1:46
…to how she's seen the art world change over the Corps of her five decade career:
Lynn Hershman Leeson 1:50
Women are in it now…
Ben Fino-Radin 1:52
We started from the beginning, though, and Lynn opened up about some of the aspects of her childhood and her early career that in many ways shaped and influenced her approach to art making today.
Lynn Hershman Leeson 2:06
I had a very weird upbringing, you know, I didn't talk till I was about six. Then, when I was in eighth grade, I was put into college, they were doing these experiments in Cleveland, where they gave kids IQ tests from all over, all over the Cleveland area and they put certain people that they felt, you know, met their criterion of IQ into these specialized courses. And also, you know, sent them in the summers to Case Western Reserve University to take classes there, you don't fit in while you're in it, you don't fit in afterwards. And then you have to try to you know try to make everything up, which is why you know, I'm dyslexic with numbers and I can't spell. So when you in a sense, you're isolated and I think that did a lot of damage to, to the people that were part of that group, a couple of them committed suicide, in fact. Then I went back to fourth grade after I finished that. So it's a very strange, strange upbringing. But the you know, the saving point for me was the Cleveland Museum was the place that I would go to as much as I could. The work in there became my salvation and the artists became my friends, Rembrandt, Turner, all the classics, Matisse, Cézanne, you know, going to the museum and libraries is where I really got my education. I always made things. I mean, when I was very young, and kept doing it, whether it was writing or doing poetry or drawing, it was always part of what I considered the better part of my life. later on. After I had experienced some physical problems when my daughter was born, I went into… I had cardiomyopathy and and went into intensive care. And when you're under oxygen, all you do is hear your breath. So I had been doing these wax sculptures before and afterwards, I started to add sound to them. I think, because of that experience of again, isolation and focusing just on breathing. I think it was just something I wanted to do, because it seemed to me that sound extended sculpture out into the world, like like it was a line. So I saw them, saw a lot of them as drawings, because it was drawing in space with sound.
Ben Fino-Radin 4:20
It sounds like it was just a very natural extension of your work. But for 1965 just thinking about art history, I mean, using interactivity, and sensors and sound in a sculpture was certainly not the norm at the time. I'm curious, you know, what were you absorbing at the time? What were your influences would you say?
Lynn Hershman Leeson 4:41
Well, one of them was Tinguely's sculpture. And I remember reading about when he showed the piece that destroyed itself and then reincarnated itself. I always read everything you could about what was going on in the real art world. And that was really spectacular for me because it incorporated time and it incorporated reinvention and rebirth and that kind of transgression of what was normally done. Another example was when I went to Edinburgh, and I was on a panel with Joseph Beuys and Tadeusz Kantor and he did one of his performances there, that again kind of made me breathless, you know, the he did performance, where he went outside of the stage into the audience, and I had never experienced that. And, you know, Cézanne too, when I look at look at Cézanne's life, which was so isolated, but yet he was looking at things and in ways nobody had and turning around in his painting and painting both sides of how something looked, these were really inspirations for me.
Ben Fino-Radin 5:46
And how about peers? I'm curious, you know, in those early years of your career in the Bay Area in the 60s and the 70s, what was your community of fellow artists?
Lynn Hershman Leeson 5:57
Quite frankly, you know, is as a female artist, I didn't have any… I was friends with another person who is in my carpool named Eleanor Coppola. And we together because neither one of us could have exhibitions or have our work seen professionally. We worked together, and we collaborated on a number of projects, but there were no community because we were really excised, you know, we weren't even considered as, as part of the world. I mean, there were people that were doing art, you know, in the Bay Area, like Tom Marioni, and Paul Kos, Howard Fried, Terry Fox, but they, you know, they had their group and I wasn't part of it. You know, for instance, I never got a review in the San Francisco Chronicle until just a few years ago. I mean, from 1984 till 2014, nobody would write about my work. Even though I showed it. I showed the same work that then went to Europe to be seen, but nobody would review it. Actually, for my master's thesis, I created three different art critics. So I wrote about myself under these other names. And people were so shocked that a woman was getting getting reviews and things like Studio International, you know, international magazines that that's how I got my gallery to start with.
Ben Fino-Radin 7:14
And so what came after that?
Lynn Hershman Leeson 7:16
Jobs, there were jobs and there things like selling shoes, in Macy's basement or selling towels, anything I could, you know, to get work because nobody would hire me to do anything. Because not only did they say I wasn't making art, but I had, even though I had a college, college degree they didn't… It was non functional. You know, I was unemployable. And then Ellie, Eleanor Coppola's brother in law, became the dean in San Francisco State. And I think he took pity on me, cause you know living in this basement, this wet basement with with a kid, he gave me my first job. And then he made me Chair of a department. And you know, but I was, I didn't get my first serious job until I was nearly 50. And before that, it was just a real struggle. You know, I was always like one step ahead of the law with all you know, the debt and bounced checks and everything you do to just survive when you know when when it's so difficult to earn any any money, certainly not from my work, because I didn't sell my my work until the 90s. The first time.
Ben Fino-Radin 8:21
Fast forward to 2013. And it's not as though Lynn had no success. In the meantime, that's certainly not the case. But she really marks this as a year that really changed everything for her,
Lynn Hershman Leeson 8:33
I have to say that I really think it's because of Peter Weibel doing the retrospective. This was ZKM in Karlsruhe, having an exhibition of over 800 works in which 65% of the pieces had never been seen. And also doing a fantastic book called Civic Radar that went along with it. I never had a book before. I never showed the work before because people my entire life told me it wasn't art. So I think people being able to have an overview and recognizing Finally, through that show, what I did, and when I did it, and how it proceeded by decades, sometimes many people took the credit for developing the ideas when they came out of work that I had done that was underground. So I think that that is really why people know my work right now. I don't think they would have without that exhibition. So I feel really grateful that suddenly my work is being collected, having museum shows simultaneously in there, you know that I'm out of debt.
Ben Fino-Radin 9:38
You know, Lynn, I'm curious when a museum or a collector collects one of these complex software based installations of yours. What do they actually get?
Lynn Hershman Leeson 9:50
They get a part of history, an important part of history in the work but we also give them manuals and for instance, Palais makes manuals for things that are like outrageous, I think the one for America's finest is over 100 pages. Same for Lorna's about 80 pages, you know, with photographs, ways to upgrade it in the future, very detailed ways of, of keeping the work intact forever. Ways to migrate it, eventually, the whole history of of how it was made, all the coding the changed. So it's a complete kind of provenance of the past and the future of the work. Well, you know, you do these things, and people are taking a big risk, they're taking a chance, because, because they don't know whether it's going to work in six months. And so it's very important to me, let's look at Lorna, which Bridget Donahue sold two issues of. The gallery took on making lists of what what was part of the piece in a for instance, how to get the furniture how, what colors to paint the furniture, what items were needed, because for Lorna, I wanted people to buy things from their neighborhood, rather than pre make them. And then from my programmer, we had the book of of, you know, that huge manual of its history and what to do to keep it going. So, you know, it's a combination. And it also depends on the work. You know, Bridget showed Lorna so she understood it, but in Shadow Stalker, for instance, it only showed at the Shed and also at the DeYoung museum, so we pretty much had to create the relics have all the different elements and parts, with instructions ourselves to send to the museums, I remember, I talked to Claes Oldenburg once, and he said that he makes manuals that go for 100 years for his projects of what how they should look in the future and where they should be. So maybe that influenced me.
Ben Fino-Radin 11:50
I have to imagine that considering the sheer span of your career, you've encountered a lot of cases of technological obsolescence. So I'm curious, you know, when it comes to conservation, is there kind of any underlying way that you approach things?
Lynn Hershman Leeson 12:07
Well there, there were two events that happened that made me pay attention to that. One, is I made a film called Teknolust that nearly brought me into bankruptcy and one of the things that I did to get out of bankruptcy was to organize the files I had done up to the time and sell them to Stanford. And since that time, I did take care of the work. For instance, for the show at ZKM, I migrated all of the pieces and updated everything. So for that time, in 2013, they were, they were state of the art for that point in time, even though they were remade with all the original mistakes, because I think it's important to keep the mistakes in things because they kind of tell about where you are, or where technology or things are during that particular time. For instance, some people make the film on eight millimeter, and then they try to 10 years later, put it on 35. So it looks better, doesn't look like it was made when it did and it's more refined. And Lorna has a lot of mistakes in it. And I mean things back up and choke and, you know, aren't up to speed, the way people are used to now although, you know, it was the first time anybody made an interactive piece, you know, computer based, so those mistakes are part of, of what the aesthetic is the the mistakes become the aesthetic, and I don't want to ruin it by in a sense, lying, you know, to make it smoother and better and be, you know, have people say, Wow, how'd she do it that well then? I'd rather have it known. There's something charming about the mistakes and not hide them keep that again, as part of what the piece is and what the aesthetic long term is. So it's a constant process. That's why things are never done, you know, because they're constantly just gestating, somebody asked me, you know, when do you know, when something's done and you don't, you know, the work tells you and I think that time is a really important element in the work as part of the construction and is important as as a color or, or a theme or a sound. And I think I incorporate time into many of my projects. And that brings different depth of maturity to the work.
Ben Fino-Radin 14:15
So I know you have a few folks that you work with on the technical production side of things. I was hoping you could kind of give us a sense of what what does your team look like?
Lynn Hershman Leeson 14:24
I've kept everything small. And I took advantage of when there was the decline in the Bay Area of tech and people were out of work. They were looking for things to do and and I you know, I generally hire people for projects depending on what skills are needed. There are two programmers, Colin Clingman, and Palais Henkel, who had been working with between 18 and 20 years and I still work with them. In fact, and you know, the same in my studio, there's a few people that work half day, two days a week, just you know, to help me to organize since I'm dyslexic. Since I never learned how to count, and so they help to keep things in order and archive things, you know, and do other things, but I tend to like things compact, but as they say, you know, the idea tells you what you need and the last project was done with the Weiss Institute at Harvard, the one before was done with the lead scientist and antibodies at Novartis. So it just depends on what the project is.
Ben Fino-Radin 15:24
Speaking of which, I know that one of the thematics of your show at the New Museum right now, is DNA, a recurring theme in your work for a long time now, and you've collaborated with all kinds of research laboratories, and I was hoping you could share that a bit with us.
Lynn Hershman Leeson 15:40
Well, can you know that I started researching this in 2006, and interviewed maybe 65 different scientists, leading scientists from all over the world about what was happening, because I realized that time that that programming, the genome was the most dynamic thing that was going to happen to the planet in what we could do, and actually changing life forms, and also preserving living things. You know, the Infinity Engine is the result of all of that research. And at the end of the project, you know, besides making the antibody for myself and Roberta, I realized, after you know, talking with George Church, who developed the the process for transformation of film, and almost anything into DNA, I thought, what if I were to take all of this research and convert the research itself, and my entire life, my diaries into DNA is kind of like watching yourself become a haiku and invisible. And it seems to me like that was such a poetic and beautiful thing to do, that I was able to do it in 2016 and 17 wouldn't have been possible before that I don't think in this way. You know, I think it's a form of archiving. And and it's a form of understanding what our history and future is.
Ben Fino-Radin 16:56
Speaking of our history and future, obviously, the past few years have been ones of drastic change, with everything going on. But I'm curious, you know, for somebody that's had such a long career in the art world, in what ways do you think the art world has changed the most over the years?
Lynn Hershman Leeson 17:16
Women are in it now. Much of much of the change has been with the millennials being born with women expecting opportunities, and not being grateful for them, having a sense of empowerment, and having women in positions as critics and curators, and gallery owners. For me that's made a huge difference. I mean, they just didn't exist before. And you know, in my time in the 60s and 70s, women weren't shown in galleries you never saw a woman as a curator. So that that's been a dynamic change young people and especially young women.
Ben Fino-Radin 17:54
And is there any advice you want to pass on to that younger generation?
Lynn Hershman Leeson 17:58
Keep your sense of humor, don't let anybody tell you what to do. And don't throw anything away.
Ben Fino-Radin 18:04
Lynn Hershman Leeson. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat. I truly enjoyed this.
Lynn Hershman Leeson 18:13
Great, thank you very much. Bye.
Ben Fino-Radin 18:16
And if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to get yourself down to the New Museum before October 3 to see Lynn Hershman Leeson's "Twisted", curated by Margot Norton. And I could tell you about the show. But why don't we just get Lynn back in here.
Lynn Hershman Leeson 18:34
The new museum show is not a retrospective. It's on one floor. And it has a theme called "Twisted" which has has to do with DNA. And its works I did about cyborgs and about DNA and the double helix and conversion from the earliest piece I think is 1956.
Ben Fino-Radin 18:53
Thanks, Lynn. And as always, thank you, dear listener for joining me. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to Art and Obsolescence. We are coming out with new episodes weekly. If you're enjoying the show, please share it with a friend review us on Apple podcasts. All of that helps immensely. And if you are interested in helping to support the show and ensuring that we can pay the artists to come on the show, check out artandobsolescence.com. Art and Obsolescence is a sponsored project of the New York foundation for the arts. Thanks for listening. My name is Ben Fino-Radin. And this has been Art and Obsolescence.