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Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson 1984–2019, 1984–2019, Lynn Hershman Leeson: Are Our Eyes Targets? installation view at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, 2024. © Julia Stoschek Foundation; Lynn Hershman Leeson. Photo: Alwin Lay
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Lynn Hershman Leeson: A History of Her Own is the first reader of essays devoted to the work of the renowned artist and media pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson, published on the occasion of her recent solo exhibition in Düsseldorf, at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, curated by Lisa Long. Bringing together over forty reprints and newly commissioned contributions across 400 pages, the book spans five decades of Hershman Leeson’s groundbreaking practice and traces its impact across disciplines.
Since the 1960s, Hershman Leeson has shaped artistic discourses on performance, interactivity, cyborgs, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and biogenetics, paving a path that many generations would follow. She has collaborated with some of the most significant scientists of our time, bringing art into complex dialogues with science. As a professor and a critic, Hershman Leeson has written extensively on art, media, and politics. Between 1974 and 1978, she commissioned more than three hundred artists to present artworks in public spaces as part of the Floating Museum, which she founded as a platform for artists excluded from institutions at the time. Alongside her art making, Hershman Leeson has written and directed six feature films and documentaries, including Conceiving Ada (1997), Teknolust (2002), and !Women Art Revolution (2010).
Below you can read an excerpt from the Introduction by Lisa Long featured in the publication.
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Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson 1984–2019: Shadow’s Song (Part 4) (still), 1984–2019. © Lynn Hershman Leeson. Courtesy: Lynn Hershman Leeson; Hoffman Donahue, Los Angeles, New York; and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco
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Lynn Hershman Leeson: A History of Her Own
by Lisa Long
“I always think that my work is not ahead of its time, but in its time,” Lynn Hershman Leeson commented in an interview with Margot Norton, curator of the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York, Twisted, in 2021.[1] Hershman Leeson, like many women artists in recent years, was “rediscovered” in the later stages of her ongoing sixty-year career. The turning point for her recognition was the comprehensive retrospective Civic Radar in 2014, presented by Peter Weibel and ZKM | Center for Media Art Karlsruhe, where her work has been diligently collected and conserved for many years.[2]
More commonly than not, Hershman Leeson’s work is described by journalists, curators, and collectors as being ahead of its time. A pioneering media artist (to say the least), the insistence on Hershman Leeson’s prophetic qualities seems to deflect from the fact that the long-standing exclusion of her oeuvre from the institutional art world, and from the art-historical canon more broadly, was, in fact, not due to her being ahead of her time but to her colleagues being miles behind. In her first years as an artist, curators told her that her works were not art because they incorporated new media, and withdrew invites to exhibit—such as when an exhibition including her Breathing Machines (1965–68) at Berkeley University Art Museum was abruptly closed on the grounds that the interactive sculptures featured sound.[3]
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Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson 1984–2019, 1984–2019, Lynn Hershman Leeson: Are Our Eyes Targets? installation view at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, 2024. © Julia Stoschek Foundation; Lynn Hershman Leeson. Photo: Alwin Lay
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It seems safe to assume that the incapability of her peers to comprehend the timeliness of her works was due to their traditional ideas of what art can or can’t be. “The cyborg drawings I was making in 1965,” she continues in the Twisted interview, “were exactly at the same time as the word cyborg was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline when they found something under a microscope.”[4]
To acknowledge Hershman Leeson’s accomplishments as situated in their time shifts the conversation around her work and places her among her peers, as a woman artist involved in all aspects of society, and so too, the art world, even if that art world took a long time to catch up.
CONTINUE READING
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Lynn Hershman Leeson, Roberta Breitmore Multiples in San Francisco, 1978. © Lynn Hershman Leeson. Courtesy: Lynn Hershman Leeson; Hoffman Donahue, Los Angeles, New York; and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco
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[1] Lynn Hershman Leeson in conversation with Margot Norton, “The Human Spirit Is What Makes It Work,” in Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted, edited by Margot Norton (New York: New Museum, 2021), 14.
[2] Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar, curated by Peter Weibel and Andreas F. Beitin at ZKM | Center for Media Art Karlsruhe, Germany, December 13, 2024 – April 6, 2015.
[3] Lynn Hershman: Completed Fragments, University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, 1972.
[4] Hershman Leeson, “The Human Spirit Is What Makes It Work,” 14.
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