Lynn Hershman Leeson
Written by Kari Lee
Throughout the twentieth century, performance surged into the art society as a new movement. Performance art is often categorized as conceptual art, characterized by its liveliness, immaterial nature, impermanence, and resonance.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is a particularly intriguing performance artist, whose work caught my eye. With experience in drawing, painting, sculpture, filmmaking, poetry, photography, and much more, Leeson took her art career in the most unexpected and intriguing path. In 1973, Leeson began her seven years long art project and journey: a fictional persona named Roberta Brietmore.
The creation of Roberta Breitmore was the existence of Leeson’s “another self”, or her alter ego. To fully embody this new persona, Leeson not only had to transform her physical appearance- from the color of her brunette hair to the tint of her cheek- she went as far as to get Roberta a driver’s licence, credit card, and psychiatrist. Leeson kept documentations of Roberta’s therapy sessions, photographs of her meeting up with friends, and mementos including Roberta’s check book and diary. As far as the world knew, Roberta Breitmore was a living, breathing woman. She was real, and she was a representation of the era’s ideal woman.
In an interview with Leeson, she stated, “I was trying to focus on the blurriness between fiction and reality, so I created a kind of fictional person… I lived as this other character for almost a decade… She had a particular taste. She had a certain way of walking and speaking; she had her own language—it was English, but it was her language, not mine”.
While Leeson was the artist who was the first to create and embody the persona, the role of Roberta has been adopted by several other artists after 1979. Through her Roberta Breitmore Series, Leeson explored the relationship between her individual self and society, her true identity and how the world perceived her from the outside.
From 1990 to 1993, Lynn Hershman Leeson produced a new project called Room of One’s Own. This project was a fresh take on the theme of
privacy in an era of surveillance. Inspired by Thomas Edison’s kinetograph, Leeson’s Room of One’s Own is a creatively interactive installation: a small box that allows the spectator to view a miniature room through a peephole. The movements of the spectator’s eyes are tracked, and depending on where the viewer looks, a specific segment of the video is triggered and projected onto the bedroom wall, accompanied by recorded speech from the female occupant in the bedroom.
The spectator is placed in the perspective of a voyeur, or someone who gains sexual pleasure by watching an individual undress or engage in sexual activities. Designed as a peep show, the intention of Room of One’s Own is to evoke emotions of guilt and desire. According to Leeson, “Women are taught to be looked at… If cinema is a social technology, then the captivity of woman as subject and subject-victim through this medium situates women into precoded identities”. Throughout Leeson’s art career, she strove to shed light on the social reality of objectifying women and the issue of constant surveillance via the emerging virtual world.
Leeson’s works share common themes: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. During the 1979’s, motifs such as individualism, liberation, and feminism surged. As a performance artist, Leeson’s works reflected these motifs, and she engaged her followers with the social and political realities that are still very much relevant to this day.
Sources
Arts bombast: LYNN Hershman LEESON’S ROBERTA BREITMORE Series. Ribbon Around A Bomb. (2013, July 25). https://ribbonaroundabomb.com/2013/07/18/arts-bombast-lynn-hershman-leesons-roberta-breitmore-series/.
Lynn Hershman: Alter ego (Roberta Breitmore Series). (n.d.). https://www.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/feeds/detail/4000.
Thackara, T. (2019, November 8). With ‘shadow STALKER,’ LYNN Hershman LEESON TACKLES Internet surveillance. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/arts/design/Lynn-Hershman-Leeson-Shed-art-technology.html.
Lynn Hershman. Lynn Hershman : Room of One’s Own. (n.d.). https://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=169.