Much of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s 30-plus years of artistic output is about solicitation, beckoning, and impersonal forms of direct address. So it seems right that, upon entering Hershmanlandia (the first major retrospective of the artist’s work), you’re immediately captured in the alert gaze of a plastic doll named CybeRoberta. The direction of the cameras in her eyes is controlled by visitors at a kiosk in another section of the building. The installation is about surveillance, of course, but more specifically, it’s about the moment when the unwitting object of observation reads the placard and becomes conscious of being observed.
Once CybeRoberta‘s gaze leads you to her pedestal in the center of the room, other seductive images—from the intertextual odalisque Blue Angel to the Phantom Limb series of photomontages that reference Hannah Hoch and the Russian Constructivists—summon you deeper into the exhibition. In Cyborg 9, a digital print made in the year 2000, a blurry figure reaches out to the viewer. Her arm and hand are out of focus and her weird green eyes are crisp, producing a Mona Lisa–style illusion of a gaze that tracks your progress through the room. If you follow Cyborg 9‘s gesture of entreaty into the left gallery and position yourself directly in front of the image, you’re suddenly implicated in the crosshairs that target her eye.
Here the circulatory layout of the exhibit suddenly jams. Guest curator Robin Held (chief curator at the Frye Art Museum) says Hershmanlandia deliberately deemphasizes Hershman Leeson’s reputation as a new-media pioneer, and the two interactive videodiscs Lorna: The First Interactive Video Art Disk and Deep Contact (from 1983-4 and 1989, respectively) show us why that was a smart decision. Jerky and strange, the videodiscs strain against the limits of their medium (a precursor to the DVD format). In the DVD transfers on exhibit at the Henry, you’re more likely to feel trapped in a frustrating closed loop of activity than to be fully absorbed into the virtual environment. Similarly, Hershman Leeson is probably best known to the public as a filmmaker, but her feature films Conceiving Ada and Teknolust merit only a cursory display of costumes and a video loop.
The interactive components of Hershmanlandia make it easy to spend several hours in the gallery. I’ve become obsessed with coming up with abusive language that might cause Agent Ruby 3, an artificial intelligent agent equipped with voice-recognition software, to change her placid expression. (Agent Ruby’s Mood Swing Diagram, hung on the opposite wall, shows the tantalizing breadth of facial expressions that are supposedly available to her.) After I left the museum, I successfully provoked a previous web-only iteration of Agent Ruby to frown (see www.agentruby.com), and I’m dying to try it out loud.
The most satisfying elements of the exhibition are analog. The thorough documentation of Roberta Breitmore, a ’70s performance project borrowing from Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, would be a model for a museum exhibition of similar works—that is, if there were any works quite like Roberta Breitmore. Starting with the bizarre roommate advertisement Hershman Leeson placed on Roberta’s behalf in the classifieds section of the San Francisco Progress, the exhibit gives us artifacts like the ash-blond wig Hershman Leeson wore as Roberta, numerous letters to and from the “dates” she acquired through the ad (some clearly oblivious to the ruse, some cheekily knowing), correspondence with Roberta’s psychologist on the subject of possible video documentation of their sessions, and the project’s numerous spin-offs—including a comic strip by Spain Rodriguez and three Roberta performers who operated in different cities.
Then there are three objects that tell a story about Hershman Leeson’s early frustration with critical inattention to her work. As part of her master’s thesis, she published freelance reviews of her own group shows under hilarious pseudonyms like Prudence Juris and Gay Abandon. The first object is the artwork: a crone mask with audio recording. Next there’s a chart of her critical personalities. Juris, the “nonlinear intuitive (female dominant)” critic (doesn’t Seattle have one of those?), penned a hilarious review—the third object on view here—that begins, “With genuine pluckiness,” and goes on to skewer provincial art criticism while devoting but a sentence to Hershman Leeson’s own piece. It’s circular and ridiculous and an auspicious sign of things to come.
