The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I
by Kyle Stephan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kyle StephanEditor: Meredith Tromble
Editor: Lynn Hershman
Foreword: Robin Held
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-12-05
ISBN: 0520239717
Number of pages: 248
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Reviews of The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I
Book Review: Excellent overview while providing detailed analyses
Summary: 5 Stars
Documenting 35 years of cutting-edge work from one of America's most important contemporary artists, The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson is a "must have" for academics, artists and anyone interested in contemporary film, video, performance art, installation art, feminism or new media. If Leeson's range of media seems impressive, run down the list of her technical innovations, which reads like the dreams of several artists rather than the achievement of one (a theme, by the way, underscored throughout her work): creator of one of the first interactive videodisc artworks, one of the earliest networked robotic art installations, the first artwork to use touch-screen interface and, most recently, a process for making virtual sets, called LHL, designed for her first feature film, Conceiving Ada. Her reputation as a constant innovator and "pioneer of new media" isn't surprising, unlike the fact that this book is the first comprehensive look at her work. If you don't know about Lynn Hershman Leeson already, you should.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition Hershmanlandia: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson, this book does an excellent job of both providing coverage while offering detailed analyses of Leeson's work. Edited by artist and art historian Meredith Tromble, the text includes a well-balanced selection of multidisciplinary essays written by art critics, historians and curators, film historians and theorists, and Hershman herself. Hershman's "Private I: An Investigator's Timeline," gives a succinct yet detailed account of her career while reenacting her playful, witty and sophisticated use of autobiography as a means to articulate the complexities of subjectivity in general, where binary distinctions such as public vs. private, personal vs. political, human vs. machine, art vs. science, fantasy vs. reality, and art-making vs. world-making are, through a plethora of odd meetings and wild matings, playfully problematized and profoundly upended.
The collection of essays are, for the most part, concise and insightful, produced by some of the best scholars in their respective fields. For example, Abigail Solomon-Godeau reads Leeson's strategies of "conscientious objectification," her "intervention into the mechanics of spectacle," as a form of "ethical self-reflection," while Amelia Jones locates Leeson in a genealogy of performative photographic self-display routed through Claude Cahun, recognizing Leeson's ability to simultaneously affirm both surface and depth in an image, the "simulacral nature of postmodern culture" and the lived experience of a subject in the flesh--in this case, "female experience in patriarchy." David E. James also addresses Leeson's work as a performance of self, but shows how Leeson complicates and extends this strategy by working with the influences, tensions and contradictions that circulate between autobiography (as authorial agency, biographical truth as well as fabrication) and the materiality of representation (in this case video), throwing into relief the tenuous and porous boundaries between the individual and the social, subjects and objects of knowledge, truth and fiction, life and death, and trauma and healing.
The book contains 17 color plates, a good number of figures, and a beautifully organized DVD that includes presentation of the artworks (both stills and clips), more essays on Hershman's work, and selected histories: videos, films, exhibitions and awards. While much of the material overlaps, the DVD will also point you to Hershman's website and impressive web-based projects, such as Agent Ruby. Be sure to check them out.
Summary of The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I
Lynn Hershman Leeson's groundbreaking installation, performance, photography, video, digital, and film works have earned her an international reputation as a prodigious and innovative artist. This first historical and critical analysis of her work by prominent scholars and the artist herself brings nearly forty years of creative output into focus by tracking the development of her constant themes through each medium. The provocative essays in this volume, ranging from formal to theoretical to psychological to poetical analyses, establish her place at the forefront of contemporary art.Hershman Leeson's work explores vision, spectatorship, and the construction of sexed subjectivity, touching on key feminist concerns relating to the lived experience of the physical body and the body as a medium on which social law and values are inscribed. Her projects of self-analysis and self mythification explode stable notions of identity. The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson demonstrates how Hershman Leeson's work uniquely mirrors fragmented human subjectivity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Especially useful are the artist's updated chronology and a DVD with excerpts from several of her works.
Copub: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington
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