Lynn was recently spotted at Tosca Cafe in North Beach, San Francisco, with legendary filmmaker, author, and artist John Waters. Along with legendary cartoonist Spain Rodriguez and Barbie Nation filmmaker Susan Stern, they were there celebrating the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s seventy-fifth birthday. For more details, read all about it in Catherine Bigelow’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle. And how was YOUR weekend?
Microcinema International has announced its catalog of releases for 2010, which will offer not one, not two, but THREE ways to get your paws on a piece of Lynn’s cinematic oeuvre!
Lynn Hershman Leeson in stills from Binge (l), and First Person Plural (r), both from The Electronic Diaries Series
Lynn’s work defies categorization. Starting tonight, January 7, and running through April 17, an installation of Lynn’s pioneering Second Life environment and 2006 re-creation of Roberta Breitmore as an avatar will be on view as part of S.F. Camerawork’s 35th anniversary exhibition, An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area Part 2: The Future Lasts Forever.
Roberta Breitmore's avatar in Life Squared: Life to the Power of N
According to the gallery,
The Future Lasts Forever utilizes the notion of autobiography as a way to explore the work of contemporary artists who are using archival material, exploring persistent subject matter, and examining their own personal histories and the practical ways and means that surround art practice and preserve works for the future beyond the ephemeral exhibition model. To emphasize the exhibition’s autobiographical focus in egalitarian terms, accompanying text panels feature an articulation by each artist of their work. The cumulative effect of these projects serves to exemplify the evolution of a multifaceted and multicultural major American metropolitan region.
As you might have heard, Lynn is currently in post-production on the documentary film !WOMEN ART REVOLUTION a (formerly) secret history, to be completed in Spring of 2010. The livingblog is thrilled to reveal the brand new trailer, hot off the Final Cut timeline!
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As you might recall from a previous livingblog post, Lynn was featured in this year’s futurist-inspired Performa biennial of new and time-based media. Her piece Customized Marinetti (2009), which features en-masse, in-place jogging, moaning, and matching t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase IO NON SONO MARINETTI (I am not Marinetti), among other things, was commissioned specifically for the festival as part of Futurist Life Redux. According to the Performa website,
Inspired by the lost Futurist film Vita Futurista (Futurist Life, 1916), Futurist Life Redux is a new film featuring contributions by an incredible group of contemporary film and video artists—Trisha Baga, chameckilerner, Martha Colburn, Ben Coonley, George Kuchar, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Shana Moulton, Shannon Plumb, Aida Ruilova, Matthew Silver and Shoval Zohar (The Future), and Michael Smith—re-imagining the eleven segments of the original Futurist Life for the twenty-first century.
Jeanne-Claude taught me about tenacity and courage, risk and scale. In the years that I worked with her, we often traveled to see farmers in Petaluma at 5:30 am, before they milked the cows. She convinced them, with charm and humor, of the value of ephemeral art.
I remember a spiritual power in her generosity, humanaity, inspiration and wit.
She passed away from a brain aneurism on Nov. 18, at the age of seventy-four.
The light in the air is a bit dimmer these days.
I will always miss her.
Well, for starters, the Houston Cinema Arts Society hosted its annual Cinema Arts Festival, a five-day celebration of innovative and inspiring media. Sounds like a place where Lynn might be found, no?
Lynn and husband George at an event honoring screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, part of the 2009 Houston Cinema Arts Festival
Original Receipt from the Dante Hotel (1973-4)
This Saturday the 14 of November, the School of Visual Arts in New York City is hosting Media Modes, a graduate student conference dedicated to emerging theorists and their scholarship on art and technology. Of course, no event of this kind would be complete without addressing Lynn’s oeuvre, especially one including a session entitled “Body, Identity, and the Virtual Space”! This session is one of two (the other being “Spatial Experience and Social Networking”) which kick off the day, and presenting on Lynn’s work is up-and-coming critical writer and curator Jaime Austin. A 2008 graduate of California College of Art’s School of Curatorial Practice, Austin will act as an assistant curator for the 2010 01SJ Biennial, where Lynn has also, in the past, exhibited innovative work in new media. Her paper is entitled “Space, Identity, and Embodiment—On Lynn Hershman Leeson’s The Dante Hotel and Life Squared”. She is the only presenter from a West-Coast school in attendance, although other presenters hail from prestigious programs on both a national and international scale.
As technology integrates itself more and more seamlessly and persistently into our daily lives and rituals, how will data be visualized to us? And how will our children learn to absorb and comprehend the rate of change and speed of information in the post-information age? The Incheon Digital Arts Festival Invitational Exhibit, which closes this weekend, tackles these questions through exhibitions showcasing the intersection of avant-garde art and technology. The exhibit is part of the Incheon Global Art Fair and Festival, which riffs on the theme of ”the future city” with three distinct categories: Inter-Time, Inter-Face, and Inter-Space. INDAF 2009 General Director Unzi Kim states,
INDAF aims to interpret our sensational and emotional reaction to the media environment through reproducing artistic codecs within the sphere of art… Each day, the future comes from the continuities of the present. In this exhibition, a happy, thus delightful future, and beautiful life will be presented to you.
Appropriately, Global Mind Radar/Reader (An Emotional Barometer), 2008 created by Lynn and shown previously in 01SJ A Global Festival of Art of the Edge as part of Life to the Power of n was included as part of Inter-Face.
The face of Global Mind Radar/Reader (An Emotional Barometer)
In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto, ushering in an interdisciplinary, revolutionary art movement that spanned painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, film, and music. A century later, Lynn has created Customized Marinetti, a new video debuting in the Futurist Film Festival at Performa 09 this November.
Performa is a performance-centered biennial which acts, like Portland, Oregon’s annual Time Based Art Festival, as a state-of-the-union laboratory for the many iterations of performance. Transforming the city through the collaboration of a multitude of curators, institutions, mediums, and disciplines, this year’s Performa uses Futurism as a jumping-off point, which according to the event’s website,
will re-imagine the past, with historical reconstructions such as the legendary “Intonarumori” and also look to the future, with its focus on new media and the infinite possibilities of generating new directions for the visual and performing arts of the new century, as imagined by today’s artists.
Lynn certainly has no hesitation when it comes to re-imagining the past. From reframing past performances and installations to creating and recording narratives of historical figures, her process is akin to a gathering trajectory, where past fuels present and future with a speed and boldness that would make any Futurist proud. As she quotes, “Time has a way of revising truth, particularly when one has unlimited perceptions of an experience.”
The schedule for the Futurist Film Festival is not yet available, but check back for updates- New Yorkers and those who will be in New York in November, don’t miss it!
