Dispatches from the Home Front
AN EMAIL EXCHANGE, AUGUST 5-7, 2011, BETWEEN MOIRA ROTH AND LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON IN RESPONSE TO HER EXHIBITION AT PAULE ANGLIM
“Lynn Hershman Leeson,” July 20-August 20, 2011, Gallery Paule Anglim, 14 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
Moira Roth, August 5, 2011
This exhibition at Paule Anglim marks a wonderful moment in your long life as an artist working in so many different kinds of media and with so many themes—and, not content with that, your enormous contribution as an artist-activist-documenter. Here you are not only with your superb 2010 film, !W.A.R. (!Women Art Revolution-A Secret History) —covering the history of the women’s art movement in the U.S., the result of your many years of filming—that is getting so much national and international recognition, but now, in the RAWWAR project [http://rawwar.org], you are gathering with huge success masses of films and videos of what was NOT in the film. I was so struck by the fact that the Anglim exhibition began with this new project.
#2. RAWWAR Maquette, 2011
Amazing.
Chronologically the Paule Anglim exhibition starts with three works of the 1960s that you “reconfigured” this year (2011): Breathing Machine, 1966, Giggling Machine, 1966 and Self Portrait As Another Person, 1968.
Here you were in California in the late 1960s, born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1941 of European Jewish parents, and with a BA from Case Western Reserve, Cleveland (1963). When you then moved to California, you started to make wax casts of yourself, your daughter and her friends which contained—I quote from the interview that Diane Tani and I did with you in October of 1991 (published in your 1992 Chimaera monograph) — “little tape recordings next to them: sounds of breathing or heartbeats and voices.” These were shown at the Berkeley Art Museum in 1972, but shortly after the opening, the exhibition was cordoned off and you were told “sounds didn’t belong in an art museum.” You chose not to take them out, however, so the exhibition was closed. A brave act on your part!
This Chimaera monograph also included your “Preliminary Notes” text in which you write:
“It is clear to me that my early work was motivated by the radical spirit and the spirited radicals of the times. In 1963 I was living in Berkeley. When I opened my windows, I could hear amplified speeches by Madam Nhu, Malcolm X and Huey Newton coming from rallies held at the University of California. Ideals of community, communes, alternatives, reprocessed media, free speech and civil rights were in the air. The air circulated in my studio and became implanted in my aesthetic. In those next few volatile years, art and life fused as performances took place in the streets. . . .I was still living in Berkeley when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. In retrospect, I feel that having seen his brain blown away on national television may have contributed to my sense of violent betrayal.”
