린 허쉬 먼
Линн Хершман

Manet’s Olympia Lives Again

source: cvjohannadevlin

In this work, she [Lynn Hersman] undeniably questions the objectification of woman in our contemporary society. The work of art is an installation that was exhibited in New-York at the Bitforms Gallery in May 2008. It is now kept in the artist’s studio. The work shows a plastic and ‘custom made’ life-size doll, lying on a chaise longue and inspired by the famous and controversial Manet’s Olympia (1863) sequentially projected on it. Hershman explained how she conceived the installation and her goal:
‘Now that you can buy even single body parts online, women really have become even more objectified. (…) My Olympia took seven months, because I ordered the eyes, the nose, the skin, to make her look as close to the painting as I could. In other words, you can customize the doll according to what you want and what your fantasy is.’(Buhman, 2008)

Clearly, what Lynn Hershman denounces is the artificiality of women as seen in the media today as ‘projected fantasies’, and how stereotypes concerning the subordination of woman to man are still existing in our contemporary (western) society. In order to understand what she means by ‘artificiality’ and ‘objectification’ of woman, this essay will firstly explore the traditional art historical way of representing women in visual texts while drawing upon the ideology behind feminist theories to explain the questioning of the patriarchal system by artists and theorists. Then, it will show how the artist within her installation uses signs and symbols to express her thoughts on ‘artificiality’, ‘commodification’ and the fact that societal prejudices still exist today.
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source: lynnhershman

A CUSTOM SEX DOLL CREATED TO RESEMBLE MANET’S OLYMPIA • LIFE SIZE SEX DOLL WITH CHAISE LOUNGE, SHEETS, SCRIMS AND SLIDES • INSTALLATION AT KUNSTHALLE BREMAN

Lives and works in San Francisco, California and New York.

Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in a era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. In 2004, she was named “the most influential woman working in New Media. A major survey of her work was presented in 2012 at Kunsthalle Bremen. Her work is featured in “A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance” at the Tate Modern London in 2012 and a retrospective and catalogue are being planned for 2015 at the Zentrum fur Kunst Und Medientechnologie, Germany.

Lynn Hershman Leeson released the ground-breaking documentary !Women Art Revolution in 2011. It has been screened at major museums internationally and named by the Museum of Modern Art as one of the three best documentaries of the year. She wrote, directed, produced and edited the feature films Strange Culture, Conceiving Ada, and Teknolust. All featured Tilda Swinton were showcased at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival before being distributed internationally.

She has been honored with grants from Creative Capital, The National Endowment for the Arts, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Siemens International Media Arts Award, Lifetime Achievement from Siggraph, Prix Ars Electronica, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Prize for Writing and Directing. The Digital Art Museum in Berlin recognized her work with the d.velop digital art award (d.daa), for Lifetime Achievement in the field of New Media. Lynn Hershman Leeson received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Her working archive was acquired by Stanford University Special Collections Libraries.

Her work is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, William Lehmbruck Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Canada, Walker Art Center, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and the University Art Museum, Berkeley, in addition to the celebrated private collections.

She is Emeritus Professor, University of California, Davis; A.D. White Professor, Cornell University.
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source: kreiszeitung

Lynn Hershman Leeson zeigt in ihren „Hero-Sandwiches“, wie ähnlich männliche und weibliche Ikonen sein können. Eine Verschmelzung von Monroe und Freud zeigt, was der Mann im Blick hat, worum seine Gedanken kreisen und wer die Welt visuell okkupiert. Die Fotos aus den 80er Jahren führen in das Hauptthema der Amerikanerin ein: die Abhängigkeit der Wahrnehmung, der optischen Angebote und nicht zuletzt der künstlerischen Arbeit vom Geschlecht.

Es hat lange gedauert, bis Lynn Hershmans Arbeit Beachtung fand. 1972 gehörte sie zu den ersten drei Künstlerinnen, die zu Einzelausstellungen in das University Art Museum in Berkeley eingeladen wurde. Der Nachbau eines Hotelzimmers plus interaktiver Plastiken mit Sound erschien den Verantwortlichen jedoch nicht passend. So platzierte Hershman zwei Frauen simulierende Wachsköpfe und Attribute, die Spuren zu Identität und Geschichte der beiden legten, direkt in ein Hotelzimmer. Die Installation hielt neun Monate, bis die Polizei, dem Hinweis eines Hotelbesuchers folgend, den Raum zum Tatort machte und die Installation in die Asservatenkammer brachte.

Mit ihrer Arbeit im Dante Hotel in San Francisco schuf Hershman eine der ersten ortsbezogenen Installationen. Auch in Performance und interaktiver Medienkunst leistete sie Pionierarbeit. Kürzlich erhielt sie den 4. DAM Digital Art Award 2010/11, den Preis des Digital Art Museum Berlin. Die Begleitschau „Seducing Time“ ist in der Kunsthalle Bremen zu sehen.

Die von Katja Riemer klar und unterhaltsam inszenierte Ausstellung gliedert sich in eine Phase vor der Computertechnik und eine nach der digitalen Revolution. Ein Selbstporträt mit Smartphone verweist eher spielerisch auf die Vertrautheit der 1941 geborenen Künstlerin mit aktuellen Medien. Die Präsentation insgesamt zeigt, wie früh, originell und komplex Lynn Hershman jeweils auf neueste technologische Möglichkeiten reagierte.
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source: libstanford

Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941) is a performance artist and filmmaker who, in various media, has investigated the idea of selfhood and what establishes an individual as a sentient, gendered, unique person. Between the years of 1974 and 1978, Hershman Leeson spent much of her time performing as an alter ego, the character Roberta Breitmore. Much of the work—drawings, photographs, clothing, medical records, letters, etc.—Hershman Leeson produced during the Breitmore years related to the character’s emotional and practical existences. Hershman Leeson seemed to be demonstrating that the two existences could and should not be easily separated—nor should the artist herself be easily separated from the character she created.

Hershman Leeson’s work in film, video, and new media has been equally focused toward exploring the ways that bodies interact and define themselves. Lorna (1983-84), described by the artist as “the first interactive video art disc,” allowed the viewer to experience the emotions of the title character while also, at key points, making important decisions for her. The viewer was both entwined with and removed from Lorna’s life.

In the 1980s and 90s, Hershman continued to focus on new media, expanding her work in video and creating online environments that incorporated artificial intelligence. Concurrently, she began to direct feature films; her first film, Conceiving Ada (1997), situated the nineteenth-century computer science innovator Ada Lovelace in juxtaposition with the twentieth-century computer reality that she helped to create.

A winner of numerous awards and honors for her contributions to art practice, Hershman Leeson is currently Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California, David, and an A.D. White Professor at large at Cornell University. !Women Art Revolution reflects years of interviews that Hershman Leeson has compiled in order to tell the story of the feminist art movement in the artists’ own words.
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source: thevillager

Art and the Feminist Revolution,” hosted by P.S. 1, Hershman Leeson is now showing a new project at bitforms gallery. The works in “Found Objects” were inspired by Edouard Manet’s notorious portrait of a prostitute entitled “Olympia” (1863). Hershman Leeson translates the painting into sculpture with the help of a custom-made, life-size doll, onto which parts of Manet’s painting are projected, exploring society’s ongoing objectification of women and the fantasies that are entailed. While Manet’s portrait shocked his contemporaries as it transformed Titian’s Venus of Urbino into a real woman, who looked straight at the viewer with an unwavering and unapologetic glance, Hershman Leeson finds new provocation in the artificiality of her subject.
Over the course of seven months, she assembled various doll parts to evoke an image that could closely resemble Manet’s painting. Taking on the famous pose of Manet’s subject, Hershman Leeson’s Olympia reclines on a chaise lounge as the projections of the painting become imprinted on her plastic skin. It is as an image that seems to imply that when it comes to women, the prejudices and restrictions of the past have not been shed. Though prostitutes might not have the same shock value today as in the 19th century, the airbrushed and omnipresent images of fashion models or celebrities is not far from the doll’s artificiality. In both cases, women resemble perfected ready-mades that can be appropriated to any desire or fantasy.

Well, my work has, for 40 years, been about projected fantasies of women and how the media treats them. With Manet, some people felt that he identified with this prostitute. The painting caused such a scandal. Now that you can buy even single body parts online, women really have become even more objectified. You can go to a store on the Internet and buy whatever you need. My Olympia took seven months, because I ordered the eyes, the nose, the skin, to make her look as close to the painting as I could. In other words, you can customize the doll according to what you want and what your fantasy is. I think that art historically, and through the media, we have been programmed to look at a version of Manet’s “Olympia” but if you look up the painting online, you get all these different versions of her. Nothing is true. It is all fiction—both the projections as well as who we are.

I am interested in the characteristics of the doll. Her perfect artificial skin, for example, relates to the artificial perfection we find in media images of women today, whether through the help of airbrushing or digital manipulation.

Exactly. It is the idea of having different skins and of the media skins we map onto ourselves.