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University of California Press

The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson

Secret Agents, Private I

by Meredith Tromble (Editor), Lynn Hershman (Editor), Robin Held (Foreword by), Kyle Stephan (Contribution by), Howard Fox (Introduction by), Amelia Jones (Contribution by), Steve Dietz (Contribution by), Jean Gagnon (Contribution by), Glenn Kurtz (Contribution by), David James (Contribution by), B. Ruby Rich (Contribution by), Abigail Solomon-Godeau (Contribution by)
Price: $33.95 / £29.00
Publication Date: Dec 2005
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780520420861
Trim Size: 7 x 8.5
Illustrations: 17 color illustrations, 82 b/w photographs, 1 DVD

About the Book

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

About the Author

Lynn Hershman Leeson is Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Davis, A.D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University, and editor of Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture (1996). Meredith Tromble is visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute and editor in chief of Art Contemporaries. Robin Held, currently Chief Curator at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, is the curator of Hershmanlandia: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson, a retrospective of Lynn Hershman Leeson's work.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Introduction

Private I: An Investigator’s Timeline
Roberta Breitmore Lives On
Composing with Images: Lynn Hershman’s Photography
Conscientious Objectification: Lynn Hershman’s Paranoid Mirror
Media Phantasmagoria
Lynn Hershman: The Subject of Autobiography
My Other, My Self: Lynn Hershman and the Reinvention of the Golem
A Cinema of Intelligent Agents: Lynn Hershman’s Conceiving Ada and Teknolust
Romancing the Anti-body: Lust and Longing in (Cyber)space
Animating the Network
Double Talk: The Counterstory of Lynn Hershman

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Illustrations
Index

Reviews

"Lynn Hershman is regarded as the most influential female artist of new media."—Rudolph Freiling, Curator, Media Art, ZKM Mediammuseum

"Lynn Hershman Leeson's universe is the super-radical and unstoppably empowered kindergarten of all our wildest dreams: where no limit exists to our optimism and our curiosity, where even our intellects can bask in glee and play. Working alongside her is one of the true delights of my life. She makes my cells rejoice. I love her with a will."—Tilda Swinton

"Lynn Hershman applies her wise intelligence, inspired humor, and good emotional sense to life in our cyber-environment. Her recent film Teknolust is a humanist's guide to real technological opportunities that we nevertheless barely imagine-it's just one channel of the fantastic course tracked by The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson."—Richard Shiff, Director, Center for the Study of Modernism, The University of Texas at Austin

"As the first sustained critical exploration of Lynn Hershman's artistic practice, this anthology offers a rich context for understanding the artist's pioneering works. The world that Hershman has created through her art is populated by doubles and clones, tele-robots, and artificial intelligences living on the Internet-all of them engaged in the possibilities of constructing identity. The interwoven narratives forming the matrix of Hershman's work are unraveled here in lucid and engaging essays that provide an in-depth reading of her projects and trace their influence in the fields of visual arts and pop culture."—Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art

"Lynn Hershman is simply one of the most brilliant and original artist-filmmakers in the world today."—Eleanor Coppola, Artist/Filmmaker

"You've been my best model of courageous living."—Sheldon Renan, Founder, Pacific Film Archive, UC Berkeley

"With brilliant, imaginative fluidity, Lynn Hershman moves between many worlds and mediums—between fact and fiction, between past, present and future times, and between live performance, writing, video, film and cyberspace."—Moira Roth, Trefethen Professor of Art History, Mills College