The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I

My Other, My Self: Lynn Hershman and the Reinvention of the Golem

MY OTHER, MY SELF: LYNN HERSHMAN AND THE REINVENTION OF THE GOLEM 159 B. RUBY RICH Atfirstglance,itwouldappearthatthe1970sfeministartworldhasbeentheanimatinginfluence for Lynn Hershman’s oeuvre of performance work, video art, and feature films. After all, that influence is inscribed in such recurring details as her heroic female protagonists, the alwaysevident female mastery of technology, her use of confession as a central cathartic trope, and her insistence on airing the personal ill for the public good. But that would be an insufficient précis. Equally present are the effects and aftereffects of male figureheads and compatriots such as Timothy Leary, John Perry Barlow, and Josh Kornbluth. Female foremothers appear, too, in fictionalized form, as instanced by the rescue mission on behalf of Ada, Countess of Lovelace, in Conceiving Ada (1997). For Hershman, the right to knowledge is an ever-present theme and truth telling a constant modus operandi, before which such barriers as gender, geography , and epoch melt away. Finally, hidden beneath these tropes a wisdom specific to Judaic traditions hovers, awaiting detection. Hershman has traced a path—from medium to medium and genre to genre—of admirable consistency, one set to fixed compass points. The talking cure, that famous Freudian device for dealing with trauma, is often present, whether it takes the form of Hershman talking to the camera in The Electronic Diaries series (1986–), or of Rosetta confessing to Dirty Dick in Teknolust (2002). Equally present, though, is another cure: the geographic one. This also happens to be the favored mode, after twelve-step programs, for dealing with addiction: move somewhere else, get parachuted into a recovery program in Omaha or some other heartland, justgetthehelloutof theoldneighborhood.It’sthesameprocessbywhichartistshavelanded, for so long and so routinely, in certain identifiable metropolises far from home. Hershman’s work has followed the rules of both routes to detoxification, the emotional/spiritual and the geographical: she tells secrets to give voice to what’s happened and she travels as far as the highway or camera or special effects can take her—away from here, away from there, out of harm’s way. That she did so in life has made her a survivor; that she figured out what to do with that survival, and how to transform it, has made her an artist. Her epic video work First Person Plural: The Electronic Diaries 1986–1996 bears witness to what she escaped.1 Hershman has confessed that she didn’t even necessarily know what she had said on the tapes until she sat down to edit them. They were an electronic corollary to the automatic writing practiced by the Surrealists, bushwhacking a direct route from the subconscious into the light of day, to the page or, in this case, the screen. We hear the words, spoken privately to herself but recorded and transported into our presence, into the very room where we sit with the monitor, just as the artist once sat with the camera. First Person Plural is a violation of a number of social pacts, all of them worth breaking. First and foremost, it’s a violation of the inherited pact of the family. (“Don’t tell, don’t tell,” whispers an unseen speaker. “Don’t air your dirty laundry.”) It’s also a violation of the forced pact between victim and victimizer. (“Don’t tell, don’t tell,” continues the voice-over. “Don’t tell your mother, your teacher, your friend.”) But it is also a violation of the “Holocaust pact,” which dictates, in the post-Holocaust era, that all Jews are victims and inhabit the terrain of victimhood. (Never mind that Israel has become one of the most bloodthirsty nations, acting out at the national level the same abused-becoming-abuser pattern that is so well known at the level of individual pathology.) Subscribers to this pact embrace victimhood, a state of being , rather than referring to specific, historic acts of victimization. Victimhood is defined by stasis. It allows no movement or action, just the assertion of injury . This assertion never leads to the kind of cathartic outcome that the talking cure, for example ,mayproduce.There’snoexorcismorresolution,justmoreassertionsof damage,more writings, more films, more videos, more monuments. But if every Jew is a victim, who are the perpetrators now that Nazis are in shorter supply? In First Person Plural Hershman shattered the victim myth of her “nice, respectable, middle-class Jewish family” by...