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

Double Talk: The Counterstory of Lynn Hershman

DOUBLE TALK: THE COUNTERSTORY OF LYNN HERSHMAN 201 MEREDITH TROMBLE Once Lynn Hershman hit upon her story, she stuck to it—the story of a body with more minds than it knows what to do with or of a mind manifesting through several bodies. Time after time, her tale of multiplicity unfolds, resolves, and concludes, only to return in a new form with the next wave of work. The tributary themes of her work—memory, voyeurism, surveillance, seduction, and authenticity—flow from the condition of multiplicity. How can one remember if there is no “one”? What are the boundaries of a “self” and how are contacts between “selves” negotiated? What does “truth” mean when “realities” proliferate? (“I always told the truth,” she whispers in First Person Plural [1988], “for the person I was.”) A random sampling of Hershman’s work shows the persistence and evolution of her major theme. In 1968 she assumed the pseudonyms Prudence Juris, Herbert Goode, and Gay Abandon to write about her own work; in retrospect, the creation of these personalities seems more fundamental to her oeuvre than the work they reviewed. By 1978 Hershman was near the climax of the persona performance Roberta Breitmore. In the later 1980s she was making Deep Contact, an interactive videodisc that incorporates the viewer as one of the minds governing the body in the narrative. By 1998 she was doubling museum visitors with Internet avatars as part of The Difference Engine #3. Hershman’s roster of media includes wax casting, installation, performance, photography, video, film, and interactive media. Through all the years and all the forms, her story of multiplicity multiplies. It’s told with varying degrees of resolution; it’s told as fiction and as fact; it’s told as the story of a victim and as the story of a victor; it’s told as the story of an individual and as the story of society. As Hershman says in First Person Plural, “All these stories are related.” DOUBLE DEALING: THE COUNTERSTORY Art is my survival weapon. It has allowed me to transcend the presumptions of my destiny. —LYNN HERSHMAN It’s no ordinary story, this story that is not used up but loops endlessly through variations. It’s a narrative that philosopher Hilde Lindemann Nelson calls a “counterstory”: “a story that resists an oppressive identity and attempts to replace it with one that commands respect.”1 “Identity,” for Nelson, is the interaction of a person’s self-conception with how others conceive her, a “complex narrative construction consisting of a fluid interaction of the many stories and fragments of stories surrounding the things that seem most important, from one’s own point of view and the point of view of others, about a person over time.”2 Because identity is social, a “fluid interaction” between self and others, it involves multiple perspectives.3 Some of those inputs may impede an individual’s ability to act on and express her own view of who she is. Nelson points out that in the course of normal social life, people assign qualities to others based on the groups to which they belong (“Americans are independent,” for example). When these assumptions are based on harmful stereotypes of a group (“black men are sexually predatory toward white women”) and restrict individual freedom , they become oppressive—damaging to the individual’s identity. But because identity is a narrative, there is the potential to “repair” the damaged identity by telling new versions of the story to oneself and to others—“counterstories.” “My destiny as a child was not to be a survivor,” says Hershman.4 Finding a counterstory was a matter of life and death, but it was no simple matter. To be effective, says Nelson, a counterstory must “aim to alter the oppressors’ perception of the group . . . and, when necessary , an oppressed person’s perception of herself.”5 Over a period of years, Hershman assembled a workable counterstory, one that challenged the oppression of women and restored the sense of self-worth that had been shattered in her childhood. Through her art, she ampli fied it into socially resonant metaphors. In this process, she challenged the conventional narrativeof theunitaryself strugglingtowardself-knowledge(Bildungsroman).Resistingsocial and aesthetic pressures to conform to a singular identity, she gave form to an alternative conception of the self as multiple. Meredith Tromble 202 Double Talk 203 DOUBLE DARE: CHALLENGING OTHERS’ PERCEPTIONS We started doing performance because...