Lynn Hershman Leeson on ’70s performance, love triangles and her latest feature film, Teknolust.

By D-L Alvarez.

Tilda Swinton in Teknolust.

Lynn Hershman Leeson has her roots in performance and installation-based work along with many who came out of the feminist-driven art of the early 1970s. But where her colleagues were putting their own body at the center of their work, Leeson’s art tended to be about a body once removed. She created art that had herself in the center, but as a negative space, and the work focused more on the sort of clues and traces a body leaves in its wake: the marks a person leaves behind in a physical space, but also the marks that are left on us when we allow others under our skin.

One of her landmark pieces continued for over nine years, between 1970-1980, and involved Leeson taking on the appearance and personality of an invented woman named Roberta Breitmore – a woman who was very much influenced by the voices of her time. [As Leeson explains on her Web site: "Roberta Breitmore was … a private performance of a simulated person. In an era or alternatives, she became an objectified alternative personality. Roberta's first live action was to place an ad in a local newspaper advertising for a roommate. People who answered the ad became participants in her adventure. As she became part of their reality, they became part of her fiction."] Roberta was a virtual clone of Leeson that took on a life of its own – in fact, three lives. In the second year of Roberta’s life her adventures became so numerous that she grew into a multiple; Leeson ended up hiring three separate actresses to "perform" Roberta.

Years later, in Leeson’s second feature film, Teknolust (2002), a bio-geneticist has fashioned three Self-Replicating Automatons (SRAs) from her own DNA. Still, Leeson insists that her sci-fi comedy film is not (intentionally) autobiographical. The film’s scientist, Rosetta Stone, is played by Tilda Swinton, who used Leeson as a model for developing her character. Swinton also plays each of the three color-coded SRAs – Ruby (red), Olive (green), and Marinne (blue) – and manages to give them distinct personalities from their creator, and from each other.

Much of Leeson’s work has used hotel rooms as symbols of identity, and her character in the Roberta Breitmore performance did most of her dealings in hotels. The clones in Teknolust also live in impersonal hotel-like cubicles, so I asked what this type of anonymous space symbolizes to a woman who has been exploring themes of fabricated identities for over three decades.

Tilda Swinton in Teknolust.

Lynn Hershman Leeson: We leave trails, and even though we’re in an anonymous space, there’s clues that we shed as to who we are, our identity. These rooms never are completely anonymous. Once someone has occupied a hotel room, we can find out who they were by what they’ve left behind.

D-L Alvarez: That was the premise of your Dante Hotel installation in 1971.

Leeson: Right. It was a hotel room which was available for the public to visit. It was up for over a year. We left clues as to who was occupying this space and those clues changed, just as people do, with time.

Alvarez: Is it more than coincidence that the names Roberta and Rosetta are so similar?

Leeson: Roberta’s name was derived from two sources: one was a character in a Joyce Carol Oates’s story about a woman pursuing stars, and the other was from one of the early writers on alchemy. I also liked the androgynous quality of the name. Rosetta’s name was chosen in part for the Rosetta Stone and the image that evokes of deciphering three cryptic languages.

Alvarez: The location of the film, San Francisco, only becomes evident after we’re halfway through. It’s like we’re learning the world slowly, just like the clone-bots.

Leeson: Yes. We all lived there, the crew and I, so that made San Francisco a practical choice ... but also that whole area around Silicon Valley is known for the advances they’ve made in software and biotechnologies. The story came out of that environment: a place where there’s constant talk about technologies and biological pursuits –

Alvarez: – computer sciences, genetic manipulation, all prevalent themes in your works. Do you have a science background?

Leeson: My family are scientists, except me.

Alvarez: In Teknolust, you’ve placed a copy of a J.G. Ballard book on the television in Sandy’s room. Is he one of your muses?

Leeson: Oh yes. And Ballard is concerned both with high and low technologies. The character, Sandy [played by Jeremy Davies], works in what is one of the lowest reproduction centers, dealing with mimeograph machines. He’s paired with Ruby, who is the most advanced form of reproduction technology. We borrowed the name "Sandy" from silicon, so all these little clues are a part of the encryption.

Tilda Swinton in Teknolust.

Alvarez: Was the casting of Karen Black as Dirty Dick, who’s addressed exclusively with male pronouns, a reference to her portrayal of a transsexual in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean?

Leeson: Yes, that was her idea. We were talking about aspects of the whole virtual world phenomenon, and Karen felt that it related to things she had discovered while doing research for her role in Jimmy Dean – taking charge of one’s own reality–and she wanted to bring some of that to this film.

Alvarez: How did you first come to start working with Karen?

Leeson: She called me. She read the script of my last film and started calling me. I had never met her before and certainly wouldn’t have thought of Karen Black as Lady Millbank, [mother to mathematician, Ada Byron King in Leeson’s first feature, Conceiving Ada]. But she’s an amazing woman; she invented the parts herself, in both films.

Alvarez: You had been thinking about directing Frankenstein just before moving over to Teknolust. Did the making of this film satisfy your desire to tackle that classic story?

Leeson: Actually we’re still looking at the possibility of doing Frankenstein. It’ll be different of course ... a different story from the Frankenstein you know, and different from Teknolust. It will be the memoirs of Elizabeth, Victor Frankenstein’s fiancée. It’s a love triangle between the creature,Victor and Elizabeth.

Alvarez: Do you see yourself moving over more full time into feature filmmaking?

Leeson: My art still gets equal time. I had a show in Rotterdam recently of a new installation, Synthia (2002), an interactive computer piece which works in real time with the Stock Exchange. When the market goes up the character Synthia goes shopping; when it goes down, she chain smokes. If the market is very low, she turns to water and becomes depressed. Her pet bull morphs into a bear [laughs]. Also, connected with the film there’s an interactive Web site, an artificial intelligence Web agency headed by Agent Ruby (which mirrors the Web site that the clone, Ruby, runs in Teknolust).

Alvarez: You say you relate most closely to Rosetta in the film, who is clearly the Dr. Frankenstein in this story –

Leeson: – and the mother.

Alvarez: Do you ever fear that one of your creations will turn against you?

Leeson: They do, all the time ... especially my daughter [laughs]. Yeah, they’re never easy. Even with Teknolust, or Synthia, they end up taking on their own life, and I have to serve them; they become the master.

Teknolust will be released by THINKFilm in San Francisco on August 22.

Links:

http://www.lynnhershman.com

http://www.teknolustthemovie.com

http://www.lynnhershman.com/synthia

http://www.agentruby.com

http://webs.lanset.com/

http://www.filmthreat.com/Interviews.asp?Id=48

http://www.thinkfilmcompany.com