From Artificial Intelligence To Sex Dolls, Tech Art Innovator Lynn Hershmann Leeson Has Some Lessons For Us All

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s 1994 essay Starting From Scratch prompted feminist art critic Linda Nochlin to identify a desperation on the part of female artists to rewrite history in the wake of second wave feminism. Over her career, it’s with this same moxie that Leeson has attempted to revolutionize an art structure not built to accommodate women. Since the early 1970s she has played with appropriations of women’s bodies in art. She’s the first artist to incorporate cyborgs into her work and play with the concept of AI, decades before it became a mainstream conversation.

The performance piece Roberta Breitmore (1974-1978) saw her walk the streets of downtown New York with a mask on as a “fake woman” – an alter ego she would bring to life on and off until 1998. Over the last ten years she has used cyborgs, mannequins and sex dolls in an attempt to reverse the masculine gaze in contemporary culture. Hershman has garnered an engaged audience through her wide range of mediums, from cyborgs to plastic dolls. At last year’s Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams, Leeson was given a special mention for her “indexing the cybernetic concerns that run through the exhibitions in an illuminating and powerful way that also includes visionary moments of her early practice that foresaw the influence of technology in our everyday lives.”

Here, as conversations about artificial intelligence gain traction, she speaks about her own use of AI in art, why she’s used dolls in her work for the last twenty years, and why she decided to have a custom life size RealDolls sex doll made to mimic Édouard Manet’s Olympia.

From your early work Self Portrait as Another Person in 1965 to CybeRoberta in 1996, you’ve used dolls in your work. What led you to create a custom-made sex doll for the work Olympia?

I had the doll in Olympia (2005) made especially because the mass-made sex dolls were too amorphous, and I wanted a direct reference to a female body. I had it made to look like Manet’s Olympia. But I replaced it with the sex doll because of the fraudulent representation of what women are in art, and the notion of them as found objects, to be purchased and used.

You worked with the controversial sex doll company RealDolls. How do you interpret the RealDoll sex dolls?

The sex doll is a symbol of the commodification of women now. It was the idea of a sex doll confronting the camera that I liked, and a found object replacing a real one. I was also interested in the idea of what passes for truth in the internet age. Hence there are many versions of Olympia; Manet’s, mine and photographs people took of the piece.

You’re one of the first artists to work with cyborgs and digital appropriations of women, from Seduction of a Cyborg in 1994 to Roberta’s Construction Chart 1, 1975. How does that experience differ to using dolls in your work?

My work Transgenic Cyborg (2000) was made by digitally recomposing elements that combined animals, humans and machines. I create cyborgs with tools at hand, including programming, light box, photography or drawing. Cyborgs interest me for the same reason dolls do, because that is what we have become. The cyborgs are a continuation of the question I’m asking in Olympia, where are the true female voices? The technology underscores the point.

I had the Olympia doll custom made because the dolls they had were too amorphous, and I wanted a direct reference. I believe in the naughties and any empowerment changes identity, and I wanted to explore that with my own version of a RealDoll.