Lynn Hershman Leeson

Why Grow? In Praise of Quiet Influence
Category
Article
Date
Nov 2, 2017
Source
The Brooklyn Rail
Author
Anne Walsh
Excerpt

The work of friends and teachers like Lari Pittman, Liz Larner, Billy Woodberry, Thom Andersen, or Cathy Opie had helped me to see where I was. Others, among them Mary Kelly, Mike Kelley, Catherine Lord, Allan Sekula, and Monica Majoli fed my attraction to violently close observation, to abjectly humorous truth-telling. The Bay Area art scene I could grasp seemed to me overly invested in its own local heroes, and prone to valorizing pretty, design-y, technophilic or conceptually lite art practices. I didn’t know jack! But people whose work I admired had chosen to live here, to stay here even if, maybe even because San Francisco was (and still is) a provincial city. B. Ruby Rich, Anna Halprin, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Vincent Fecteau, Trinh Minh-ha, Dodie Bellamy, Kaja Silverman, Kevin Killian, Pamela Lee, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Larry Sultan, Moira Roth, Pauline Oliveros, Bill Berkson, and Connie Lewallen are some of those people…

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