“Lynn Hershman Leeson defies categorisation. Her artworks are sketched, photocopied, filmed, sculpted, broadcast, cut and pasted. They are encased in glass, tucked beneath blankets, animated by sound. They visit the California Department of Motor Vehicles and submit application forms for driving licences. They meet suitors for dates in San Francisco’s Union Square, wearing blonde wigs and Revlon blush. This vast and varied body of work, made from the early 1960s to the present day, seems impossible to characterise neatly. Except, that is, to say this: that women are Hershman Leeson’s medium. Not ‘woman’ merely as artistic subject, nor ‘womanhood’ as theme, but the use of women as material—their bodies, faces, identities. Women as the stuff of the art itself, whether sketched, filmed, photocopied, or filling out forms at the DMV…”
ArtForum