The Brooklyn Rail

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Private I: A Memoir is one of those memoirs you can’t put down—every page feels like you’re sitting in the room with Lynn, listening as she unravels her most personal challenges as a female artist coming up during the sixties and seventies. She lets you in while setting the record straight. Not surprising for an artist whose best known works are a collection of confessional videos called The Electronic Diaries (1984–ongoing), which we learn in the book were started as a form of self analysis when she could no longer afford therapy due to long periods of poverty while struggling as a single mother. As visionary as Lynn’s work has been in examining culture and technology, her work has always been grounded in the personal.

I first met Lynn in San Francisco during the early nineties when I performed in two of her films—Virtual Love (1993) a story about mediated intimacy and Twists in the Cord (or) Other Extensions of the Telephone (1994), a hybrid docu-fiction about the history of the telephone. These prescient, experimental features were the warm up to what would later become Lynn’s most well-known films Conceiving Ada (1997) and Teknolust (2003) both starring Tilda Swinton. Memoirs can be slippery, often falling between the real and imagined. And Lynn’s practice has always played in this space. But in Private I, she is firm to structure the story, and recount her personal history through actions, not emotions, revealing who was there, who did what, and who got left out of history. As the memoir traces her lifelong devotion to experimentation with technology and the self, it sharpens her ever-more-timely warnings of technology’s power to surveil. In Private I, Lynn tells us what it’s like to have the art world catch up to her after all these years.

Michelle Handelman (Rail): Let’s start at the beginning. You’ve been using your life as material in one form or another ever since you started making art, so it’s not surprising to see you address your work in the memoir form, but what exactly prompted you to start writing your memoir now?

Lynn Hershman Leeson: For most of my early life, I had very little acknowledgement that I was an artist. It was a point of contention. A great many relevant parts of my life that directly influenced the art I made were absent from the few stories that were being written about my work. When the pandemic happened and I wasn’t able to travel for my work I found that, almost without premeditated thought, I began to write what had really happened, and what caused certain aspects of my life to be reflected in the work I found important to do. Being grounded by the pandemic was a remarkable gift.

Rail: Did you have a specific writing routine or ritual that helped you to focus, like lighting a candle or making a cup of tea? And when did you reach a point when you knew it was done?

Leeson: It was about three years of daily writing before I felt this phase of the writing could be shared but honestly, I do not think it is ever done. I would work first thing in the morning after a walk, so I would say 8am–1pm, after that I am a bit depleted. No candles, but a cappuccino helps!

Rail: The title of the book, Private I, brings up all sorts of references to your life and work. The privateness of your inner world, starting with little child Lynn who didn’t speak until the age of seven, to your Roberta Breitmore project, a fabricated persona who had her own identity and checking account, and often hired an actual private eye to follow her. There’s the private “I,” things we keep private to ourselves, and then the private “eye,” someone who reveals private things about others, to others. How does this dichotomy of private vs. public manifest in your life and work, and how does it connect to the title of your book?

Leeson: This dichotomy is something I find very intriguing. The “I” and the “eye” are witnesses and interpret how what they privately see and/or experience is translated and presented to a broader public. I think we often keep the most meaningful parts of ourselves within our “I” quiet, but I felt many of these often hushed up or disregarded elements of our experience are key to who/what we become and how we manifest that.

We live in an era of surveillance of many types and privacy that was known by my grandparents no longer exists. There has not been “real” privacy for half a century because so much of our lives are captured by cameras and the internet. So the title is a non sequitur!—a literary device that creates absurd or humorous effects by breaking any logical connections between the words. But also, I feel that these two words are a reflection of how, over time, identity is formed. It impacts how our relationship to ourselves is created, and then to how that is manifested in the choices one makes.

Rail: You begin the book by talking about all the friends you’ve lost, and ask the question, “What do we survive for?” It’s quite introspective and I imagine you felt quite vulnerable swimming through your past—a past touched by violence, sexual abuse, childhood trauma, yet also supported by dear friends, family, and other women artists. What were the hardest aspects of writing this book, and what was the guiding force in deciding what to keep in, what to keep out?

Leeson: Perhaps the hardest part was just starting, then confronting my past and the choices I had made, and understanding that from this point in time, looking back and realizing what my life was actually like. I wanted to be honest but not maudlin, entertaining but not superficial. Those were among the things that guided my decisions.

Rail: Were their revelatory moments where remembering something allowed you to understand your present more concretely?

Leeson: Probably everything in it.

Rail: Were there eras that were more difficult to contain on the page than others?

Leeson: Yes! Teenage years and divorce. My teenage years were filled with sexual and physical trauma and there is a good reason why so much of it was repressed or denied and could only be accessed by prolonged meditations. At the time I felt it was critical to deny the abuse publicly so I even denied it to myself. It was only after intensive therapy that the memories returned. I also did not take responsibility for my divorce. I was to a large degree, to blame, and I never admitted how I was the one that caused it. My husband just left and I was startled and traumatized at what that meant, and horrified about how I could even live on my own with my daughter, who I fought to keep. I had no idea how to be independent. None. I had relied on my husband for everything and never held a job.

Rail: Even though I’ve known you since the early 1990s, reading this book has been a revelation. I didn’t know how deeply involved you were in Christo’s Running Fence (1976), nor had ever heard about The Floating Museum (1974-1978), your project which produced exhibitions in public spaces with nearly 350 artists, including prisoners at San Quentin. When I was an art student at SFAI, none of my teachers were talking about your work, even though it’s clear you were one of the most active artists in the Bay Area! I think one of the most important things about this memoir is how it represents your struggle— and the struggle of all women artists from the feminist movement— working in relative obscurity even though they were working all of the time.

Leeson: Yes! It is still a constant struggle to be credited for what I accomplished, as my work was largely disregarded for fifty-four years. Part of it was because I was friends with Eleanor Coppola, part was because I was married and lived in an expensive neighborhood. I did not fit the typical profile of what constituted being an artist, and because I defied that, I was made invisible to the Bay Area community. It was easier to show work in Germany or other parts of Europe.

Rail: Do you think this lack of attention to your work was specific to the Bay Area?

Leeson: Eleanor Coppola and I commiserated about this a lot. Neither of us were ever taken seriously. Our work was disregarded and we were not included in any art events. We were making work about our lives, using technology and public installation to question women’s roles in society, in culture, in the 20th century. Yet I was constantly being told by curators and gallerists that my work “wasn’t art.” The work was completely dismissed.

Rail: How did it feel to be told that your work is not art?

Leeson: It made me more determined to do it! Somehow I had the confidence to know they were wrong and hoped to prove them wrong by continuing to do the work. It took me fifty-three years to prove them wrong publicly, which didn’t happen until my retrospective at the ZKM Center for Art and Media show in 2007. That exhibition brought me public and critical attention and, in fact, critics were rather astounded that they did not know about me or my work and that so many others were credited with the work I pioneered.

Rail: So how did silent little 7-year old Lynn find her voice and become so determined after experiencing years of rejection?

Leeson: I realized that there were only two options, which were to continue doing work only I could do, or become a slave to the expectations of everyone around me. I chose the former.

Rail: Do you think anything’s changed for women artists?

Leeson: Not much and most certainly not enough

Rail: This book, and your recent addition to the Electronic Diaries Series About Time (2025), both talk about time and presence, loss and hope, and I would also say, how technology functions as a tool of its era, not a panacea for the future. Obviously you’ve thought a lot about the effects of technology on women, on communities, on the greater society. Now that we’re living under surveillance capitalism where every aspect of our lives is mined for corporate data, we’re experiencing a global loss of privacy and agency. Do you think there’s anything to be gained from this loss of privacy?

Leeson: The threat of losing privacy makes us aware of how precious it is. I believe we continue to encrypt and mask deep elements of our lives in order to make them non-public, nearly invisible, non-transmutable, and perhaps even more private. I do not think people now even realize what privacy once was. We lost it several decades ago. Now, nearly everything can become accessible even with encryption.

Rail: What are some of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned from all the scientists you’ve worked with?

Leeson: I have learned how linked the process of science and art are both about discovery and risk. I consider most scientists that I’ve interviewed to be artists who use a different form than we are accustomed to in the art world, they are constantly seeking or inventing new languages to convey the discoveries of their era.

Rail: Looking back over your life while writing this book, what surprised you the most?

Leeson: I was surprised by how much I chose to sacrifice in order to continue what I felt was the most relevant aspect of what only I could do— making my art.

Rail: Now that this is out in the world, how do you write your next chapter?

Leeson: By living it. By living the rest of my life without constraints or expectations, or fears about not being able to afford the time or the price, or guilt when discovering insights that will prevail in the future.