Introduction

---

For several years now the multimedial work of Lynn Hershman has been been included within the scope of the presentation projects undertaken at the Centre for Contemporary Art. A comprehensive overview of the artist's videos was shown in 1994 at the second International Media Meetings; her interactive installation Deep Contact was presented in the following year, within the context of the International Film, Video and Computer Art Exhibition LAB5; and now, finally, the Ujazdowski Castle has the privilege of extending an invitation to a large retrospective of Lynn Hershman's works. Photographs, videotapes and interactive installations reveal the complex and multifaceted character of the artist's approach, as well as showing its coherence nad logic. As an occasion to meet an exceptional artistic personality, the exhibition offers an insight into the most recent and intriguing exploration of creative tendencies, which are now becoming increasingly important to the appearance of modern culture, and will surely contribute to the art of tomorrow. Last year Lynn Hershman was awarded the Siemens Prize for media art. In itself, this is not a fact I would mention - after all, Lynn Hershman's work has been honoured with many awards. However, the other recipient of last year's Siemens-Medienkunstpreis was Jean Baudrillard, a philosopher whose ideas constitute an extremely important part of sociological and philosophical thought on the contemporary world. It is significant that the works of these two creative people were connected in such a way; for if Jean Baudrillard is one of those who contributed most to the description and understanding of the modern art culture, Lynn Hershman's work is one of that culture's most fascinating components.

Ryszard W. Kluszczynski
Curator CSW

The ***

---

Man, of whom they speak so much and whose liberation they seek, is himself a result of a much deeper enslavement. He is inhabited and elevated to being by a "soul", which is part of the authority's rule over the body. Soul - the effect and tool of a political anatomy; soul - the body's prison.

1
The artistic activity of Lynn Hershman has started over a quarter century ago. That period was a time of constant transformation, affecting not only the structures of her works, its means of expression and technologies used, but also the art domains wherein these works were situated. However, despite these transformations, resposible for the formal and medial diversity of her art, her activity remains coherent and logical if interpreted through its problem contents and underlying attitudes. Performance art, in-place and interactive installations, photographs, videotapes - all these media, when used by Hershman, express the body's invariable and unvawering resistance to attempts of enslavement, its defiance in the face of external domination, its rebellion against all violence. (...)

2
Voyeurism is the standard model of film perception; peeping into others' lives is the standard behaviour of the moviegoer. Popular cinema has even developed a specific set of conventions - called the zero-style - to provide the viewer with the comfort of looking while being invisible. For example, this purpose was served by the rule forbidding the actor/actress to look straight into the camera lens; such a look would necessarily expose the audience engaged in its scopofiliac activity and make them also the object of observation, however imagined. (But when the cinema stopped avoiding the look into the lens, it lost no time in transforming it into another, this time more "transparent" convention). (...)

3
These limitations of film (and photography), inherited by video art, were probably the reason why Lynn Hershman, cosistently taking up in her work the question of the viewed body syndrome, had very early - at the end of the 70's - decided to add the interactive installation to the employed means of medial expression. (...)