Playing Oneself

John Haber
in New York City

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Wong Ping, and Ed Atkins

Lynn Hershman Leeson has spent a lifetime playing others. Can she have found at last her true self?

Or was her art all along, like an early video, A Commercial for Myself? In playing others, was also playing herself. She came to prominence in the 1970s, as Roberta Breitmore, and people looked forward to her alter ego the way fans of painting looked forward to an artist's signature expression. As the first in a suite of shows at the New Museum, she asks where invention or technology leaves off and the body or identity begins. Her idea of technology has received a sharp update at that. In the most recent of her Electronic Diaries, she chronicles her attempts to archive her DNA, so that she can multiply herself that much more.

Wong Ping was coping as best he could with mass protests against a repressive regime and their aftermath when something strange happened: his nose began to grow. Not his exactly, but his animations are filled with stand-ins. They speak to life under pressure from mainland China and for others in Hong Kong unable or unwilling to leave. They also speak to strategies for coping that sound an awful lot like computer-driven animation—in his words, "transform and adapt." Like a chastened Pinocchio, he can only refuse to lie.

They could be the most fearsome words in the language: call your mother. Not that Ed Atkins has a particularly bad relationship with his mother, although he sure seems to have dreaded the call. Not that he seems to have been all that afraid either for her well-being or for his, although she had cone down with Covid-19. Nor did his concern prevent him from taping the call, for the purposes of his art. It has become the digital centerpiece of "Get Life/Love's Work."

Multiple seductions

I first encountered Lynn Hershman Leeson (then Lynn Hershman) in 2004—not in life, but in digital media. Her avatar faced front with hair in bangs, an utter blandness, and a determination to see and to be seen. She was nearing the end of a project, "Seduction of a Cyborg," challenging notions of the female body and who is seducing whom. Already in the 1960s, titles spoke of robots and cyborgs, but the work itself was low tech. Wax casts and wigs got along with clumsy drawings—of a bag lady, an "x-ray woman," and a "burning" or "disappearing heart." And then came her decade-long performance as Roberta.

She documented every minute, and the documentation matters as much as the performance. Her retrospective, "Twisted," has Roberta's glasses, driver's license, checkbook, and psychiatric profile. In the early 1990s, Roberta was still receiving birthday greetings from present and former presidents. As her cast expanded, she placed ads for Lynn and Roberta "multiples," turning an art opening into a look-alike contest. The comedy has a parallel in Lorraine O'Grady, who crashed museums as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. While O'Grady was demanding a place for blackness, Hershman Leeson was throwing identity to the winds.

She was demanding a feminist revolution all the same. Did that demand something more serious and embodied? Maybe so, but she embodied herself as a revolution in new media, as cyborgs. In the photographs of "Twisted Limbs," they merge with the camera body. Compared to mid-century self-portraits by women photographers, the Surrealism is cheap and unconvincing, but that may be the point. She was taking people in, but she invited others in on the game.

Soon enough, she got a boost from technology—and, I suspect, inspiration from such pioneers of multichannel video as Mary Lucier. With a series of "Water Women" and, more recently, "Twisted Gravity," she appears in digital prints and etched in plastic. She stands facing forward, palms out and arms at her side, denuded by x-rays or thermographs. A row of light boxes makes a haunting impression in red and violet light. She intends the water women to protest toxic waters, but their politics seems incidental. Pollution is just one more threat to the body and identity.

Is it too late to recover either one? Hershman Leeson calls recent prints Evidence of Missing Children and Evidence of Missing Persons. Maybe age makes her more concerned for what she has missed and what she has left behind, but digital manipulation gives way to DNA manipulation. She imagines implanting her DNA into other bodies. She obtains antibodies from it as well—and stores her traces behind locked laboratory doors. Scientists assure her that the antibodies are quite effective, although that was before Covid-19.

As art, the diaries look as flat and literal as they sound. Still, they bring Hershman Leeson back to her beginnings in direct records of her obsessions and her pain—back then, in wax impressions of her flesh. She also recovers her compulsive habits as an artist. In real labs, this technology holds out hopes of regenerating damaged flesh and organs, and she interviews one scientist after another. More than a hundred small photos look back to Roberta's Identity Face Stamps, but labeled and in living color. They lack the comic focus of her early performance art, but their multiplicity wins out.

He cannot tell a lie

Wong Ping could stand for everything wrong with the contemporary scene. He reduces Asian art to animations, in the predictable style of cartoons. When he takes to paint, for an entrance mural, his glib settings and arbitrary compositions stand out all the more. He brings excessive good cheer to sex and violence. Still, he comes as close as anyone to computer-generated art and a computer-generated identity. Then, too, when it comes to artistic freedom in the face of tyranny, he cannot tell a lie.

Unless, that is, he is lying all the time. Artists are always telling stories, and that can be a political necessity, too. He titles his show "Your Silent Neighbor," after his latest video, and the only alternative in Hong Kong may be silence. Yet his videos, too, have sound, from a narrator who just cannot shut up, amid the cartoon colors of a child's temper tantrum. No doubt, he admits, someone with a nose that heightens the aromas of his favorite foods "should be having a good life," but forget it. "I want to be melancholic to my heart's content."

An Emo Nose and another video, both from 2015, have alcoves to either side, while more recent work plays out in a central room. Their subjects have grown darker, like the tale of a sex worker. If that were not an obvious enough metaphor for government restraints, her clients are police. In another, a man deals with his failures in online dating and his responsibility for giving birth to a son. He seems to remember only such sordid details as "her vagina wrapping my enormous fist." In Fables, chickens, elephants, and a "revolutionary cow" have to learn some serious human lessons.

Do they seem more relevant than ever, as China cracks down? From the start, though, Wong was making excuses for his fears. He did so in "Songs for Sabotage," the 2018 New Museum Triennial of emerging artists, and he did so again among the contemporary Chinese artists in "One Hand Clapping" at the Guggenheim that same year, well before "Mirror Image" at Asia Society. And he is still making excuses, like so much cartoon art, past age thirty-five. In The Other Side, he cannot so much as "leave the safety of the womb." If he does, maybe he can take his mother's air with him—or maybe, like many a refugee, he cannot leave what he has breathed behind. The New Museum sees his plight, too, in terms of the intersection between technology, the body, and the self.

The central room has screens for each video, but they play just one at a time. For those without the patience, let me offer a spoiler: Wong can never resist a happy ending, ironic or not. The sex worker is only making up for her husband's impotence, and he gets the pleasure of a peeping Tom. The online dater looks forward to his son's "passionate kiss," and the animals learn their lessons. An Emo Nose promises to reject Disney's Pinocchio in favor of the fable's raw original, but do not believe that for one second.

A collaboration in the lobby is sunny, too. In fact, it is "This End the Sun." A video by Jordan Strafer compresses the earth's yearly orbit around the sun into a single day at the beach, while Maryam Hoseini brings sky blue to her interiors, with the diagonals of shaped canvas in place of fencing or linear perspective. Rindon Johnson finds an affordable substitute for diamonds in quartz crystals. Like the other shows, it comes with weighty questions about humanity and technology—questions on the lobby wall about confronting reality and reality itself. Still, for all the clichés, one can enjoy the coastal breeze in a doll's dress or the eternal blue.

Call your mom

What is left for art after Covid-19? For some, its future lies in virtual galleries, virtual art fairs, and virtual exhibitions—if only for real photographs of lost lives and neighborhoods shut down. And virtually everything for Ed Atkins is virtual, including maternal affection. An "information panel" speaks of "apophatic love," or love by indirection and innuendo, as in "I shall not speak of love." His mother's voice has become a raspy subtext to him on camera, often mouthing the very same words. He seems most afraid of no longer knowing who is speaking or whether anyone can hear.

The show is just one of four at the museum concerned with what is left of the human in the face of technology, but the most single-minded of all. A "language prediction model," GPT-3, has produced the text panels, in conjunction with an "anonymous author project," Contemporary Art Writing Daily. You will not be reassured to hear that the entire show is a collaboration with Nokia Bell. (Your fears may have more to do with corporate intrusions into art, but still.) I hesitate to call the video computer-generated art, too, although Atkins does not. "Facial-capture technology" has captured him—and inserted his face in place of a model's.

The result is so high res that you may have trouble believing what technology can do, but the video would be spooky enough regardless. The person (whoever he is), dressed in a black suit and tie, sits in a plain Breuer chair looking anything but relaxed. Cut off from the rest of his reality, he might be under interrogation. He does his best to reassure himself with a cigarette and a stiff drink on the small table beside him. When the camera closes in, the smoke takes on an ominous life of its own.

He may fear or welcome the encounters, but he must fear even more the silence. He calls the video Worm, like software that might reduce it at any moment to the blue screen of death. It projects onto the interior of a box of light wood, which presents a barrier to those coming off the elevator. As the worm turns, it leaves a larger and entirely empty chamber on the other side. Surrounding the video, crumpled linens could be abstract art reduced to silence. You will just have to take his word that some are embroidered with his father's words.

The English artist still has his mother, but he lost his father to cancer. Can art and AI make up for loss? The show's title comes from Dennis Potter, the creator of cult British TV, and Gillian Rose—a British philosopher who launched into the stars of postmodern philosophy in the name of truth. Still, Atkins is about as postmodern as they come. He took over a three-floor gallery in 2019 for the comforts of home, like clothing and food, but mothballed and left to decay. Is it a coincidence that Thomas Pynchon, the postmodern novelist, made entropy his favorite word?

Still, I am not writing off human intelligence any time soon. Human handlers have fed this AI on a diet of Antonin Artaud, of Theatre of Cruelty fame, and tendentious philosophy. Another panel makes god, human, theatricality, and fantasy the poles for pairings that produce realism, naturalism, illusionism, and idealism. Is it any wonder that "we could no longer write love poems"? Now if only one could set all this aside, for that moment when a man fears for someone more vulnerable, knowing that he can never forget his risks and his isolation. Call your mother.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Wong Ping, and Ed Atkins ran at the New Museum through October 3, 2021.