Simulation

Images from Lynn Hershman Leeson's Roberta Breitmore, (1971-1978) Performance in real life, using real materials, experience and real time San Francisco, San Diego, Italy.

Besides bending reality to create ROBERTA BREITMORE, Hershman has more significantly demolished the barriers separating theater, literature, painting, photography and conceptualism. This collage technique is not unlike filmmaker Robert Altman's multiple character/multiple viewpoint treatment in nashville. Hershman rents a room, uses the mails and classified ads as they are ordinarily used. This creative demolition may be the most promising movement in the arts today
Robert Atkins, Bay Guardian, October 13, 1978

ROBERTA BREITMORE was, for 9 years a private performance of a simulated person. In an era or alternatives, she became an objectified alternative personality. Roberta's first live action was to place an ad in a local newspaper advertising for a roommate. People who answered the ad became participants in her adventure . As she became part of their reality, they became part of her fiction.

Forms of Documentation: artifacts, diaries, surveillance photos, ads, handwriting analysis, credit, letters, psychiatric reports.

from the artists website

A Haunting

Stills from Maya Deren's 1943 film, Meshes of the Afternoon.

Masquerade

William Klein's 1966 film Who Are You Polly Magoo? is a brilliant and scathing look at fashion, media, and identity. The film opens with an avant-garde fashion show featuring dangerously sharp, sheet metal haute coture. One model shrieks "I'm wounded" as she is sliced open by her rigid costume. The designer, who is lauded for "recreating woman" doesn't flinch as he orders assistants to cover her cut with pancake makeup. The women in the film are interchangeable props engaged in a skin-game of continuous masquerade. 

Supermodel, Polly Magoo is singled out by a TV crew shooting a reality documentary series called "Who Are You?" The mostly male production team dictates and directs a story which portrays Polly as a vapid Cinderella, despite their claims to want a "self-portrait." The main interviewer Grégoire Pecque, probes and prods Polly through a battery of psychological tests and diagnoses her as both frigid and narcissistic. She is manipulated by the crew as well as the designers and photographers who want to shape her image. She is a creation of male fantasy and the director of the TV show even doubts her existence.

In her own defense, Polly says " You want to know who I am. Sometimes I wonder. They take my picture every day and every way. They've taken millions of pictures, and every time they take one there's a little less of me left. So what'll I have left when they're done?"