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