Lynn Hershman Leeson: Drawing Breath | Art21 "Extended Play"

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]

Drawing for me is a sort of meditation.

I think everything begins and ends with the drawing.

Whenever I do a project, I draw it out.

So, it's kind of a basic language,

and then I do some things in between.

It's all about collaging.

A lot of what I do as being an artist

is creating a voice for myself

because I didn't have one for so long.

In 1965, I got pregnant.

In the fifth month of my pregnancy,

I was having trouble breathing

and came down with a heart condition
called cardiomyopathy.

I went into heart failure.

I was under an oxygen tent
during that pregnancy,

in a hospital.

I was unable to walk

or to do anything for many, many months.

When you are experiencing
the threat of death,

you become so aware of time.

That's really a gift,

to become so sick early in my life.

It made you value the time you had

and the fact that you
can't really waste time.

Because so much of my illness
depended on breathing,

I added the sound as it was getting better

to a couple of my wax sculptures.

[PLAYBACK OF RECORDED BREATHING SOUNDS]

[VOICE FROM CASSETTE PLAYER]
--Oh, there you are.

--I've been waiting for you all day.

--I'm so glad that you've come to see me.

--What's your name?

I took a night class at UCLA

on how you cast wax.

Since I didn't have anybody else around,
I cast my face

and made the wax cast from myself.

When you're so isolated, you hear more.

[RECORDED BREATHING SOUNDS]

After my breath itself, I added
interaction and dialogue.

To me, it was sort of like a drawing.

It was sound that extended into space.

So that became part of the work.

In the seventies,

women artists were just becoming aware of
how they were made invisible.

The early challenges were getting somebody
to show my work,

and nobody would.

Eventually,

the University of California at Berkeley
invited three women to have exhibitions

and I was one of them.

But they wanted to show only my drawings.

I think they thought
that drawings were safe

and good draftsmanship and all of that.

But along with that,

I put in a couple of my wax sculptures
that talked.

Within two days,

the museum closed the show.

They said, "Media isn't art."

"Sound isn't art."

And they completely closed
the exhibition down.

Being rejected and being made invisible by
the museum system

was really the best thing
that happened to me.

The cultural experience of
having your voice suppressed

has made speech, and talking,

and having a voice,

really important in what I do.