Lynn Hershman Leeson & Eileen Myles The Double

In a 1978 film called Lynn Turning into Roberta, the artist Lynn Hershman Leeson applies makeup to her face, sets a wig on her head, and gradually eases into the role of her fictitious persona and multiyear performance piece Roberta Breitmore (1972–79). Roberta rode buses around San Francisco, went to a psychiatrist, and had her own credit card. “Several times I left my house as Roberta, forgot something, and had to return in Roberta costume and makeup,” Hershman Leeson recalled of the years she spent enacting her alternate self, “which was a continual annoyance to my then eleven-year-old daughter.”

To say that Hershman Leeson was ahead of her time would be an understatement. A pioneer in performance, video, and multimedia art who throughout her life has probed the connections between technology and society, she recently converted her collected works into synthetic DNA. As early as 1980, in an interview with Nam June Paik, Hershman Leeson asked, “How long will it be before ordinary people supersede movie stars, and intercommunicative TV and computers supplant fictional film?”

During the 1970s and’80s, while Hershman Leeson was redefining contemporary art, Eileen Myles was writing the stories that would be celebrated in her iconic 1994 book, Chelsea Girls, in which life becomes art and the body becomes poetry. “Nothing I said was forgettable,” Myles, who is also a photographer, has noted. “It was all designed to be remembered.” Here, Hershman Leeson and Myles speak about past glories, present fame, and the long life of an artist.

Eileen Myles: Well, what should we talk about?

Lynn Hershman Leeson: I don’t know. It’s up to you.

EM: I was thinking you would know.

LHL: What they told me was that you were going to interview me, so I didn’t prepare anything.

EM: This is very funny. See, I think they told me the same thing.

LHL: [Laughs] Well, that makes sense. We could start with doubles.

EM: What does “doubles” mean?

: Well, I once lived as another person for close to seven years. In the 1970s, I was trying to focus on the blurriness between fiction and reality, so I created a. She had real artifacts, though, and a documented physical presence in the world. She saw a psychiatrist. She had an apartment. She had a driver’s license and checking accounts. And she put ads in the newspaper. I lived as this other character for almost a decade.