Electronic Diaries — Lynn Hershman Leeson's long-running video journal

1984

Artists: Lynn Hershman Leeson · Year: 1984 · Medium: Ongoing video diary — direct-address self-recordings across 35+ years · Substrate: Video across multiple technical platforms (U-matic, DV, HD) over decades; Hershman Leeson addressing camera directly on personal, political, and artistic topics · Place: San Francisco, California, USA · Institution: Independent Lynn Hershman Leeson began the Electronic Diaries in 1984 as a set of direct-to-camera personal video confessions: a woman alone, in her house, speaking to a video camera about rage, childhood sexual abuse, body disorder, the death of her infant daughter, the loss of her mother, the accumulation of ordinary and extraordinary damage in her life. The format was brutally spare. One camera. One subject. No edits. The subject was the artist herself. The delivery was unvarnished. The Electronic Diaries would eventually run to five tapes across fifteen years, ending in 1999 with First Person Plural. What Hershman was doing in 1984 did not have a category. Video self-portraiture existed (Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas), but it was not confessional. Confessional writing existed (Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton), but it was not video. Performance art of the extreme-body kind existed (Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramović), but it was not domestic. Hershman's contribution was to pull these modes together and deliver them in the specific register of the home-studio video diary — decades before the YouTube vlog existed as a form. The formal argument, embedded in every tape, was that the video camera could function as a private instrument for the processing of a specific kind of psychic material that literary prose could not hold. The tapes are unbearable to watch in sustained stretches. They are also, in the judgment of most subsequent feminist media scholarship, the single most important American artist autobiography of the late twentieth century. Hershman's parallel practice — Roberta Breitmore (1973–78), a fictional woman Hershman lived as in the streets of San Francisco; Lorna (1983), the first artist-made interactive laserdisc; Agent Ruby (1999–2002), an early AI chatbot — makes her one of the most methodologically ambitious artists in this archive. The Electronic Diaries are the personal counterpoint to the constructed personae: the actual self, speaking directly, in the same medium in which the constructed personae had been designed to hide. Hershman is 83 and remains active; she is represented by Bridget Donahue Gallery in New York. Her archive lives at Stanford Libraries. Lore Hershman shot the first Electronic Diary tapes on a Sony Portapak in her San Francisco living room, alone, at night, after her daughter had gone to bed. The tapes were initially not for distribution; she said in a 1998 interview that she had been making them for herself as an alternative to psychoanalysis, which she could not afford. Friends who saw the early tapes convinced her that they were works, and the first tape — Confessions of a Chameleon (1986) — circulated at Bay Area festivals to polarized reception. She was diagnosed with breast cancer during the making of the 1994 tape and included the diagnosis in it. She beat the cancer. She continued making the diaries through two more marriages, her daughter's adulthood, and her own long slow emergence into the museum establishment in the early 2000s. Sources • Hershman Leeson, Lynn — The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I (ed. Tromble, UC Press, 2005). • SFMOMA — Civic Radar (exh. cat. 2016). • Stanford Libraries — Lynn Hershman Leeson Papers.