In 2005, Michael Shanks, the Omar and Althea Hoskins Professor of Classical Archaeology at Stanford University and director of the Archaeology Center's Metamedia Lab, and three colleagues started The Presence Project to explore issues of presence and documentation across the arts and sciences. Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose work has been shown at more than 200 major institutions and is part of the permanent collection at New York's Museum of Modern Art, joined soon after and, together with Shanks and others in the Stanford Humanities Lab, created Life to the Second Power, an online encounter with her archive. As they see the project through to its completion in 2010, Shanks and Hershman Leeson plan to further explore memory, identity, and place. Seed invited them to advance the conversation.
Click on the image to watch highlights from the Salon. Click here to watch the full conversation.
MICHAEL SHANKS: Nineteen seventy-two: You were working in San Francisco, and you did a piece at the Dante Hotel.
LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON: Yes. I'd done a piece with sound at the museum, but they said media wasn't art and didn't belong in an art museum. So I thought, well, why not just use an environment, wherever it exists?
So, Eleanor Coppola and I created rooms in the Dante Hotel, which was a run-down place in North Beach. It was very simple. We rented the rooms—mine was rented indefinitely; hers was rented for two weeks. And I created a situation where people could look at presumed identities constructed from artifacts placed in the room.
MS: So, you put stuff in there?
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LH: Yeah. I put goldfish in there. There was a soliloquy of Molly Bloom. There were books that the presumed people might have read, clothing that they might have worn. People were invited to trespass. It was open 24 hours a day; people could check in at the front desk, get the key, stay as long as they wanted, and displace it.
MS: Did anybody leave anything behind?
LH: Nobody left anything. They graffitied the mirror that was there, but nobody took anything. They really respected that space.
MS: Were you monitoring people coming and going?
LH: No, not really. It was left gathering dust and the flux of time as people traveled through. I was just starting to think of time and space as elements of sculpture at that point.
MS: And then the police came at some point, didn't they?
LH: Yeah—ha! Somebody reported a body in the bed, because there were these wax cast figures—
MS: —which had been there from the beginning?
LH: Yes. And the police confiscated everything in the room and took all the artifacts down to central headquarters, which, I thought, was really the apt ending to that particular narrative.
MS: And then 32 years later, Stanford acquires your archive of 90-something boxes. The remains of your body of work—whatever hadn't been taken away by the police, I guess!
LH: Yes.
MS: As an archaeologist, I'm interested in what comes after the event, as it were. What you do with the remains of the past, to somehow try to get back to where they originated.
LH: I don't know that you can ever get back to that point, but you can go forward, using them as context for the future. The trail and the remains may be dormant, but they exist, waiting to be revived or resurrected into something else.
