Roberta Breitmore by Lynn Hershman Leeson
Roberta Breitmore was a performance/simulation that Lynn Hershman Leeson ran between 1973 and 1978 in San Francisco. However, the project continues to this day in a variety of documentary strategies. In the perfomance, Hershman inhabited a character named Roberta Breitmore who lived in San Francisco.
For an overview of the project, I recommend checking out Hershman’s website. For the work in the context of her career, check out this video on art21. The piece itself is discussed 3:50-6:00, but I like the whole video. It also talks about her Dante Hotel project, which was a precursor to this performance and very interesting as well.
This performance is one of my favorite pieces of art, so I thought it would be a nice first post for the off-topic section of my website. There’s tons of fun, engaging moments in the performance itself: Roberta looks for a roommate, goes to therapy and Weight Watchers, and at the end, is exorcised from Hershman. However, the way the character has lived on post-1978 is the most thought-provoking aspect for me.
(As a tangent, Hershman’s staging of the whole project is a smart way to get people engaged in conceptual art. The Roberta’s antics are a funny, instantly-appealing hook that onboards you into thinking more deeply about what her life means and how her life is similar to yours)
I see this piece as a precursor to all sorts of online “character simulations” that are all over the internet today. For example, I see CG influencers like Lil Miquela as Roberta’s spiritual children. It is a trite-but-true point that each of us everyday randos having an ‘online-prescene’ has pushed us all towards acting like Hershman did in this performance. I don’t just mean that we are faking out personalities. Keep in mind that the way this performance has lived through the ages is not primarily documentation of the performance itself, it’s the bits of debris Roberta generated along the way. In fact, if you see documentation of the work in a museum (there’s some at SFMOMA), it’s kinda rare to see photos of Hershman actually inhabiting Roberta out-and-about in 1970s San Francisco. What you see is checks, government documents, etc. You also see diagrams about how to construct the Roberta charcter.
This style of documentation is a little unusual for performance art. Usually, you see a recording of the performance, or else you see another individual reenacting the performance. Certainly Roberta has re-enactors, but they’re framed as ‘look-alikes’ and appear in multiple. This subtle difference regarding the reenactments is meaningful, because it shifts makes you think of Roberta as a constructed identity rather than a temporal performance.
Returning to my original point about Leeson’s prescience here: I think we all kind of live to document our lives now. I also think the concept on a ‘online life’ and a ‘physical life’ has made people much more comfortable compartmentalizing their identities, and slipping into identities inspired by others. Obviously the former point has probably been true since the advent of photography, and the latter has always been true. But Roberta Breitmore points it out in a rich way at the dawn of the computer age, so I keep returning to her.