Lynn Hershman Leeson &
Muffled knocking against the screen and a look into the camera by the protagonist with the short peroxide-blonde hairstyle provide the start of the 26-minute video Desire Inc. It begins with the contact ad spot of the actor Marion Grabinski, who appeals to us viewers to reach through the screen and touch her. After a dissolve, the artist comments on the format of the »seductive ad« for all genders. She describes the dual meaning of this mass/mask communication as a form of »synthetic desire«, which we, according to the title, have internalised (incorporated) and at the same time present as a brand (Inc.).
The work of the American media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson from 1990 is a metareflexive video essay composed of contact ad spots, interview sequences and statements of the artist. It addresses a variety of forms of desire, loneliness, the wish for relationships, media and technologies as well as expanded bodies, prostheses of seduction and disappointment in an increasingly medially formatted society. In her social interventions, Hershman Leeson placed ads through local television and allowed male callers to have their say in the video. To this purpose, she chose a hybrid form of talking heads, mobile images, television screens, studio scenes and found footage to counteract the interviews with feminist media analyses, with commentaries of a female caller as well as with disclosures by Marion about fear and depression. The slogan of the ads of »Turn on – Turn off« play with genre clichés and the dual meaning of erotic and media function. In the process, the audible sound of a shattered pane following Marion’s offer materializes the desire, at the same time revealing that the invisible membrane of the screen forms the actual phantasmatic contact zone, within which the medial appeal for cybersexual interaction remains. The video of Hershman Leeson thus opens up another space for »stimulation as simulation«. (Lilian Haberer)
This work was first shown in the context of the Videonale at it's 4th edition.
