Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson has spent a career being herself, examining her transformations over 83 years alongside society’s unrealistic and bizarre expectations of women. Working largely from San Francisco has brought her close to Silicon Valley, and her interpretations of technological developments from AI to biotech have cemented her reputation as an incisive analyst of how culture evolves…or doesn’t.
In this text, a collaboration between Lux and Protodispatch, a monthly digital publication relating artists’ lives to their art, Hershman Leeson speaks about the ideas behind a body of work devoted to anti-aging, a compulsion that reaches back to quests for the Holy Grail of immortality. —Editors.
Narcissism is an easy word. Particularly if, as an artist, you’re using your own image. But really, I use myself as a vehicle.
From 1973 to 1978, I created an alter ego named Roberta Breitmore, which began with a work called “Roberta’s Construction Chart.” It showed Roberta’s face, describing what makeup she wore and how she acted in her job or at home. It revealed how her face changed over time and what she did to try to stay young. But I don’t think it worked (staying young). And I still don’t. I haven’t seen anyone who really looks younger because of skincare or surgery. They just look different.
Ten or 12 years ago, I was thinking about true immortality and how important genetic engineering was becoming to humanity because it had the capacity to create new species and fundamentally change us by modifying cellular structures. Scientists have had success using children’s DNA to make new organs. Doctors can output these organs on a 3D printer and insert them into a human body.
As I was studying this phenomenon, I was invited to create a project at the House of Electronic Art in Basel, Switzerland, in 2018. I decided to transform the museum into a genetic engineering lab, working with a group of local scientists including the biochemist Thomas Huber. The success of our work in this lab was remarkable; we were able to create an antibody that could “identify, expose, and combat toxins in the circulatory system” that biotech giants like Novartis had not been able to produce. Subsequently, I began meeting other scientists, like George Church (the father of synthetic biology), Anthony Atala (inventor of the bioprinter), and Elizabeth Blackburn (who isolated the telomere or aging gene). All of them were dealing, in some way, with immortality and anti-aging, from work that confronted the devastating impacts of contaminated water on the lifespan of the human body to work that more obviously preyed on human vanities.
Botox and fillers and facelifts may change your appearance, but as Roberta discovered, nothing on the market can actually defy the effects of aging. These scientists, though, were using DNA to make new cells to replace aging ones with younger versions of themselves. This wasn’t just a logical progression from surgical or surface attempts to stave off the impacts of living life; it was an attempt to change biology and chemistry. It was a leap.
Beginning around 2015, serums that included these DNA-specific, younger cells started being produced and injected into subjects. I was interested in getting such a serum made from my own DNA. But serum made with human DNA is not yet readily available in the United States or Europe. It has been tried with cats and rats but not yet with humans. In China, though, it has recently been made available to humans, and there, they are injecting these serums into people. I haven’t been able to find any documentation of the results.
I thought that having a sculpture that comprises a refrigerated vial of my own DNA serum — a sort of narcissism to be sure — would help us think about important questions. I sent a sample of my DNA to a lab in China, and they sent back the vial of serum that is now the sculpture “Eternally Yours” (2023). The serum contains young cells that can start the aging process all over again if I inject it. I’m probably not going to do that, but I’m curious to know what happens to people who use this serum over time. Will they ever be able to stop taking it, and what will happen if they do? Do they feel different? With this kind of anti-aging, can life actually be extended? By how much? The work marks a moment in time when the possibility of not aging is unfolding. And simultaneously, it signals a reckoning: We may have contaminated this planet beyond repair. Just when we’re learning to touch endless life, will our very species, and planet, begin to die?
Here's why we publish
Feminist thought is increasingly banned from universities and marginalized in billionaire-owned media. We’re proud to publish it. While these institutions are firing feminists, we’re hiring them — as brave journalists, writers, and artists who challenge ideas about gender at every level.
If this matters to you, please support Lux today. Independent media depends on you.