At 243 Luz gallery in Margate, facing a screen that plays Lynn Hershman Leeson’s video work Desire Inc. (1990), is a red couch shaped like a pair of human lips. On an identical couch, the actor Marion Grabski sits, gazing past the screen and addressing the viewer directly. By placing a physical representation of Grabski’s presence inside the screen into the gallery itself, the exhibition makes Leeson’s film bleed outward, from moving image to flesh and blood; the visuals on screen become malleable, as if the desires they project could be made real with enough thought, the film itself casting a spell.
Leeson introduces Desire Inc. as “seduction ads,” a multimedia version of personal ads found in newspapers, with the mediation of the screen creating an “imitation of an artificial self,” an unreal object of desire performed by Grabski. The screen constructs an image of fantasy, something impossible to attain. This idea is at the heart of advertising—the promise of a feeling captured in an object. The TV series Mad Men (2007-2015), centered on Madison Avenue ad executives, argues that “advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car”—but Leeson dares to push this idea of the object, and the objectified female body, further. Early in the film, Grabski asks the viewer to “try to reach through the screen and touch me.” While Grabski, inside the screen, is that unreachable object of desire, that promise of happiness, the screen itself becomes a gateway from one world to another. David Cronenberg’s horror film Videodrome (1983) tells the story of Max Renn, a sleazy TV producer seduced and driven to madness by a TV station; in one scene, the woman he’s involved with speaks to him through the set, asking him to kiss her. The screen shows an extreme close-up of her lips, and the TV set itself comes to life; cold, unresponsive metal becomes soft, tactile and fleshy. When Max finally surrenders to the screen and kisses the crackling, staticky lips, he falls into the screen, and it consumes him. While Desire Inc. never becomes this fantastical, echoes of Cronenberg’s film resonate in Leeson’s art, especially in the way Grabski addresses the viewer: “How long has it been since you talked back?” This creates a tension in the film—a sense of liveness in the pre-recorded images.
Late in the video, Leeson explains some of her ideas directly to the camera, discussing the impact that images from pop culture can have on the formation of sexuality; she places an emphasis on the idea of what she calls “a fantasy, a fiction, a non-response, a masturbation. Reaching for something that isn’t there with our phantom limbs that don’t exist, and yet extend out like a prosthesis.” Early on in Desire Inc., the image of Grabski is frozen while, lingering below it at lower opacity, is Leeson herself addressing the viewer, telling them “mass communication is like mask communication. It creates this veil, an illusion, an opaqueness, a separation,” which Leeson takes to the breaking point throughout the ads. In Ad #2, Grabski sits on the couch, holding a smaller TV that shows Grabski sitting on the couch holding a smaller TV that shows Grabski sitting on the couch, a feedback loop echoing on eternally, each screen containing itself over and over again; Grabski’s image mass-produced through layers of TV, leaving an uncertainty around where the subject ends and the object begins.
The recent group show “Viddy Horrorshow/Daytime Viewing (VHS/DTV)” at Taco! in London sees artists sharing the TV as a common reference point, challenging and subverting the expectations of advertisements, game shows, music videos and more. In Say Cheese (2025), the artist Aimee Neat creates work that feels like it exists in direct dialogue with Desire Inc.—footage of a model smiling at the camera is intercut with her eating from a block of blue cheese. Like Grabski’s persona in Desire Inc., the woman in Say Cheese at once embodies the idea of the compliant object of desire while also subverting it, here through moments of surreal physical comedy. The performance itself also challenges the idea of the seductive persona, what Leeson calls an “artificial persona.” In Say Cheese, the model’s smile is often wavering and uncertain, the mask of performance becoming too difficult for her to maintain. This more contemporary work is able to take the ideas in Desire Inc. and situate them in a new context where the ways in which we understand technology—whether nostalgia for grainy TV screens and late-night ads or the omnipresence of digital tech, cameras and curated personas—have transformed. In Leeson’s work, there’s a sense of a tangible connection that exists between the artist and the women who answer her ads; she talks about getting so many calls that she needed to disconnect her phone.
In contrast, the more contemporary work is defined by a kind of loneliness, an understanding that our connections are becoming increasingly mediated. In Adam Knight’s Mirror Tapping (Empathy Labourers) (2025), the artist’s hands are shown on screen (with another screen in the background, echoing eternally like Grabski in one of the ads), overlapping and manipulating the image. There are moments where a voice addresses the viewer in quiet, almost apologetic tones; at one point, they apologize for the quality of the video (it is, by design, lower resolution, almost analogue), and at the end of the video, they say “thank you for staying with me.” The impulse is to create a connection, however tenuous and mediated, and to understand that the ways in which we define intimacy are now shaped by our relationships with technology as much as with each other.
While Shrinkflation (2025), by artist duo Von Kant & The Other Guy, is tonally different from Mirror Tapping—a frantic blast of information overload rather than the furtive intimacy of Knight’s work—each uses multiple screens as ways of presenting information. In Shrinkflation, a definition of the economic concept (items shrinking in size or quantity while their price remains the same) flashes across one of the corners of the screen as advertisements for products like Big Macs play. In the decades since Leeson created Desire Inc., the fantasies being sold through TV have transformed. Charlotte Yao’s The Mythology of the Iron Chain (2022) presents itself as a commercial for iron chains, extolling their seemingly timeless uses and resilience. The longer the ad plays, the more insidious it becomes; the chains become not just objects of utility, but something that seems to trap the viewer in place. One of the overlapping voices in the ad announces that the chain is “one that we’re unlikely to break,” with Yao showing just how difficult that act can be; as one voice describes what a chain can do, another echoes specific words like “hang” and “straighten out,” which flash across the screen, a declaration and a threat all at once.
Leeson argues that mass media is “feeding like a vampire” on those who consume it; that it aims to replace desire itself by presenting something so unattainable that even to reach out and touch it isn’t enough. She says, “you want to go further, into the dream. Because reality’s a fraud.” The tension that animates Desire Inc., and these more contemporary works of video art is their understanding that the screen, too, is a fraud and that the promise it offers is unattainable. Grabski is a performative stand-in for the artist herself; the chains in Yao’s work can really only ever trap the viewer. And yet, until that screen and the connection it offers can be broken, we will continue to fall under its spell, contorting ourselves into impossible images. This act of breaking is gestured toward by forcing the viewer to consider their role in the images that unfold before them; the cutting between two different kinds of embodiment in Say Cheese shows an object trying to break into subjectivity through a bizarre, subversive gesture. In Ad #4 of Desire Inc., Grabski asks the viewer, “Do you really think I want to look like this? I’m your fantasy, I’m your image, you’ve made me what I am,” her voice echoing through a series of smaller screens, her body increasingly out of reach. The screen itself begins to exert a power over the figures that are trapped inside of it—Grabski in Desire Inc, the woman Max is obsessed with in Videodrome—and it’s through these subversive acts of taking images and expectations to breaking point that the spell of the screen can begin to be broken.
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