Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Dante Hotel: The Hotel Room That Became an Artwork

For about nine months in 1973 and 1974, anyone could walk into a shabby North Beach hotel, ask for a key and let themselves into a stranger’s room. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Dante Hotel was that room. The artist calls it a precursor to site-specific installation, and it was the first home of Roberta Breitmore, a woman who did not exist.

“Sound isn’t art”: the museum show that closed

The hotel began as an answer to a museum. Recovering in an oxygen tent in 1965, the artist’s timeline says, “She begins working with a ball of wax by her bed, which leads her to make ‘Breathing Machines’ and ‘Giggling Machines.’” In 1972 Berkeley’s University Art Museum showed those wax figures with their sensors and breathing sounds.

“The exhibition is closed in 24 hours by curators who state that ‘the work uses sound and sound isn’t art,’” the timeline records. Frieze later noted that “During the 1970s, Hershman Leeson and many other women artists worked outside of traditional galleries and museums, in part because the art world sidelined them.” She took her work to a hotel.

Room 47: a visit to the Dante Hotel

SiteWorks, the University of Exeter’s archive of San Francisco performance, places the work in Rooms 47 and 50 of the Dante Hotel at 310 Columbus Avenue, now the Europa Hotel. The artist Eleanor Coppola had the second room. Visitors learned of the piece “through newspaper ads placed by the artist,” says the artist’s own project page for The Dante Hotel.

Hershman described the visit in 1980: “You could sign in at the desk, get a key, go up to the room, and trespass into this kind of alien identity that was there.” Inside, “There were two wax figures that were lying in the bed as you entered the room, two women.” Moira Roth, in the same conversation, added that the hotel was “a rather sleazy hotel, shabby and slightly ominous.”

The project page lists the rest: “Sounds of breathing, emitted from a hidden tape player, created the impression that the pair were simply asleep. A radio played local news and pink and yellow light bulbs contributed to the ambiance.” Frieze describes the soundtrack differently, as Elton John on the radio and Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses.

Element	Artist’s project page	SiteWorks and Hershman, 1980	Frieze, 2020
Dates	Nov 30, 1973 to Aug 31, 1974	Nov 29, 1973 to Aug 31, 1974	1972-73, “nearly ten months”
Getting in	Newspaper ads	Sign in, get a key	Ask for the key at the desk
In the bed	Two life-size dolls	Two wax women	Wax figures with the artist’s face
Sound	Breathing; a radio with local news	A record made for the room	Elton John; Molly Bloom
Ending	An end date only	Not stated	Impounded after a visitor called the police

Police, and the problem of dates

The artist’s timeline says the show was “closed by police when someone mistakes the body parts in the art for a murder victim.” Frieze says it “was eventually impounded after a startled visitor called the police.” The safest summary is that police were eventually called and the room was shut, by the artist’s account.

The dates are just as tangled. The project page gives November 30, 1973, to August 31, 1974, while the timeline dates the renting to 1972 and Berlin reviews say 1972-73. Going by the artist’s own project record, it opened at the end of November 1973 and closed at the end of August 1974.

Roberta Breitmore checks in

“In 1973, Hershman Leeson began a private performance as the fictional character, Roberta Breitmore. Breitmore’s first act was to arrive by bus in San Francisco and check into the Dante Hotel.” Roberta then “undertook real-life activities such as opening a bank account, obtaining credit cards, renting an apartment, seeing a psychiatrist,” and joining EST and Weight Watchers.

She had “her own clothing, signature makeup, walk, gestures, speech mannerisms, and handwriting.” In her fourth year, Roberta “multiplied into four people appearing in her guise.” The performance ended with an exorcism in the crypt of Lucrezia Borgia at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, in 1978 by most accounts (the timeline says 1979).

Item	Detail
Arrival	By bus, into the Dante Hotel
Roommate ads	43 replies; she met 27 of them
Records	144 drawings and surveillance photographs
ID	Interim driver’s licence, January 20, 1976
End	Exorcism in Ferrara, 1978 (timeline: 1979)

After the hotel: Lorna, Second Life and the Novalis Hotel

The room kept coming back. The timeline presents Lorna (1984) as “an extension of her work in the Dante Hotel,” and claims it as “the first interactive video art LaserDisc.” Engineers at Stanford later rebuilt the installation so that “Players of Second Life can tour a re-creation of Hershman Leeson’s installation The Dante Hotel,” frieze reported.

In 2018 KW Berlin’s exhibition The Novalis Hotel showed “an inverted version of The Dante Hotel” in a real Berlin hotel, where visitors could leave a DNA sample. “DNA is a perfect archive,” Hershman Leeson said. Stanford University Libraries began acquiring her archive in 2004.

A Bay Area parallel: Antenna’s walk-in rooms

No source connects Hershman Leeson or the Dante Hotel with Antenna Theater, so this is a parallel only. About eight years later, across the Golden Gate in Mill Valley, Antenna’s Artery, a Walkman maze of rooms led each visitor into a stranger’s private life. Esquire’s Steve Erickson described a room with “a bed where someone is lying,” a voice that says she is asleep, and “Louise’s diary” waiting on the table.

The tools differed. Hershman’s room was silent except for breath and radio, and the visitor made up the story. Artery’s voice told the visitor who they were and what to do next. Reviewing a 1999 staging, the San Diego Reader called Artery “a performance art installation” with the visitor as its performer.

Both belong to the history of the theatre installation, and the wax sleepers have cousins in our history of wax museums. The rest of Antenna’s rooms are in the Antenna Theater chronology.

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Read on with Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence, Robert Lepage and the machines of Ex Machina, or the Beat Generation’s North Beach.