Laurie Anderson: Performance Artist

Author(s): Mel Gordon

Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 24, No. 2, Women and Performance Issue (Jun.,
1980), pp. 51-54
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1145281
Accessed: 08-10-2016 04:03 UTC

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Laurie Anderson:- .

Performance f
Artist

by Mel Gordon

I always felt it was a mistake being labeled as an autobiographical

artist. [...] Most of the work that I do is two-part or stereo, not
monolithic at all-so there's always the yes/no, he/she, or whatever
pairs I'm working with.
Laurie Anderson, 1979

Since her first performance work in 1974, Laurie Anderson has found herself
concerned with a basic esthetic dilemma that has troubled a number of other
performance artists: how to create an intensely personal art that is not just sim
autobiography. How can the performer/author bring raw, unmediated materials fro
his/her life and structure them to strike a balance between his/her own needs and
those of the audience? For Anderson, the resolution is not only intellectual but
technical; it is one that leads to a new performance style.
What Anderson calls a "system of pairing," of placing polar opposites side-by-
side or before one another, of incorporating and transposing a kind of spiraling
dialectic of styles and frames of reference pattern her productions like an electrical
grid. Her performance methodologies revolve around a network of dualities: artist as
person/character, language/sound, private/public activity, memory/fantasy,
audio/visual space, male/female, nineteenth/twentieth century musical instru-
mentation, history/prophecy, filmic/live presentation.
Even Anderson's reception as a performance artist has a dual aspect to it.
Despite the dense theatricality of her work, her support and renown seem to come
almost exclusively from the art world, where she has an enthusiastic following.
Although a Life magazine photo-essay (January 1980) described her as "a former
teacher and critic, who may be the most popular performance artist," relatively few
individuals in experimental theatre are aware of her work. Possibly, the difficulty in
actually seeing Anderson's presentations-she normally performs only once or
twice a year in New York, where she lives-and her tendency to mount her
productions in art galleries and museums may also explain why she has been
generally overlooked in theatre circles.

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52 THE DRAMA REVIEW/T86

Born in 1947 and raised in northern Illinois, Laurie Anderson feel

childhood may have had a lasting influence on her artistic thinking.
children, she remembers a family ritual where everyone sat around the t
stories about what had happened to him that day. Amidst this mob scene, she
quickly learned that the simple narration of interesting experiences did not always
lead to interesting stories. Reports had to be tailored in places, expanded in others,
points of view sometimes had to be altered, occasionally missing details or more
dramatic conclusions had to be supplied. Besides stories, family members played
musical instruments, composed private songs, did voice imitations. Anderson also
discovered at this time, like many tellers of yarns, that one often forgets what
reportage is factual and what is invented. This sometimes leads to a certain artistic
confusion or complexity. (For example, during a piece she presented at the Whitney
Museum in 1976, where she related a personal story, her father was heard relating
another version of it in the audience.)
During the 1960s, Anderson studied at Barnard College where she graduated
with honors in art history. Later she took a master's degree at Columbia in sculpture
and began teaching "Principles of Art History," which she subtitled "Skrooples," at
'City College in New York. Both in and out of the classroom, Anderson found herself
fascinated with the perceptual contrasts of words-whether handwritten, printed, or
spoken-and visual imagery. The notion of students filling notebooks in the colored
light of projected slide transparencies while she lectured struck Anderson as a
bizarre esthetic relationship.
It was just at this time, around 1972, that Anderson's interest in paper sculpture
and in art generally began to fade. Instead, she turned to writing, a kind of
conceptual writing that consisted of one-sentence books, diary entries, even a
dream series that resulted from the mixing of daydreams, memories, real dreams,
and paintings that were projected on the screen during an art history class.
During the summer of 1972, Anderson and a friend organized a performance
event in a small Vermont town. Every Sunday evening, residents of Rochester would
drive up to their park in automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles to hear music played
by a local band. Without ever leaving their car seats, the spectators would sit and
honk their horns to show approval at the end of each section. Enthralled by the
naivete and sophistication of the situation, Anderson managed to reverse the
audience/entertainer relationship by forming an orchestra of the same vehicles.
This time the people in the driver's seats made the music with their horns and
spectators sat in the park's gazebo.
Laurie Anderson's first major performance piece, As: If was mounted at the
Artists Space in Soho in 1974. Encouraged by Vito Acconci, she attempted to
structurally blend different personal stories with oversized projections of words. On
one side of the screen was a word concerned with language, and on the other,
separated by a colon, was a word related to water. (For example,
"SOUND: DROWN.") The slides were used as a subtext to both highlight
diagram the narration.
In the summers of 1974 and 1975, Anderson performed Duets on Ice in var
outdoor locations in New York City. Standing in ice skates, whose blades wer
embedded in blocks of ice, she played a violin that contained a built-in speak
Wired to a hidden tape recorder, the violin could produce prerecorded sound as
as live music. In this way, Anderson was able to perform a duet with herself.
More than a simple Dada-type escapade, Duets on Ice revealed a number o
central features in Anderson's ethos-notably a deep concern with performan

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 LAURIE ANDERSON 53

time and objects. Possibly influenced by her storytelling and teach

Anderson tries to keep the length of her performances within set lim
than 60 or 75 minutes. In Duets on Ice, the melting of the ice regulated the
performance time in an obvious, graphic fashion.
For Anderson, certain personal objects play a significant part in the production.
Unlike standard stage props, these special items, or what Anderson calls "dense
objects," signify a whole range of private memories or emotions, while remaining
entirely functional to the piece. The ice and the skates take on personal and
metaphysical expressions of time passing, of internal and outer balance, of music
and anatomical rhythms. Of all the "dense objects" in Anderson's repertoire, none
so readily associated with her as the violin. Used as an instrument, a partner, a piece
of machinery, a screen, a weapon, the violin and bow (or symbolically, wood an
horsehair) have undergone dozens of technical incarnations in Anderson's work.
Sometimes electrified, at other times played naturally, Anderson's most innovat
violin-creation has consisted of an instrument whose strings have been replace
with an audio head from a tape recorder and whose horsehair on the bow has bee
replaced with recording tape. This "tape-bow violin" can create a sound-speech th
has never existed before. As the bow is passed across the audio bridge, a totall
reversible music-language is heard: "no" on the up-bow becomes "one," on the
down-bow, "yes" becomes "say." All a demonstration of the liquid nature of
language.
After Duets on Ice, Anderson's work began to exhibit a more sophisticated
blending of personal narrative and complex technology. For one thing, her sculptural
sense of space became more pronounced. In an early version of For Instants,
presented at the Whitney Museum in February 1976, a film shot from Anderson's loft
window was projected against a white wall. After a few moments, she appeared in a
white dress with an electric violin. Flush against the film image, looking like a kind
of bulge in the two-dimensional plane of a window, she started to play her
instrument, occasionally glancing back at the projection. The concert and film
ended simultaneously. Anderson then lay down on the floor with a candle and read a
text, which described the difficulties she had in filming, in understanding film time,
in writing songs. ("It's like walking up the stairs in the dark and you think there is one
more step than there actually is, and your foot comes pounding down on the top
step.... ") While she spoke, her breath caused the candle flame to move in and out
of the path of a photo cell's beam, which in turn caused the electrical circuit of the
spotlight to be joined and broken. Therefore, the reading's illumination was solely
based on the "breathiness" of its words.
Later in 1976, Anderson prepared a new piece for the Berlin Festival, ca
Engli-SH. Knowing little German, she attempted a performance that explored
areas between the languages, emphasizing "s" (actually "z" in German) and "s
sounds. At first, she appeared before her audience with simultaneous slide
projections of German translation as she spoke. But, after a while the subtitles went
out of sync, and the performance took on a new rhythm. Almost every word had a
"zzz" sound in it, which became the buzzing of a fly, the noise of snoring, the
resonation of bad violin playing. (Curiously enough, small sections of the audience
responded by locking arms and replying with their own "zzz" sounds.) Anderson also
played a violin as she ran back and forth between two microphones, merging the
images of crossing language barriers and violin-playing. The staccato sounds of the
violin rapidly going in and out of the microphones' range increased until they
resembled the frenzied report of a machine-gun. Anderson then stopped to tell a

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 54 THE DRAMA REVIEW/T86

story
storyabout
aboutcarrying
carryinga violin
a violin
case in
case
Chicago.
in Chicago.
She performed
She performed
her violin her
duet,violin
and onduet
an up-stroke she released the bow, which sailed to the wall, hitting a projected
image of an apple, then William Tell, as other images begin to multiply.
Laurie Anderson's longest and most complex piece, Americans On the Move,
was presented at the Carnegie Recital Hall and at The Kitchen in the spring of 1979.

Life in Los Angeles from Americans on the Move

Americans on the Move: Parts 1 & 2

by Laurie Anderson

(This text was compiled from

from Anderson's
Anderson's notes
notes and
and aa transcription
transcription made
made
recording of her performance
performance at
at The
The Kitchen
Kitchen in
in New
New York
York onon April
April 1979.)
1979.)

ANDERSON: Facing the audience,

audience, she
she speaks
speaks in
in aa sincere,
sincere, presentationa
presentationa
Behind her is a crude outline of the U.S. projected on a screen. A certain American
sect has been looking at conditions of the world during the Flood. According to their
calculations, during the Flood, the winds, tides, and currents were in an overall
southeasterly direction. [Purple arrows appear.] This would then mean that in order
for the Ark to have landed on Mt. Ararat it would had to have started several
thousand miles to the west. [A red arrow leaves map on right, and the proje
the arrow advances left.] This would then locate pre-Flood history in Up
York, and the Garden of Eden somewhere, roughly, in Genesee County.
projection points on map.]

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