Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work encompasses performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York City during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.
Anderson's debut studio album Big Science was released in 1982 and has since been followed by a number of studio and live albums. She starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. Anderson's creative output has also included theatrical and documentary works, voice acting, art installations, and a CD-ROM. She is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several musical devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows.
Early life and education
Laura Phillips Anderson was born in Chicago on June 5, 1947, and grew up in the nearby suburb Glen Ellyn, Illinois, one of eight children born to Mary Louise and Arthur T. Anderson. Growing up, she spent weekends studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and played with the Chicago Youth Symphony.She graduated from Glenbard West High School. She attended Mills College in California, and, after moving to New York in 1966, graduated in 1969 from Barnard College with a B.A. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, studying art history. In 1972, she obtained an M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia University.
Her first performance-art piece — a symphony played on automobile horns — was performed in 1969. In 1970 she drew the underground comix Baloney Moccasins, which was published by George DiCaprio. In the early 1970s she worked as an art instructor and as an art critic for magazines such as Artforum, and illustrated children's books — the first of which was titled The Package, a mystery story in pictures alone.
Career
1970s
Anderson performed in New York during the 1970s. One of her most-cited performances, Duets on Ice, which she conducted in New York and other cities around the world, involved her playing the violin along with a recording while wearing ice skates with the blades frozen into a block of ice; the performance ended only when the ice had melted away. Two early pieces, "New York Social Life" and "Time to Go", are included in the 1977 compilation New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, along with works by Pauline Oliveros and others. Two other pieces were included on Airwaves, a collection of audio pieces by various artists. She also recorded a lecture for Vision, a set of artist's lectures released by Crown Point Press as a set of six LPs.Many of Anderson's earliest recordings remain unreleased or were issued only in limited quantities, such as her first single, "It's Not the Bullet that Kills You ". That song, along with "New York Social Life" and about a dozen others, was originally recorded for use in an art installation that consisted of a jukebox that played the different Anderson compositions, at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York City. Among the musicians on these early recordings are Peter Gordon on saxophone, Scott Johnson on guitar, Ken Deifik on harmonica, and Joe Kos on drums. Photographs and descriptions of many of these early performances were included in Anderson's retrospective book Stories from the Nerve Bible.
During the late 1970s, Anderson made a number of additional recordings that were either released privately or included on compilations of avant-garde music, most notably releases by the Giorno Poetry Systems label run by New York poet John Giorno, an early intimate of Andy Warhol. In 1977, she was granted an artist-in-residence stay at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris, France. In 1978, she performed at the Nova Convention, a major conference involving many counter-culture figures and rising avant-garde musical stars, including William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, Malcolm Goldstein, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg. She also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s.
1980s
In 1980, Anderson was awarded an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1982, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts — Film. In 1987, Anderson was awarded an honorary doctorate in the fine arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.Anderson became widely known outside the art world in 1981 with the single "O Superman", originally released in a limited quantity by B. George's One Ten Records, which ultimately reached number two on the UK singles chart. The sudden influx of orders from the UK led to Anderson signing a seven-album recording contract with Warner Bros. Records, which re-released the single.
"O Superman" was part of a larger stage work titled United States Live and was included on her debut studio album Big Science. Prior to the release of Big Science, Anderson returned to Giorno Poetry Systems to record the collaboration album You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With ; Anderson recorded one side of the double-LP set, with William S. Burroughs and John Giorno recording a side each, and the fourth side featured a separate groove for each artist. This was followed by the back-to-back releases of her albums Mister Heartbreak and United States Live, the latter of which was a five-LP recording of her two-evening stage show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She also appeared in a television special produced by Nam June Paik broadcast on New Year's Day 1984, titled "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell".
File:LA21uitsnede.jpg|thumb|Anderson performing at De Vereeniging in Nijmegen, Netherlands, 1986
She next starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave and also composed the soundtracks for the Spalding Gray films Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box. During this time, she also contributed music to Robert Wilson's Alcestis at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She also hosted the PBS series Alive from Off Center during 1987, after having produced the short film What You Mean We? for the series the year before. What You Mean We? introduced a new character played by Anderson: "The Clone", a digitally altered masculine counterpart to Anderson who later "co-hosted" with her when she did her presenting stint on Alive from Off Center. Elements of the Clone were later incorporated into the titular "puppet" of her later work, Puppet Motel. In that year, she also appeared on Peter Gabriel's fifth studio album So, co-writing and performing on the song "This is the Picture ".
Release of Anderson's first post-Home of the Brave album, 1989's Strange Angels, was delayed for more than a year in order for Anderson to take singing lessons. This was due to the album being more musically inclined than her previous works. The single "Babydoll" was a moderate hit on the Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1989.
1990s
In 1991, she was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival. In the same year, Anderson appeared in The Human Face, a feature arts documentary directed by artist-filmmakers Nichola Bruce and Michael Coulson for BBC Television. Anderson was the presenter in this documentary on the history of the face in art and science. Her face was transformed using latex masks and digital special effects as she introduced ideas about the relationship between physiognomy and perception. Her varied career in the early 1990s included voice-acting in the animated film The Rugrats Movie. In 1994, she created a CD-ROM titled Puppet Motel, which was followed by Bright Red, co-produced by Brian Eno, and another spoken-word album, The Ugly One with the Jewels. This was followed by an appearance on the 1997 charity single "Perfect Day".In 1996, Anderson performed with Diego Frenkel and Aterciopelados for the AIDS benefit album Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin produced by the Red Hot Organization.
An interval of more than half a decade followed before her next album release. During this time, she wrote a supplemental article on the cultural character of New York City for the Encyclopædia Britannica and created multimedia presentations, including one inspired by Moby-Dick. One of the central themes in Anderson's work is exploring the effects of technology on human relationships and communication.
Starting in the 1990s, Anderson and Lou Reed, whom she had met in 1992, collaborated on recordings together. Reed contributed to the tracks "In Our Sleep" from Anderson's Bright Red, "One Beautiful Evening" from Anderson's Life on a String, and "My Right Eye" and "Only an Expert" from Anderson's Homeland, which Reed also co-produced. Anderson contributed to the tracks "Call on Me" from Reed's collaborative project The Raven, "Rouge" and "Rock Minuet" from Reed's Ecstasy, and "Hang On to Your Emotions" from Reed's Set the Twilight Reeling.
In late 1998, Artist Space, New York presented an exhibit of Anderson’s work from 1970s to 1980s, along with her 1990s work, Whirlwind.
2000s
Life on a String appeared in 2001, by which time she signed a new recording contract with another Warner Music Group label, Nonesuch Records. Life on a String was a mixture of new works and works from the Moby-Dick presentation. In 2001, she recorded the audiobook version of Don DeLillo's novella The Body Artist. Anderson went on tour performing a selection of her best-known musical pieces in 2001. One of these performances was recorded in New York City a week after the September 11 attacks, and included a performance of "O Superman". This concert was released in early 2002 as the double CD Live in New York.In 2003, Anderson produced albums with French musicians La Jarry and Hector Zazou and also performed with them. Zazou's album Strong Currents, which brought together well-known soloists, features her alongside Jane Birkin, Lori Carson and Irene Grandi, among others. She became NASA's first artist-in-residence in the same year, which inspired her performance piece The End of the Moon. In May 2004, she received an honorary doctorate from Columbia University. She was part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens and collaborated with choreographer Trisha Brown and filmmaker Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo on the multimedia project O Zlozony/O Composite for the Paris Opera Ballet which premiered at the Palais Garnier in Paris in December 2004. She mounted a succession of themed shows and composed a piece for Expo 2005 in Japan. In 2005, Anderson visited Russia's space program — the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre and mission control — with the Arts Catalyst and took part in the Arts Catalyst's Space Soon event at the Roundhouse to reflect on her experiences.
In 2005, her exhibition The Waters Reglitterized opened at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City. According to the press release by Sean Kelly, the work is a diary of dreams and their literal recreation as works of art. This work uses the language of dreams to investigate the dream itself. The resulting pieces include drawings, prints, and high-definition video. The installation ran until October 22, 2005.
In 2006, Anderson was awarded a Residency at the American Academy in Rome. She narrated Ric Burns' Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, which was first televised in September 2006 as part of the PBS American Masters series. She contributed a song to Plague Songs, a collection of songs related to the 10 Biblical plagues. Anderson also performed in Came So Far for Beauty, the Leonard Cohen tribute event held at the Point Theatre in Dublin, Ireland, on October 4–5, 2006. In November 2006, she published a book of drawings based on her dreams, titled Night Life.
Material from Homeland was performed at small work-in-progress shows in New York throughout May 2007 supported by a four-piece band with lighting and video visuals mixed live by Willie Williams and Mark Coniglio, respectively. A European tour of the Homeland work in progress included performances on September 28–29, 2007, at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin; on October 17–19 at the Melbourne International Arts Festival; and in Russia at the Moscow Dom Muzyky concert hall on April 26, 2008. The work was performed in Toronto, Canada, on June 14, 2008, with husband Lou Reed, making the "Lost Art of Conversation" a duet with vocals and guitar. Anderson's Homeland Tour performed at several locations across the United States as well, such as at the Ferst Center for the Arts, Atlanta, Georgia; The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City; and Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park, Chicago, Illinois, co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.