Laurie Anderson Essay Research Paper Overview

Laurie Anderson Essay, Research Paper

Overview

Laurie

Anderson earned an international reputation as a high-tech magician of

multi-media performance art. Her legendary shows, combining computer synthesized

music, videos, slides, and provocative monologues, have challenged and

delighted audiences for over twenty years. A self-described "story-teller,"

Anderson’s art stems from a deeply personal vision.

Once the l’enfant terrible of New York’s

avante-garde, Anderson has evolved into a kind of electronic folk artist;

an urbane Will Rogers speaking to the artist in everyone. Daring to discuss

thoughts and feelings that many rarely verbalize, Anderson strikes a resonant

chord.

Early history

"Try to break as many [rules] as possible if you can," Anderson

told Rolling Stone while

preparing for her 1995 Nerve Bible Tour. "Not just for the sake of

doing it but for the feeling of freedom that you get when you just step

a little bit out and kind of go, ‘Whoa!’"

That feeling of "Whoa!" may be the driving impulse behind Anderson’s

career. Born on June 5, 1947 in a Chicago suburb, Laurie was one of eight

children. Taking an early interest in music, she studied violin and played

for a number of years with the Chicago Youth Symphony. Believing she would

never play brilliantly, she abandoned the instrument at age 16.

Burying her artistic inclinations, Anderson began a Library Science major

at Barnard College in New

York State. It seemed a pragmatic career choice for an eager bibliophile.

"I liked to read and thought working with books was a good idea,"

she told biographer John Howell. But Anderson’s Muses were not long silenced.

Her interest in art blossomed into an Art History major. Graduating magna

cum laude in 1969, she moved to New York City and pursued an MFA in

sculpture at Columbia University.

After Columbia, Anderson taught at several city colleges. The idea of

performing for a living first occurred while she lectured a Sunday morning

Art History class at Pace University.

Since her students were less than interested in the subject, she improvised

fantastic histories to entice them.

"The stories I made up had nothing to do with anything I’d ever

read in art history books," she said.

SoHo’s art scene was exploding

with raw, youthful energy in the early ’70s. Any dilapidated garret that

could be inhabited was likely to become an art studio. Art had few rules

except to ignore conventionality. Lofts were bursting with poor artists,

surviving on little more than youth, rebellion, and the desire to break

new ground.

Naturally, Anderson gravitated to this Mecca of experimentalism, and

was soon immersed in SoHo’s burgeoning gallery scene. "It was a wonderful

time. We were all pioneers," Anderson has said.

Instinctively recognizing the potential of multi-media, she began playfully

synthesizing sculpture and collage in super-8

films. Her delight in language surfaced in visual puns and double

entendre. As she explored photographic prints, slides, and eventually

live performances, these themes surfaced again and again.

Her quirky sense of humor manifested in her first performance piece,

Automotive, produced while passing through Rochester, New York

in 1972. Inspired by the sight of people who stayed in their cars during

a concert at the town green, she mounted a production using blaring car

horns. She describes the resulting concert as "really horrible."

That same year she traveled to Genoa, Italy where she regaled audiences

with her pun inspired Duet on Ice. Always troubled by cold feet

before a performance, she actualized the metaphor by walking across stage

in skates embedded in ice. She played Tchaikovsky on a violin rigged to

"weep water" until the ice melted.

Yet Anderson was more than a conceptual clown. She possessed an emotional

sensibility rare among the heady, philosophical performers in vogue at

the time. The poet Vito Acconci greatly influenced Anderson during this

period. Known for confessional dialogues that often dealt with taboo issues,

Acconci was an outrageous provocateur. His risqu. antics on stage combined

with near stream-of-consciousness sexual musings. Acconci expressed thoughts

most people shared, but were afraid to verbalize. Anderson found this

enormously liberating.

She put some of Acconci’s lessons into practice in As: If, a confessional

piece that dealt with her religious upbringing. Performed at New York’s

Artist’s Space in 1975, Anderson was concerned with the process of memory.

"I was obsessed with making the stories not very interesting,"

she told Howell. Anderson saw her stories as illustrations of the way

the mind weaves patterns into m

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