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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

APRIL 22, 1994

A storyteller with an electronic edge

by Doreen Cudnik

"The best thing about the term 'performance art' is that it's so ambiguous. It includes just about everything you might want to do."

-Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson has amazed, challenged, and delighted audiences with her unique multi-media performances and recordings since her emergence in the early Eighties as America's most recognized performance artist.

Born in Chicago, the second of eight children, she was encouraged from an early age to be artistic. She studied classical violin, and played with the Chicago Youth Symphony. She graduated in 1969 from Barnard with a degree in art history and earned her master of fine arts in sculpture from Columbia in 1972. She lived and hung out in SoHo with other artists in a time that she recalls as "weird and wonderfully open. You didn't have to be a professional anything, it was enough you were an artist."

After several years of performance on the art world circuit, her song "O Superman" became a major pop hit in 1980, climbing to Number Two on the charts in England and attracting the attention of larger audiences here and worldwide.

Often described as avant-garde, Laurie says, "I don't think my work is avant-garde; I'm just a storyteller, the oldest profession of all." And a fascinating one at that--with her inventive blend of electronics, striking visual imagery, original music, and pointed anecdotes, she has created a singular vision of performing art for our time. Anderson works as a performer, composer, poet, photographer, vocalist, writer and recording artist, and her artwork has been shown at major museums throughout America and Europe.

On Tuesday, April 12, Anderson brought her scaled-down tour to Kent State University Auditorium. Billed as a "Small Hall Spoken Word Engagement" she read from her book Stories from the Nerve Bible, a retrospective of her work from 1972 to 1992. In the book's introduction, Anderson describes it as "a collection of the various voices I've used to speak for me. Some of them speak foreign languages or stutter. Others mutter, complain, lecture, and yell. Some sing. I've written them down, trying to bring them back to life."

She used those voices that evening to share with us her vision of the future by taking us on a tour of the past. In an informal question and answer period after the performance, she said she likes the “strippeddown" feeling of a small venue such as Kent State's auditorium. She brought only the basic electronic instruments, effects, and gadgetry with her, which still produced amazing sounds. Having a love/hate relationship with technology, she worries sometimes that her full scale multi-media performances have the look and feel of a "huge electronics trade show."

"Technology today," she says, "is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There's this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive." Some of the ideas that surface in this particular work are those of time and timelessness, the future, and whether or not things are getting better or worse.

Her work has always jumped back and forth between the personal and the political, because, she says, "Politics is extremely personal. You feel strongly about certain issues, and it's a question of what you're afraid of. And now politics are getting extremely personal because, especially for women, it's a question of getting crushed. And silenced." Much of the talk is about "how to imagine the future. How to move towards the year 2000."

"There never has been a utopia," she tells us, "so that's the kind of thing I'm doing, trying to re-imagine utopia. I always used to think, what would it have been like when Rome fell? And now you can see it. It is

spectacular, these death throes. And they are death throes, believe me. But it's a lot better than being asleep, which is what the 80s were about. The 80s was like being in a coma. I find the current situation breathtaking. But things happen so fast that people can't adjust to it. For example, we recently lost our biggest enemy, after 25 years of being told the Russians were coming and constructing all these Doomsday scenarios... suddenly, the Russians are over there saying 'Hi, we shop at the Gap, we wear jeans, we want to live like you.' It's cliche to say, but if you don't have a 'devil' out there like Saddam Hussein, for example, then who do you hate?"

There has always been a comedic twist to her work. She has an uncanny ability to tell truths about the condition of the world while delivering it in such a way that makes you laugh as well as think. In "Empty Places" (1989), she describes what she recalls as the "last strictly political thing I ever did.” At a large demonstration at the Playboy Club, it was her job to explain to the press what they were doing there. "So we're marching around with these big signs and once in a while we'd stop and I'd explain to the reporters that we were marching to protest the way women were being exploited economically like animals and I had drawn up some pamphlets to illustrate this, pictures of chicks and bunnies and foxes and pussy cats and other animals that had come to symbolize women and I was handing them out.

"So, we're marching around the club and this woman, one of the bunnies, was just getting to work and she saw us blocking the entrance and she said, 'So hey, what's going on?'

"And I said, 'Well, we're here to protest the economic exploitation and the treatment of women as animals,' and I gave her one of the free pamphlets.

"And she said, 'Listen, honey, I make eight hundred dollars a week at this job. I've got three kids to support. This is the best job I've ever had. So if you want to talk about women and money, why don't you go down to the garment district where women make ten cents an hour and why don't you march around down there?'

"And I said: "Hmmmmmmm.'”

Her work requires her to be a spy of sorts, to eavesdrop and tap into various conversations, attitudes and trends of American culture. "People seem to respond to my work as if I'm saying something they already know," Anderson says. "As if they'd thought these things but never said them." Her observations about the Gulf War were both frightening and telling in regards to how the media can whip us into a frenzy of national pride. In "Voices from the Beyond" (1991), she shares her thoughts as she watched the Gulf War victory parade in New York. "Suddenly tanks were driving through my neighborhood and all these people dressed up like sports fans were running around screaming hysterically about being Numero Uno. But it wasn't until later after the victory parades were over that I had time to wonder, wait a second! Why was the Gulf War presented by only one TV network? One that trumpeted the event with super graphics and a thunderous patriotic soundtrack? What happened to all the other reporters? The Gulf War was an unqualified success because no one was allowed to question it seriously. It was of course presented as a show, an ad, a drama."

While traveling around Europe during the Gulf War, she noted the attitude of the Europeans who were "all talking about the effectiveness, no, the beauty, the elegance of the American strategy of pinpoint bombing, the high-tech surgical approach which was being reported on CNN as something between grand opera and the Super Bowl ..."

In Night in Baghdad, she writes about the euphoria surrounding the bombings:

"Oh it's so beautiful,

it's like the Fourth of July

It's like a Christmas

tree, it's like fireflies On a hot summer night. And I wish I could describe this to you better

But I can't talk very well right now 'cause I've Got this damned gas mask on.

So I'm just going to stick this

microphone

Laurie Anderson

Out the window and see if we can't hear a little better. . .” As we move into the uncertain future, Anderson is currently finishing work on her next album for Warner Brothers (produced by Brian Eno) for a summer '94 release. Upon wrapping up her spring series of readings from Stories from the Nerve Bible, she will put together an American tour of a major live multi-media performance for the fall of 1994, following the release of the record.

Her most exciting forthcoming project is an art/music theme park to be called Real World. It has been a long-planned collaborative effort with Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno. They have recently secured a deed on 100 acres in the center of Barcelona, Spain.

"We're trying to build a park that has no model. A park designed by artists. It's a new way to put art in a public space without locking it into a museum. What makes it really fun is going to the meetings and Peter, Brian and I can just free associate

ANNIE LEIBOWITZ

and people take us seriously. You can say something like 'how about if a large black cloud hovers over the park and triggers a forest of talking trees' and some guy actually writes down 'research large, black cloud and talking trees...' So then you think, 'okay, that was much too easy, I'm going to give you guys something difficult.' There was an image in my previous performance, 'Empty Places,' of a Ferris wheel that's half in and half out of the water. And we're actually going to build this thing. So for me this is literally your subconscious come true."

One last question that people often ask her is "Is this stuff actually true?" The answer is yes, she says, except of course for the songs. "For example, I never really saw a host of angels mowing down my lawn. I don't even have a lawn. It just seems like I do sometimes."

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