Laurie Anderson
04/07/2009
She’s a performance artist and musician, and she has been active in the art world since the 60s. She has a very wide-ranging art career. Her first notable performance art piece was in 1969 when she played a symphony using automobile car horns. One interesting fact is that she married Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground in 2008.
When asked what artist she admired, she said this:
“Thomas Pynchon I admire very much. And now I’m using “artist” in the broadest sense of the word. Gravity’s Rainbow is just so beautiful because it’s very multidimensional. I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual. I wanted to make an opera of that book, actually, and I wrote to him and asked him if that would be OK (I actually found him; he’s quite reclusive). And he wrote me this funny letter. He said, ‘You can do it, but you can only use banjo.’ And so I thought, ‘Well, thanks. I don’t know if I could do it like that.’ I suppose it was his polite way of saying, ‘No. No way can you do this.’ “
I thought this was cool since Pynchon is a fan of Spike Jones who is a bit of an early sound artist, integrating unusual sounds such as gunshots, whistles, and cowbells, and ridiculous vocals in his songs.
Laurie Anderson has also been known for inventing instruments to use in her performances. One such instrument is the talking stick, which is a 6-foot batonlike MIDI controller. It is a wireless instrument that can access and replicate any sound. It breaks sound down into tiny segments and plays them back in different ways by rearranging hte fragments into random strings, and then playing them back in overlapping sequences to create new textures.
A single, ‘O Superman’, reached #2 on the UK charts. According to her, this came about quite accidentally.
In response to what she is trying to do with her art, she says:
“I think I do my work for some sadder version of myself, a woman who would be sitting in Row K. I am trying to make her laugh. “
She dislikes Broadway musicals very much.
