Laurie Anderson (avant-garde artist)

Musician, artist

• Born: June 5, 1947
• Place of Birth: Glen Ellyn, Illinois

Education: Barnard College; Columbia University

Significance: Laurie Anderson is an American musician, artist, and filmmaker. An accomplished classical violin player, Anderson first entered New York's performing arts scene in the 1970s and quickly became known for her avant-garde approach to performance art. She often used new technologies, some of which she invented herself, alongside her visual and musical art. She also released multiple studio albums throughout her career. Anderson has dabbled in filmmaking and has composed music for film. She directed the 2015 film Heart of a Dog, which featured an original soundtrack by her. In 2024, she released an album, had a major exhibition, and debuted a stage show.

Background

Laurie Anderson was born on June 5, 1947, in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, Illinois. As a teen, she played the violin and later moved to New York to pursue a music career and study at Barnard College. She graduated in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in art history. She then earned a master of fine arts in sculpture from Columbia University in 1972. For several years after earning her master's degree, Anderson taught art history and Egyptian architecture at City College. During this period, she also began mounting performance art pieces that featured music and visual art, presenting her first show in 1973.

Within a few years, Anderson was performing a steady stream of shows in museums, concert halls, and arts festivals across the United States and Europe. Her performances had evolved to include new music and art technology. Her 1980 piece "Born, Never Asked" featured orchestral and electronic compositions. Anderson's career entered the greater spotlight the following year with the release of her single "O Superman." The eleven-minute song featured Anderson half-speaking, half-singing lyrics to the sound of electronic drones, and the track occasionally electronically manipulated the sound of Anderson's voice. The single was a huge hit in Great Britain, where it reached the number two spot on the UK charts.

The success of "O Superman" caught the attention of music executives, and soon Anderson had signed a record deal with Warner Bros. She released her first full-length album, Big Science, in 1982. The album was essentially a condensed version of a seven-hour performance arts piece she had created titled United States. Anderson's sophomore album, 1984's Mister Heartbreak, took a step back from her avant-garde tendencies, resulting in a much more pop-oriented production. The record featured collaborations with musicians such as Peter Gabriel and Adrian Belew, and the product managed to land a spot on the American top 100 charts.

Life's Work

The year 1984 also saw Anderson release a live recording of her United States performance piece, which was split into five LPs as a box set. Her next project was a concert film titled Home of the Brave, released in 1986. She also composed the soundtrack to the 1987 film Swimming to Cambodia, directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Spalding Gray. Anderson did not release another full-length studio album until 1989's Strange Angels. She then embarked on several years of performance touring. In 1990, she toured her show Empty Places. She then brought her performance piece Voices from the Beyond to the stage in 1991. This was followed by 1993's Nerve Bible.

Anderson collaborated with musicians Brian Eno and Lou Reed for her next release, 1994's Bright Red. The following year, she released a spoken-word album titled The Ugly One with Jewels. Anderson also released a CD-ROM that year called Puppet Motel, a display of the progressive artist's enthusiasm for the latest technologies. She decided to take a break from recording following these releases, and she did not release another full-length album for seven years. During her time off, she fulfilled her creative desires through other media. She wrote the entry for New York for the Encyclopædia Britannica. She also produced a program entitled Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, which featured Anderson using her violin to voice the giant whale from the novel Moby Dick. Anderson developed her own piece of technology for the show called a talking stick, a type of wireless sound sampler.

Anderson returned to the recording studio in 2001 and later issued Life on a String, which contained songs from her musical theater shows and included music from Songs and Stories from Moby Dick. That same year, she recorded a live event at Town Hall in New York City just over a week after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She released the album in 2002 as Live at Town Hall New York City, September 19–20, 2001. Although she would not issue another studio album for some time, Anderson kept herself busy with performance art. In 2004, she was commissioned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to create a space-themed performance art piece. NASA named Anderson its artist in residence and gave her a $20,000 budget to complete her project during a two-year tenure. The finished product was titled The End of the Moon, a ninety-minute monologue about the vastness and unknowability of space.

Anderson released her next studio album, Homeland, in late 2010. Throughout the 2010s, the artist worked on a number of projects, including a film titled Heart of a Dog. The film meditated on the feelings of grief and loss following the death of Anderson's dog. Released in 2015, the film also featured a soundtrack composed by Anderson.

Her next album, Landfall, was released in 2018. The collaboration with the Kronos Quartet is the soundtrack for a multimedia project on Hurricane Sandy. Songs from the Bardo was released the following year. This consists of an eighty-minute improvisational work with Jesse Paris Smith and Tenzin Choegyal.

Anderson has collaborated with experts at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning at the University of Adelaide. It created an artificial intelligence (AI) Laurie Anderson and used it to generate the stories of the Bible in her style. In 2020, Anderson and the Institute's staff input interviews, songs, and writings by her husband, Lou Reed, who had died in 2013. Although she had to leave Australia because of the global COVID-19 outbreak, the experiment continued and cultivated in a Reed chatbot. It enabled Anderson to type in prompts, to which the Reed AI responded in writing. It produced prose and verse. In 2024, she said that she could not stop using the chatbot but did not think of it as talking to her late husband. She occasionally found a kernel of inspiration in the responses that she could use in her work. In March 2024, works generated by AI Laurie Anderson and AI Lou Reed were exhibited at the State Library of South Australia in the show I'll Be Your Mirror.

In 2024, Anderson released the album Amelia. It fictionally charts the final flight of aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. She was preparing a new state show for November 2024. ARK: United States Part 5 combined visuals, stories, and old and new music. It was an addition to her 1980s multimedia project, United States Parts 1-4. Some of the themes of the new work included AI, love, and environmental destruction, as well as how humankind might change the course of climate change and survive.

Impact

Anderson's groundbreaking music career has inspired countless music and visual artists over the years. Her work has received more attention on a global scale than any avant-garde performance artist of her time. Anderson's contributions to the electronic music genre include the invention of several musical devices, including her talking stick, a tape-bow violin, and a number of voice filters. Anderson hoped her work would evoke honest reactions from her audience, and she utilized a number of creative mediums to achieve her goals. In January 2024, she received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award. She was also awarded a Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2024.

Personal Life

Anderson was married to Lou Reed from 2008 until his death in 2013.

Bibliography

Anderson, Laurie. Interview by Dave Simpson. The Guardian, 22 Aug. 2024, www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/aug/22/laurie-anderson-us-artist-musician-amelia-earhart. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Davis, Peter G. "Weird Science." New York, 14 Mar. 2015, nymag.com/nymetro/arts/music/classical/reviews/11298/. Accessed 25 Sept. 2017.

"Encyclopædia Anderson." New Yorker, 16 July 2001, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/16/encyclopaedia-anderson. Accessed 25 Sept. 2017.

Fletcher, Kenneth R. "Laurie Anderson." Smithsonian, Aug. 2008, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/laurie-anderson-779875/. Accessed 25 Sept. 2017.

Gross, Terry. "Laurie Anderson Reflects on Life and Loss in 'Heart of a Dog.'" NPR, www.npr.org/2015/11/19/456655545/laurie-anderson-reflects-on-life-and-loss-in-heart-of-a-dog. Accessed 25 Sept. 2017.

Hermes, Will. "Electronic Expressions in the Service of the Soul." New York Times, 25 June 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/arts/music/27laurie.html?‗r=0. Accessed 25 Sept. 2017.

"Laurie Anderson." AllMusic, 2024, www.allmusic.com/artist/laurie-anderson-mn0000785773. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Marsh, Walter. "Laurie Anderson on Making an AI Chatbot of Lou Reed: 'I'm Totally, 100%, Sadly Addicted.'" The Guardian, 28 Feb. 2024, www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/28/laurie-anderson-ai-chatbot-lou-reed-ill-be-your-mirror-exhibition-adelaide-festival. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Spilsbury, Joe. "What to Expect from Laurie Anderson's New Stage Show, 'ARK: United States Part 5." Crack, 22 July 2024, crackmagazine.net/2024/07/laurie-andersons-new-stage-show-ark/. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.