Laurie Anderson: Visionary Pioneer of Media Art by Charles Amirkhanian

Laurie Anderson has pursued her evolving artistic practice with a determination borne aloft by joyful, insatiable curiosity. At 75, she continues to mine her observations of the real world equally with imagery summoned from her dreams and imagination to communicate stories rich with symbolism, and replete with irony, bemusement, satire, gentle outrage, plus her very personal brand of speculative futurism. Ars Electronica celebrates her career accomplishments with this year’s Golden Nica award for lifetime achievement as a Visionary Pioneer of Media Art.
As a practitioner of electronic and media arts, she is a leader in adopting emerging technical innovations. Her creation of a special violin with magnetic recording tape replacing the horsehair of the bow enabled her to play a vocal sound “say” on a downbow and “yes” on the upbow. Another invented violin enabled her to play a spinning disc with her bow.

She was an early adopter of the vocoder, and later, the Eventide Harmonizer, which enabled her to speak live onstage in the lowered voice of a male airline pilot or to speak at specific musical pitches or in chords. That real-time transformation, little-known at the time, was striking both theatrically and musically. But no matter the tools, her work is always distinguished by a personalized, down-to-earth, hands-on approach that communicates vividly to countless fans and followers. Laurie Anderson’s dynamic ascent from 1973 to the present situated her in the center of the emerging form of performance art—an intermedium that embraces any and all artistic media. And Anderson has essayed them all: music performance and composition; prose, poetry and song-writing; painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, motion pictures, artists’ books, and installations; choreography and movement; theatrical spectacle; and digital media, from video and interactive DVDs, forward to Virtual Reality environments. VR has now become a major focus of her work, and there’s a good reason why.
Writing in 2019 about her installation To the Moon, made with story-telling VR artist Hsin-Chien Huang for the Manchester International Festival, she explained, “As an artist and performer, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with stages and screens and more and more interested in immersive works— music you can walk into and images that completely surround you. I also love long extended drone work that fills the physical space and the imagination, and art that is composed and completed by the listener/viewer, who walks into it and experiences it viscerally, emotionally and intellectually.” This new medium, however, has forced her to re-orient certain assumptions about the creative process. “In working with VR, I’ve had to relearn many of the things I know about narrative and stories. In VR, the beginning, middle and end are shifting states, not sequential ones. I find this way of being in time increasingly interesting and actually true to life.”

Not only is that disorientation true to life, it points to another reason Anderson’s story-telling is so compelling—even hypnotic. In her writing, the focus will change abruptly from one subject to another, replicating our own thought patterns and offering references that challenge us to connect the dots. This is the very essence of Surrealism— seemingly illogical sequences of images, resolving dream and reality into an absolute, or superreality.

You know when the Egyptians built their steam trains They didn’t have any fuel to burn— no wood, no trees anywhere. But they did have a lot of old mummy rags lying around So they gathered up all the rags and burned them in their trains Yeah, they burned their ancestors for fuel. Ooo, I’m a crocodile floating down the river I'm a tree catching my own oranges as they fall from my head I'm a little teapot short and stout Tip me over and pour me out
from “One Beautiful Evening,” Live at Town Hall album

In 1984, describing her writing process, Anderson stated, “I try to be in a receptive mood. I suppose I mesmerize myself to write the songs. But the most important thing to me is the words. That’s what I consider my main work: The way the words fit together.”
Musician, April 1984, interview with Joshua Bae

So, opening her mind to the reception of disparate thoughts—a kind of concentrated meditation—is essential to her process. Composing these memories into resonant sequences is the artistic process. I was privileged to discover Laurie Anderson’s work just before her emergence as a national and international figure. In 1977, while producing an LP anthology of electronic music by American women composers. I had nearly completed the compilation when I ran into Philip Glass in the cafeteria of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. I told him the names of the composers I had selected, including Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, and Laurie Spiegel, and asked him if he could think of anyone interesting I’d omitted. “No, that sounds great, Charles.” But as I walked out the door I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Wait,” he said. “There’s this girl . . .” He proceeded to urge me to write to Laurie Anderson in New York, which I did. A five-inch reel of tape soon arrived in my mailbox from the composer containing five short songs, two of which I selected for the anthology—"New York Social Life” and “Time to Go.” A letter accompanying the tape thanked me and referenced a previous LP I’d produced with American sound poets. It concluded, “I really liked the other anthology you did. I thought it was very straight through listening—not chopped up.” (Letter to C.A. March 3, 1977) Hearing Laurie’s music for the first time made a profound and immediate impression. Her “songs” were carefully constructed with just the right formal balance and inventiveness to rivet the attention. This, I learned later, was a by-product of a perfectionism evident to me when I witnessed her dress rehearsals, working for hours right up until curtain time so that nothing was left to chance. While the sound and lighting staff were learning their cues, Laurie would rehearse her lines from memory, drilling herself to replicate every nuance of verbal expression and emphasis that she intended.

In those early days, she would arrive with her 35mm slides to be projected, pre-recorded elements on tape, her tape-bow violin, and then have to rehearse with whatever technical crew could be mustered by the host producer. At Mills College in 1978, she performed in the cafeteria building, emptied of tables, with a small audience of perhaps 35 witnesses, and it was apparent that the student stage assistants were not quite able to keep up with her requirements. But the glory of the performance was its irrepressibly inventive content. Amusement and admiration was our response, and after the concert some of us gathered around her for a photo to document our having witnessed what we understood to have been a pivotal event.
Subsequently I invited Anderson to perform at the summer 1979 Cabrillo Music Festival in Aptos, California, where Dennis Russell Davies served as Music Director. This sparked a long and fruitful collaboration between two of the most brilliant minds of their generation. A memorable moment found Laurie, 32, as the youngest member of a distinguished panel of composers including Virgil Thomson and Lou Harrison.

Less than a year later, Dennis, as pianist, was accompanying the African-American lyric tenor Charles Holland, long exiled from the U.S. due to racism and returning home for the first time in three decades. Laurie happened to be in town, workshopping her first orchestral commission with conductor/composer Robert Hughes and the Oakland Youth Symphony, and I asked her if she wanted to come with me to a church in Berkeley to hear the concert. That evening, Holland had programmed a recital of art songs by Beethoven, Mahler, Fauré, and Vaughan Williams. But things were not going well at first for the 70-year-old singer.
Laurie was struck by the struggle Holland was having settling himself throughout the first half until the last number. “Charles was really nervous. He kept dropping the music paper, dropping his glasses. Finally, he began to sing “Ô Souverain” by Massenet . . . basically a prayer for help.” (Anderson, Stories from the Nerve Bible) It was at that point that Holland regained his confidence, and his still-youthful voice burst into sublime eloquence. Anderson was electrified by the transformation. The event, which didn’t strike me at the time as memorable, turned out to be pivotal for the ever-observant Laurie, seated next to me. A week later, while composing Born, Never Asked, her orchestral work-in-progress, she produced a fascinating ostinato pattern based on a repeating “ah ah ah ah” voice loop. Anderson then fashioned some lyrics, obliquely based on her recollection of the Massenet song, to match that rhythm. The resulting song, “O Superman,” was performed solo as a segment of her new orchestral work at the grand, fully-restored art deco Paramount Theater in Oakland, California, on May 17, 1980.
When the music was released shortly thereafter as a solo song on a single disc, it rocketed to number two on the British pop charts. Thus, she was swept to fame and a lucrative record contract with Warner Brothers that afforded her the construction of a recording studio inside her New York loft. From that point forward, she would have the luxury of the unlimited studio time she needed to hone and perfect her next musical efforts.
Laurie Anderson’s art generally has favored short, song-form compositions gathered into ambitious theatrical suites. Her métier is aphorisms, short stories, and songs, not novels or symphonies. Her visual subjects reference the whole of art history from cave paintings to the present, but her lyrics are as likely to quote overheard street conversations as Ludwig Wittgenstein. Over the years, Anderson has built an impressive catalogue of plain-spoken but sophisticated tales that bring out the child in each of us. She shares her wonder at how bizarre ordinary life can be; she can simply walk out onto a city street with wide open eyes to engage creatively.

Hers is a communicative art—deeply personal, yet grounded in common experience and amplified through her extraordinary imagination. Contrast that with much of our digital and computer art with its sterile, laboratory patina, to understand her popularity across widely different audience groups.
In 1984 I had the pleasure of interviewing her onstage in San Francisco at the Exploratorium’s Speaking of Music series in the 1000-seat Palace of Fine Arts Theater.
Laurie arrived fully prepared as usual, with a series of musical illustrations ready to play back for the audience. She discussed her new album Mister Heartbreak, her influence from Word Jazz radio storyteller and fellow Chicagoan Ken Nordine, and her attraction to the complex displaced accents in Cuban popular music. Laurie’s entertaining presentation was documented on a nationally-syndicated radio broadcast preserved by Other Minds: https://archive.org/details/CMF_1979_08_23
When I co-produced the Composer-to-Composer Festival in July 1990 in the rarified high mountain air of Telluride, Colorado, American artists had been roiled by the emergence of right-wing censorship in the awarding of grants from their country’s National Endowment for the Arts. The conservative senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, had led a movement to prevent controversial artists from obtaining governmental support, citing Laurie’s friend photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as one of the chief offenders. The prominent guest composers in Telluride that year included Henry Brant, Pauline Oliveros, Roger Reynolds, James Tenney, and others. But our American grievance over withdrawn governmental support to individual artists unexpectedly paled in significance when we heard brutal stories from Chinese composer Ge Gan-ru and Balinese composer I Wayan Sadra. Both of them had experienced life-threatening governmental interference in response to their work.

Following long discussions about artistic freedom, it was left to our eldest composer, Henry Brant, to refine the language of a proclamation that all the guest composers enthusiastically signed, asserting the right of artists to express themselves without fear of repression.
But it was Laurie who phoned United Press International and convinced a reporter to announce our statement. A syndicated story went out the next day, reprinted in papers across the country, with the headline, “Telluride Composers Denounce Jesse Helms.” Laurie had leveraged her celebrity effectively in an act of generosity that was widely appreciated. Her appearance on a panel discussing censorship is documented here: https://archive.org/details/CTC_1990_07_14_2

Laurie Anderson has made it clear on many occasions that she avoids prescriptions for fixing the world. As a Buddhist practitioner, she knows better than to try. But she generously lends her support to social, environmental, and political causes that move her. And, like most true artists, she is not content to be told what she can and can’t do in her work. That determination was on display during her participation in creating the Telluride manifesto affirming artistic freedom. It also came into play when she was asked to present a retrospective in 2021 of her visual work at the Hirschhorn Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
Defying expectations of the curators, she produced instead an ambitious multi-room exhibit of new work, integrating earlier inventions and images, which has garnered enthusiastic international attention. Especially notable is a reprise of her striking all-black room covered with new white drawings and inscriptions hand-painted by Anderson—part of a virtual reality project that is dazzling in its intensity and scope.

Over the years, I’ve been thrilled to watch Anderson’s career blossom, with an impressive series of brilliant recordings, theatrical performances, artists books, and a stunning feature film Heart of a Dog, centered on her pet rat terrier Lolabelle. Laurie’s partnership and marriage to the late rock guitarist Lou Reed was energizing and a great source of comfort and inspiration, and recently she has worked successfully to preserve his legacy in conjunction with the New York Public Library and by curating some of his unpublished recordings for release in 2022 on the label Light in the Attic. When called upon during the pandemic in 2021 to present the prestigious series of six Norton Lectures at Harvard, she responded to the challenge by turning them into fanciful Zoom performances replete with beautiful visual backdrops and inventive musical manipulations.
Laurie Anderson’s life and work serves as an inspiration now to four generations of art lovers and especially to many younger artists, revealing a way forward that embraces the tools of evolving technology and employing them toward humanistic ends. Her creations consistently reawaken our sense of wonder. She is, without question, a most deserving recipient of the 2022 lifetime achievement award from Ars Electronica as a Visionary Pioneer of Media Art.

Ars Electronica 2022 recognizes New York-based artist Laurie Anderson as a “Visionary Pioneer of Media Art” whose extensive oeuvre always deals with the relationship between people and technology and is characterized by a high degree of sociopolitical engagement. She is a musician, composer, filmmaker, author, and media artist who is nearly unrivalled in her ability to transcend and merge the various genres, thus becoming one of the most influential and style-defining icons of the mediaart avant-garde.

“I say I tell stories. And those look like paintings sometimes. They look like, you know, songs. They look like films. They’re just stories. What is a story? What is its function? How does it work? Who’s telling it? To who?” Laurie Anderson in an interview with Anderson Cooper, CBS, 2022

Born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, on June 5, 1947, Laurie Anderson began playing violin as a child, performing violin concertos with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra. In the mid-1960s she moved to New York, first studying art history at Barnard College and then sculpture at Columbia University. Her first performance piece—a symphony played on car horns—was performed in 1969. In the 1970s she began establishing herself as a performance artist, creating media installations and developing her own style of performative storytelling. In 1977 she made the first recordings of her works and achieved sudden fame in 1981/82 with O Superman, which reached number two on the UK singles chart, and the LP Big Science. From the analog electronics of her early interfaces and instruments to the first digital synthesizers and samplers, she was never satisfied with the possibilities of existing devices, instead building her own personal instruments with which she became a pioneer of electronic music. Essential components of her performances from the very beginning were the violin and, above all, her voice, which were simultaneously her instruments as well as the subjects of her constant experimentation and exploration. A legendary Laurie Anderson creation was the “tape-bow violin,” a violin she made into a tape recorder by using recording tape in the bow and a magnetic tape head in the bridge, thus developing the practice of utilizing recorded loops and collages of early electro-acoustic music into an instrument for her live performances. Her use of the vocoder, with which she transported her voice into the world of electronic sound and generated her absolutely distinctive signature sound as her artistic trademark, had a lasting influence on style.

Laurie Anderson has created numerous performances and elaborate multimedia stage works, such as the eight-hour solo opera United States I – IV (1983) and Songs and Stories for Moby Dick (1999). The tour to promote the release of the 2001 album Life on a String made a stop at New York’s Town Hall only a few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Despite the dramatic events, Laurie Anderson decided to go ahead with the performance, including several of her older works as well. “I have often written about loss, betrayal, death, technology, anger and angels. I felt as if I had written the songs only yesterday… and now suddenly I am singing about the absolute present.” In 2002, she became NASA’s first artist-in-residence, which culminated in her tour performance The End of the Moon. She presented her performance project Homeland on a two-year worldwide tour in 2008/09, and it was released as an album in 2010. Laurie Anderson has a particular fondness for dogs. In 2010 she gave her first concert exclusively for dogs outside the Sydney Opera House. In 2015 she released both an album called Heart of a Dog and a film with the same title, which was selected for the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals. Her 2018 chamber music piece Landfall was inspired by her experiences with Hurricane Sandy, which ripped through Central and North America in 2012 and destroyed much of her archive of work and memorabilia. In addition to her career as a musician and singer, Laurie Anderson has made numerous films and published several books, and her visual works have been presented in major museums around the world. In recent years, she has designed VR installations and composed music for symphony orchestra. In 2021 she was appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor for Poetry at Harvard University.