LAURIE ANDERSON
The Wire, March 1992
by Simon Reynolds,
‘Musician’
has never been an adequate description of Laurie Anderson. Her music’s been
successful: she’s still mostly known here for 1981’s ‘O Superman’, which rose
from John Peel cult favour to Number Two in the Hit Parade, complete with Top
Of The Pops dancer cavorting in sub-Daliesque costumes. And it’s been taken
seriously: John Rockwell includes Anderson
in All American Music, his guide to the twenty most distinguished
American composers of the late 20th century. But music’s just one string to
Laurie Anderson’s bow.
When
it was released, ‘O Superman’ was a fragment from a gargantuan
work-in-progress, United
States I-IV. This eight-hour long
multi-media ‘solo opera’, eventually premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music
in 1983, was a category-shattering blend of live and pre-recorded music,
stand-up comedy, schizo-soliloquies, treated vocals, gadgetry, special effects,
slides, films and performance. The Brooklyn
nights’ sonic document, United States Live, has just been issued on CD
for the first time.
Anderson’s post-modern,
polymath approach confounds genre and plays games with gender. Her (loaded
word) ‘mastery’ of technology (computers, samplers, voice modulation
techniques, MIDI systems), her boffin-like
invention of new instruments (like her famous tape bow, where a tape loop is
bowed across a violin which has cassette heads instead of strings) – challenges
the idea (held by essentialist feminists as well as male chauvinists) that the
mechanical/scientific realm is intrinsically masculine. Much of Anderson’s music, with
its electronically generated and processed, denatured textures and its
un-inflected minimalism, doesn’t sound ‘feminine’. Or does it? Hip musicologist
Susan McClary, author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality, has
hailed the refusal of harmonic closure in ‘O Superman’ as a subversion of the
phallocentric, triumphalist structures of Western classical music. Furthermore,
says McClary, ‘Language D’Amour’, also from United States, shuns
the bombastic narrative structures that underpin both classical and rock (tension
leading to explosive release); the track’s proto-ambient house pulsations
recreate in sound the undulating, non-linear, potentially inexhaustible economy
of female jouissance.
"To
tell you the truth, I’ve never been interested in plot," says Laurie Anderson.
We’re sitting in the breakfast room of her spotless, spacious SoHo
apartment, which looks exactly how you’d imagine a New York performance artist’s loft to look.
"I think plot is something that takes all the boring days out and leaves
the exciting ones in. Most real things unravel in a much more textured way. But
that’s not particularly feminine or masculine, I think. Maybe you could make a
case for action-oriented being male, detail-oriented being female. But I’ve
never been interested in these clichés, I don’t find it helpful to put that
grid on what I do."
IRONICALLY, ANDERSON’S
LAST record, 1989’s Strange Angels, was both her most
‘feminine’-sounding and her most jouissance-free. A frilly, twittery
affair, somewhere between Enya and early Kate Bush, the album was sabotaged by Anderson’s misguided
attempts at proper singing. But all this is ancient history to the workaholic
Anderson. Being a Warner Brothers recording artist is just one of many fronts
of activity. This past year she’s been happy to let it recede into the
background.
"It’s
been a very intense year, and the little details I’ve always been interested in
have been so eclipsed by whoever has been writing the script for this last
year. Whoever’s writing the script has a great sense of humour. I’ve never had
a more interesting time in my life. I never wanted to write those kind of songs
that are, y’know, ‘I know who’s pulling the strings, the Big Boys’; there were
aspects of that before, but as backgrounds for odder moments. But for the
last year I‘ve been performing a three hour show called Voices From The
Beyond, all over the country, every week. There’s one minute of music in
it. Before I never had the sensation that what I do is useful. It’s shocking to
me what’s happened in America. It’s totally out of control. And nobody’s really
talking about it in ways that illuminate. When I do the show people say to me
‘are you allowed to go around saying things like this?’! In the talk, I try to
follow threats, and particularly sexual threats, through the country, because
I’m really trying to understand this blend of puritanism and violence. It’s
mainly to do with words and images, the music in it is a sort of ‘pump up the
volume’ adrenalin-boosting thing."
Before,
she was political with a small ‘p’. Now Anderson’s become an ‘engaged’ artist,
if not quite a purveyor of agit-prop.
"I
feel like I can irritate people. I was doing something in Miami last weekend.
Miami’s starting to get an art scene. It’s not like New York, where you’re
watching something die, it’s watching something come to life. But the directors
of this sponsoring organisation brought some people down there who were
terribly angry at what we were doing, because they saw thousands of people
cheering for ideas that were total anathema to them. It deals with a lot of
topics, beginning with the Gulf War and the threats that developed from that.
Because that was the first time I felt a deep, deep alienation. Watching this
country explode into a self-congratulatory orgy was when it really hit me. The
Victory Parades. And bringing up the rear of the Parades, tagging along, were
the Vietnam vets, wearing war-ton outfits and giving Huey Newton power salutes
that no one had seen for 20 years. And then I read a fascinating statistic
about how twice as many Viet vets had committed suicide than actually died
during the war.
"The
talk jumps very quickly from the War to the sex trials to my Grandmother’s
missionary past to Bush’s use of sex, starting with his slogan ‘read my lips’,
which meant that you actually had to look at his lips. Which is a very
unpleasant experience. He could have said ‘take my word for it’ or ‘believe me’
but he established a very erotic relationship with his audience. For me, the
sex trials have been the most amazing thing. The case a few years ago of the
woman who was strangled by her boyfriend in Central Park (and the guy gets
off), the Central Park jogger case, the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings,
the William Kennedy-Smith trial. It’s the exact some thing every time, it’s
like the woman is out of her mind, or lying. I’m finding that a lot of women
are feeling the same way. There are lot of women who’ve been meeting in groups
since the Anita Hill business. At the first meeting of this group of female
artists called Women’s Action Coalition, someone said ‘are we going to have a
policy decision to decide what we’re about, or are we just going to do
something?’. Everybody goes: ‘we’re gonna do something’. So Monday morning
we’re going out to stage a protest at another of these sex trials.
"The
idea for the protest originally occurred to me in connection with a piece I’m
working on for a benefit. I was very struck by the blue dot during the Kennedy
trial, which is this TV effect that blocks out the faces of the rapist’s accuser
when she’s on the stand. My idea was to get 50 women, a kind of Greek chorus,
to hold up blue dots over their faces and testify. Then the protest at this
rape trial arose, so I decided to use the blue dot idea then. Because then you
get the image of the fan as well. There are numerous examples in American films
of court rooms where Southern injustice is being achieved and the women are
fanning themselves. On the black of the dots there’ll be slogans.
"At
this meeting there were a lot of cross-the-board artists, painters, sculptors,
film makers, and it was very thrilling to see the same kind of rage. I haven’t
seen anything like this for many years. The last women’s artist political group
I participated in was in the mid-70s. When I was at this meeting I decided to
open up the piece of music I’m working on to other women artists. So we’re
going to get Nona Hendryx to sing in this thing called The Supremes Court. The
idea is, instead of male judges, it’s The Supremes sitting in judgement on us.
And Karen Finley and Diamanda Galas might be involved in the piece.
"There
are so many raw, personal things involved in sexual harassment and these rape
trials. Half the women in America have been raped. I went out to the Lama
Foundation, this Buddhist compound in New Mexico, to do a little storytelling
workshop. And I got these women to tell stories, and you know. I was sorry I
asked! These women started telling me stories about being sexually abused
as children. And I was not prepared for this, I realised I had zero skills to
help these people. I was horrified, I just began crying. Later I thought that
maybe the kind of people who come to these workshops have stories weighing on
their hearts, so maybe it attracted a disproportionate number of victims. Then
I started reading real statistics, and found that 40 per cent of women were
abused as children. Boys too. It was very deep shock to me. I thought ‘I’m an
artist, I’m supposed to work with images and try to reach these emotional
extremities’. At the same time, I’m also interested in the outside world. My
real subject is the membrane between the personal and the political, how people
use these war-torn backgrounds for the dramatisation of their relationships.
The three-hour talk jumps back and forth between the personal and the
political. Because 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."
IN THE PAST, Anderson’s work has involved playing with and
problematising the idea of America as the promised land, as utopia. United
States is a kind of anthropological work on the folkways of American
hyper-reality. Voices From The Beyond, on the other hand, marks a shift
from such elliptical undoings. A lot of the talk is about "how to imagine
the future. How to move towards the year 2000."
"There
never has been a utopia. It’s always been in your mind, an imaginary creation.
So that’s the kind of thing I’m doing, trying to re-imagine utopia. America’s a
country of Puritans, of extremely puritanical people. And I inherited that. My
ancestors are Puritans who came over from England because the King of England
would not allow them to punish people for playing games on Sunday. So they came
here to exercise this precious right to punish people."
Mind
you, Utopia, as conceived by Thomas More, was no anarchic, free-loving
commune but a legalistic, highly policed, socially-engineered society that
wouldn’t seem very paradisical to us. So it’s probably true that America was
founded to be a more congenial site for a totalitarian theocracy.
"Which
is what I think they ended up creating. But you know, 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 lost our biggest
enemy this year, after 25 years of being told the Russians were coming and
constructing all these Doomsday scenarios with Americans wandering in tribes
through the irradiated ruins of cities. Suddenly, the Russians are over there
saying ‘Hi, we shop at the GAP, we wear jeans, we want to live like you’.
Defining an enemy has always been a confusing thing in America, but necessary.
It’s a cliché to say, but if you don’t have a ‘devil’ out there like Hussein,
who do you hate?
"You
can see this kind of demonisation on many different levels, from the obsession
with abolishing abortion to the movie images that were invoked in these sex
trials, extracted from films like Fatal Attraction, where the woman is
the one who’s the killer. Now women don’t kill that many people, we really
don’t. But in all these films, we’re vampires that are out of our minds and
we’re coming for you with knives. Now who’s manufacturing this stuff? It’s
deeply insane, and so totally interesting."
With
her topical, polemical concerns and busy schedule of protest, Anderson doesn’t have much time for frippery
like the purely aesthetic activities of making music. "I’m working on
stuff that I think will develop into music. But I’m very bad at predicting what
stuff will turn into: it could start out as an opera and turn into a potato
print!" Also in the pipeline is a book, an anthology of extracts from her
entire 20-year career. "It sounds really pompous. But I feel more like a
curator going through somebody else’s stuff. I’m continually surprised by stuff
I’d forgotten about. It’s been really interesting, because I only have a dozen
or so themes that I do over and over again, and one of them is utopia, as you
mentioned. Others are issues of language, airplanes, dogs, angels, authority
figures. Sometimes I wonder if it’s coherent, and then looking back I can see
it’s quite a piece. This book is an overview of my entire oeuvre, and it feels like
I’m writing my own obituary. It’s also a way to get this stuff out of my house.
Because I never throw stuff away, I have thousands of slides and hundreds of
films. I feel this real need to lighten up. What I’d really like to do is have
a radio show, just to get this stuff out in a less ponderous and more timely
way. At the same time, I’m not really a reporter, I like to chew on this stuff
awhile, see what connections emerge."
But
the most interesting project Anderson’s
involved in is a longstanding pipedream of Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno’s called
Real World, a fantastical theme park in Barcelona
that’s still in the planning stage.
"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. And I
think it’s very thrilling. What makes it really fun is going to the meetings
and Peter, Brian and I can just free-associate 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."
FOOTNOTE: During the interview, LA did something I've never seen another smoker do -- which is smoke Marlboro Lights, but tear the filters off before lighting up and inhaling. That would seem to undermine the Lightness rather, I'd have thought.
