Laurie Anderson
° 1947
Born in Chicago, Illinois (US).
Storytelling (recounting your day over dinner), putting on plays, and playing in the family orchestra all formed a large part of Laurie Anderson's childhood. Her twin brothers only composed family songs. "We all loved word games."
Anderson began playing the violin at age seven, an instrument she describes as "the perfect alter ego, the instrument closest to the human voice, the human female voice. It's a siren. I've spent a lot of time teaching the violin to talk."
After winning the Junior Miss Illinois pageant in 1965, she talked about life in America in schools, town halls and at trade shows during a European tour with 50 other American teenagers. Her act consisted of explaining American life while drawing cartoons.
All this, namely language and the expression of ideas, whether in a verbal, auditive, or visual way, in short, the expression of her thoughts, laid the foundation for her experimental performances, which she later became known for. Anderson manipulates language through words, phrases, music, projections and 'storytelling'.
Later that year, she moved to Mills College, after which she ran away the following year to New York to study art history at Barnard College and then sculpture at Columbia University. Anderson took courses in art history with Meyer Shapiro, printmaking with Tony Harrison and philosophy with Arthur Danto. She worked as an art critic for art magazines such as Art Forum and began teaching art history at several colleges in New York. She rubbed shoulders with the composer Philip Glass and also began creating her first objects and sound sculptures.
In 1973, Vito Acconci selected Anderson to stage her first performance, called O-Range, at the New York-based Artists Space, during which she showed some framed panels with handwritten texts and black and white photos. In response to the demolition of Lewisohn Stadium, famous for its jazz and classical concerts, she also created a large-scale, eponymously titled sound installation/performance in which ten of her students recited different stories using megaphones on a deserted site.
During this period, Laurie Anderson travelled to Europe several times to get a sense of what was happening outside New York. In 1977, she participated in Documenta 6 in Kassel. Laurie Anderson's international breakthrough came in 1982 with the single O Superman from her solo album Big Science. She used a vocoder for her surprise hit, which was connected to the Iranian hostage situation and drew on Massenet's operas. The album contained a selection of studio versions of her long performance United States, with which she toured during those years. An unlikely pop star, Anderson was already a pioneer in multimedia performance and installation art, taking the lead in debates about the influence of mass media on the art world.
Her performances, music, installation, films and books are often autobiographical in nature, encouraging a sense of intimacy with her live audience through her meditative tone and calm delivery. Despite this calmness, Anderson's work often features political content and engages with societal issues.
"My work is more about trying to ask good questions and not trying to come up with big shows. Every fashion company is doing that, every car company is doing that."
A recurring theme in her work is the nameless voice she herself called 'The Voice of Authority': a technique in which she deepens her voice into a masculine register using an electronic technique called 'audio drag'." Later, she decided that voice had lost much of its authority and instead began using the voice to provide historical or sociopolitical commentary. On Homeland (2010), the voice was dubbed Fenway Bergamot at the suggestion of her husband, Lou Reed, who died in 2013. The cover of the latter record features Anderson with a black moustache and shaggy eyebrows.
Anderson explained some of her perspective on the character in The Cultural Ambassador (on the album The Ugly One with the Jewels). She makes her voice sound like an - often - male computer voice, voice-over, alien and/or robot spy. Her voice takes on a different role as she shares her personal stories and thoughts, staged with striking images, props, costumes, projections, and lighting, lending her performances a futuristic, almost science-fiction-like character.
In 2002, Anderson became NASA's first-ever artist-in-residence, inspiring the solo performance The End of the Moon.
Since the beginning of her career, Anderson has been hailed as an innovative force in electronic music, inventing new devices and technologies, often the result of taking apart cheap and even silly devices.
She invented the tape bow violin, among others, which uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. She also brought this violin with her to Antwerp in 1979 for a performance at the ICC. In the late 1990s, Anderson collaborated with Interval Research to develop a new instrument called a 'talking stick': a 1.8-metre baton-like MIDI controller that can access or replicate sounds.
"Technology is the campfire around which we tell stories," she says, from her experimentation with tape loops, overdubbing and new recording technology in the 1970s and 80s to her use of projection and experimental theatrical lighting. Anderson introduced a new aesthetic vocabulary in art galleries and performance spaces, collaborating with William Burroughs, Mitchell Froom, Peter Gabriel, Perry Hoberman, David Sylvian, Jean-Michel Jarre and Lou Reed, among others, and, in the late 1970s, with the comedian Andy Kaufman.
She married Lou Reed on 12 April 2008 and went on tour with him and John Zorn.
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