Anderson, Laurie

Born in 1947 in Wayne, Illinois, she is an American performance artist, composer, and writer whose work explores a remarkable range of media and subject matter. She began studying classical violin at the age of five and later performed with the Chicago Youth Symphony. In 1966 she moved to New York, where she attended Barnard College (BA, 1969) and Columbia University (MFA, 1972). For two years she taught art history at the City University of New York.

One of her early performance art pieces was Automotive (1972), for which she orchestrated car horns at the Town Green in Rochester, Vermont. In Duets on Ice, another early piece, she wore ice skates frozen in blocks of ice; she then proceeded to play a duet with herself on an altered violin that she described as like a “ventriloquist’s dummy” – she replaced the bow hair with prerecorded audiotape and the strings with a tape head. The piece ended as soon as the ice melted.

To support her work in performance art, Anderson worked as a freelance interviewer and art critic for ARTnews and Artforum. By 1974 she had received several grants that gave her more freedom to pursue her artistic explorations. She came to rely on a driving rock beat as a backdrop to many of her word-oriented pieces; this led to a musical single, It’s Not the Bullet at Kills You – It’s the Hole (1977). Another song, the eight-minute O Superman (1981), reached the number two spot on England’s pop charts. She released the recordings You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With (1981), Big Science (1982), and Mister Heartbreak (1984) before producing a massive four-part multimedia extravaganza, United States I–IV. It combined music, photography, film, drawings, and animation with text and consisted of 78 segments organised into four sections: “Transportation,” “Politics,” “Money,” and “Love.” First performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983, it ran for more than six hours and employed more than 1,200 photos, cartoons, and films. She used some of the same material again in writing, directing, and performing in the film Home of the Brave (1986). Anderson collaborated on Set and Reset (1983) with visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and choreographer Trisha Brown, whose dance company premiered the piece. Anderson’s later recordings include Strange Angels (1989), Bright Red (1994), and The Ugly One with the Jewels and Other Stories (1995).

In 1994 a book of her work was published entitled Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective, 1972–92. A year later Anderson embarked on a multimedia tour entitled The Nerve Bible, in which she read excerpts from the retrospective book and incorporated elements of music, comedy, illusion, dance, film, songs, and a simulated tornado into her performance. In 1995 she also crafted, with designer Hsin-Chien Huang, the highly complex interactive CD-ROM Puppet Motel (1995). Anderson next toured in 1999 with Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, a multimedia musical event. She later served as NASA’s artist in residence (2002–4) and the experience inspired her one-woman show The End of the Moon, which debuted in 2004. Her other projects include The Waters Reglitterized (2005), an installation inspired by her dreams, and the albums Life on a String (2001) and Homeland (2010). Anderson also collaborated on the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.

Her latest works include the show Another Day in America (2012) and film Heart of a Dog (2015). Laurie Anderson has often partnered other musicians, including Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed (her long-time partner whom she married in 2008), Brian Eno, Ryūichi Sakamoto, Jean-Michel Jarre, Philip Glass, Adrian Belew, and Hector Zazou.