Laurie Anderson, the wild joy of performing arts

It is difficult to summarise Laurie Anderson’s profession with a single adjective, and it is too vague to simply describe her as an artist. To be sure, she certainly is one—and often of an excellent standard—but over a career spanning almost fifty years, she has expressed herself as a violinist, sculptor, painter, comic-book author, singer, director, actress, teacher, choreographer, art critic and, more generally, a performing artist. “Creating performing art,” she says enthusiastically, “means doing something filled with a wild joy that you cannot put into words.” She has also invented a number of instruments, modifying household objects for her electronic music compositions – a field in which she has been a pioneer: among the most innovative is the so-called ‘talking stick’, a stick nearly two metres long capable of reproducing sounds. Anderson is a cheerful and generous woman for whom optimism is, above all, a choice, and her admirable intellectual curiosity leads her to pursue with passion anything that might reveal something new to her or help her understand further nuances of something she already knows. She has agreed to take part in this series of conversations, starting with her earliest memory.

“I remember the sky. Vast, empty and bright. I must have been in a pushchair parked on the lawn. It was the plains of the US Midwest, and the sky took up 180 degrees of my field of vision. Horizon all around. I remember the very real feeling, the conviction that I had come from the sky and that I would return there. The sky is always present in my songs. Sometimes in the form of questions.

What are days for? To wake us up. To break up the endless nights.

“What are nights for? To drift through time. Into another world.”

“I am someone who has a real need for teachers. I seek them out and often find them in the most unlikely places. My art teacher in Year 1 wasn’t our regular teacher, nor was she part of the school system. She came from somewhere else, from another part of the city. Once a week she would burst through the door wearing a large, wide-brimmed hat and carrying a bag full of things to draw: seaweed, crumpled paper, bits of a telephone. The thing I remember most clearly was that she came and went as she pleased. Our lives were governed by what were called bells, but they sounded like cicadas. They’d ring and we’d put down our pencils; they’d ring and we’d go out for break; they’d ring and we’d file back in from break. So, when our art teacher came rushing in, ten minutes before or after the cicada rang, we could already sense that the rules were being suspended. ‘Children!’ she’d say. ‘Let’s paint some very big tomatoes! They don’t even have to look like tomatoes! Just imagine what they’re like. You could put loads of juice dripping all over them!’ Then she’d walk round the classroom, scrutinising our paintings, and disappear before the bell rang. And I thought: ‘I want to be that person! I want to leave before the bell rings.’”

“I’ve never been afraid of the stage. I love being with people, telling stories and playing music for them. I want people to be relaxed but at the same time open-minded and curious. My absolute favourite part is waiting backstage behind a curtain before the show. It feels so ridiculous hiding there, waiting to pop out. ‘Hello everyone!’ The performance is also a good way to edit. I always shine a light on the front rows so I can watch people’s expressions. If people start dozing off or staring at the ceiling, I consider cutting that section out. Not that I want to please people, but I work in a time-based art form and I don’t want to waste people’s time. As for who I’m speaking to, I’d say I’m speaking to the part of you that never speaks.”

“I’d like to have a routine, but I try to pay as much attention as possible throughout each day and to remain open to unfamiliar things as often as possible.”

“Fortunately, I’ve no idea. But I imagine there are countless singers, painters, sculptors, weavers, writers and dancers who have never had the chance to step into the limelight. That thought always puts me in a good mood. Armies of creators!”

“I don’t want to share it with anyone!”

“With Americans, I can speak in code using subtle cues, slang and gestures. But when I have to perform for people who speak English as a second or third language, I use broader terms and tend to simplify things, which often leads me to greater truths.”

“Wagner. But I try not to analyse artists on the basis of their ‘ideas’ unless these are so fully embodied in their work that they cannot be ignored. And even then, I make no distinctions. If I don’t like a piece of art because of its ideas, I simply don’t spend much time with it. There are, however, some notable exceptions, such as certain types of music.”

“Arvo Pärt. An exquisite minimalist. Ecstatic. Open to the world”.

“Not exactly. Sometimes silence in the visual arts is difficult because of its temporal nature. But ultimately, the things that matter to me as an artist – joy, curiosity, hypnotism and freedom – can be expressed in all the languages of the arts.”

“Prolonged trance-like states tend to be a little easier to achieve in music than in the visual arts. With many exceptions!”

“Lou was an extremely generous person who always saw the positive aspects of everything that was created: a play, a song, a book. He recognised and admired the effort that had gone into those works. At the same time, he was an extremely fierce critic of people who cause pain and injustice of any kind. He had no tolerance for arrogance and certain kinds of stupidity. I miss her so much and wish I could hear her thoughts on the decline of democracy, the erosion of empathy and the absurd triumph of hatred. These days I often sing my own version of her song ‘Dirty Boulevard’ with the lines: ‘Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I’ll piss on them. That’s what the statue of bigotry says. ‘Your poor, huddled masses, let’s beat them to death. And let’s get it over with. And let’s throw them away. Let’s throw them down onto the dirty boulevard.’”

“New York isn’t a good place if you need to get by on a tight budget. So it’s tough for artists, even though the myth of the starving artist has faded. So many ambitious young artists have found ways to support themselves in fields linked to the business world. Major galleries, a bustling art market: New York is a great place. I often like to quote one of my favourite writers, George S. Trow, on the concept of American greatness. He wrote: ‘Wonder was the grace of the country. Every action could be justified by this: the wonder in which it was rooted. One era followed another, and in the end the wonder was that things could be built on such a grand scale. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes – all of which had previously drawn on the power of wonder in the market. But then came a moment of silence. What was it now that had been built on such a grand scale? Only the market itself. Could there be any wonder in this? Could there be any wonder at the sheer scale of the scam?’”

“There are so many capital cities these days. So many beautiful and exciting places to live. I love Rome, which I consider my second home. My first capital is New York, of course. A bit of local pride there!”

“I practise meditation and am interested in the awareness that can be attained through it. It has provided me with ways of understanding that there is no ‘self’ and that, at the same time, you are radically connected to others. My spiritual life and my creative life are one and the same. They require only one thing, and that one thing is simply to be aware. I greatly appreciate the Buddhist idea that every person has the capacity – on their own – to attain enlightenment, and that no hierarchies or intermediaries are necessary. And that we all possess this innate capacity. The other thing I appreciate about meditation is my growing ability to understand, challenge and accept the many ways in which the world is collapsing politically, economically, technologically, ecologically and spiritually. That said, like many people, I am currently experiencing moral trauma. Much of what I know about morality in the 20th century I learnt from the Holocaust. The fact that those who suffered so monumentally are now inflicting the same suffering on others is an extremely difficult and painful lesson about good and evil. What can we learn about love and faith from this? About suffering? Countless citizens around the world are suffering from this same disconnect between rights and goodness, judging by the massive, global demonstrations in support of the Palestinian people’s rights.”

“I’m thinking about a recent conversation between J.D. Vance and the new Pope. The Vice-President has recently converted to Catholicism and often speaks of St Augustine and what he called the ‘ordo amoris’, the so-called order of love. The idea is that love is a series of concentric circles: at the centre is your family, so you look after them first, then your neighbour, then the people in your town, then in your country and the people out there… far away in the outer rings. They are none of your business! They should simply return to their families—if they have one. Vance invokes this logic when discussing deportation: rounding up undocumented individuals and deporting them—often to prisons in other countries. Meanwhile, the new Pope, who hails from Chicago—my hometown—replied, ‘No, Mr Vice-President, your model of concentric circles is not the right way to look at what you’re talking about’. And then he said four words: ‘We do not categorise love’. I thought: can I convert right now? Who has the courage to say things like that in our world?”

“I have spent far too much time trying to understand Donald Trump’s decisions, the meaning of his speeches, his attacks, his place in history, the effects of his shocking announcements and executive orders, his need for newspaper headlines and practically everything else he says and does. I do not know what circumstances led this man to become a narcissistic psychopath. I imagine it may stem from a privileged yet abusive childhood, from his training in crime and duplicity by his mentor Roy Cohn, and from the overall joy and pride he derives from exercising power over others. In my entirely personal and non-medical opinion, Donald Trump is effective when it comes to his own interests, but he is mentally ill and plagued by his peculiar sense of justice, loneliness and insecurity. He is also severely limited by the disgust he feels for most people and by his admiration for fascism, power and those who wield this raw power.

In answering this question, I am reminded of a rape victim being asked: is there anything you admire about your rapist? Perhaps his masculinity? His strength? His confidence? His innate charm and easy affability? His creative ways of seduction? You tell me. Although affability may be attractive, when it is used for personal power, it is poison.”

“The words have been twisted. Let’s start with the concept of the ‘American Dream’, an expression that suggests equal opportunities for all. This summer we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The dream of freedom is the aspirational foundation of the United States and is set out in the document with these powerful, world-changing words: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.

Those who today have cast doubt on the reality of this objective have been labelled ‘woke’, as if they were the living dead who had discovered something rotten in the cellar. Initially, the ‘woke’ were seen as naïve do-gooders, then as intransigent figures somehow opposed to progress, subsequently as traitors and, as time went on, as enemies. The ideological war raging in this country has its roots in centuries-old divisions over property and human rights – issues that have split the country and led to a tragic and bloody civil war. When MAGA’s rhetoric of greed and self-sufficiency once again pours fuel on this fire, the results are extremely toxic. This situation quickly degenerates into insults and absurd questions about which side you’re on in this artificial war of words.

I am thinking of a conversation from 2004 between a journalist and an adviser to the president. The adviser said to the journalist: ‘You live in a community based on reality and think you can find solutions by studying reality. But that is no longer how the world works. We are now an empire, and when we act, we create our own new reality. We are the actors in history… and you, all of you, will simply be left to study what we do’. As for the American dream, my view is that it is not possible to wake someone who is merely pretending to be asleep.