Laurie Anderson’s Experiential Pop Media Influence
Anderson’s inventions and innovations in sound design and instrumentation invention have a long lasting impact on pop music ranging from Kanye West to St. Vincent.
O Superman · Laurie Anderson Big Science ℗ 2007 Nonesuch Records, Inc.
If you listen carefully to Kanye West’s 2019 song “Use This Gospel” and Laurie Anderson’s 1981 “O’ Superman” there are similarities in the introductions. Both begin with A Cappello vocal staccato at a metronome cadence followed by a layered synth voice modulation. It was this style of voice modulation to which Anderson was a seminal pioneer. Anderson’s “O’ Superman” questions the nature of patriarchal or parent-like “gods” of war whereas West presents a reimagined spiritual song augmented by audio technology and mechanically engineered flourishes. In both songs there is a purposeful synth sound that has implications on the nature of power, faith, authorship, authenticity and manipulation.
Laurie Anderson’s career started as an experimental media artist and musician in the 1970s, and she rose to prominence and recognition in the early days of MTV in the 1980s. She engaged with broadcast media via MTV and VH1 as a mass platform at a time when few artists were creating for the new medium. During this period critics and contemporaries held pop video channels in distain for defusing or commercializing both niche avant-garde contemporary music and media art.
The 2022 Hirshhorn Museum exhibition gives audiences a gateway to a kaleidoscopic range of career highlights and new works from Anderson that show her cultural impact in everything from pioneering physical sound modulation machines to archival projection and video works. New works commingle and illuminate earlier groundbreaking projects which make the exhibition both fresh and timely as well as foundational to the artists cannon of seminal and influential mixed media and performance-based pieces.
The first time I saw Laurie Anderson was at a small gathering of something around thirty people at a Wooster Street loft in New York. It was in the late 1990s when events like this came to your attention from word of mouth. She played electric violin wearing ice skates embedded on giant frozen blocks. I remember feeling dwarfed by the cathedral height of the room and the unexpected nature of the spectacle. She looked stoic and mystical. Laurie Anderson seemed like a magical wizard casting a spell on the space with an amplified sonic vibration in her work “Duets on Ice”.
She was a familiar face that I recognized since the early 90s MTV PSAs. Her Public Service Announcements (1990) mimicked the on-air announcements that were popular from local broadcast networks. The series of short form social commentaries aired on MTV and VH1.
Anderson had spiky hair and looked like an angelic, androgynous, soft-spoken Johnny Lydon. Her voice in the PSAs had a warm, slow, and metronome like hypnotic cadence, like Fred (Mr.) Rogers, welcoming but interrogative. What did our National Anthem, Star Spangled Banner really mean? “Just a lot of questions, written during a fire”. That was the most punk thing on television.
There was a bleeding-edge between performance art and music in the currency of the nascent MTV mass video storytelling in the 80s. That seemed to be emitted from the commingling of New York art gallery and performance scenes that launched and nurtured acts like The Talking Heads, Blondie and electro pioneers Suicide and Klaus Nomi. Anderson’s imprint on mass media as a performance artist can be seen as an antecedent to aspects of the theatrical performance in contemporary works David Bowie, Childish Gambino, Kanye West and St. Vincent.
The Hirshhorn museum’s cylindrical architecture stands as a unique access point to the scale and flow of the experience, there is a momentum between the rooms and the journey through each section. There are opportunities to become an instrament where Anderson’s invention makes audio conduits with your bones.
There are unpredictable connections between the works like ownership rights of the moon and the lack of rights in Guantanamo detentions. Anderson’s biographical sources of childhood paralysis in proximity to a burn unit becomes an anchor point of why she questions reality. The range of Anderson’s topics combine digital frontiers and painterly hand worked illustrative textures as if you walked into a giant journal. The language of her compositions are relatable to Joan Didion’s investigative style in cross country road trips with a lens of meeting America through art.
“the show is less a traditional exhibition than a giant artist’s project that happens to be set in our national museum of modern art.
– Laurie Anderson”
The constellation of rooms, videos, sounds and progressions at the Hirshhorn in DC created a sense of walking through existential maze of experiences where the process is well crafted and perhaps always potentially shapeshifting.
By the time most of us see an artwork, it’s “finished” and ready for the world to view. What we often don’t see is what the work went through to reach its final state. What was the initial idea? What did the first draft look like? How and why did it evolve to what it looks like now? Does it live up to the artist’s vision? What was it like to produce a major exhibition during a global pandemic?
— Laurie Anderson
The exhibit was designed during the Covid19 pandemic as showcase of the Anderson’s ability to build worlds within spaces. Her through line is combining sensory shifts where language is visualized and images are story, participant scale that can be Lilliputian or illusory. The show carries themes of dreams, codes, symbolism and non-linear cross sampling. Anderson builds on patterns of cyphers in her work around memory, sound design, entropy, and mortality.
Toward the entrance of the Hirshhorn exhibition is a large projection of black and white video showing Anderson moving and snapping in a dance like a physical beat boxer and human drum machine. Every jerk and shake produce a distinctive sound building off her body as physical percussive rhythm instrument. Here the audience meets the spectacle of Anderson as a performer, inventor and media artist.
Chalkroom, a collaboration between Anderson and Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang was originally planned for the exhibition as a VR component. Due to Covid19 the VR headset idea was scraped to become a 360 virtual reality like experience in paint. Here the layering and textures of handwriting and drawings communicate jokes, poems, thoughts and metaphors about the nature of symbolism, permanence and impermanence.
Anderson has stated that this room was meant to show how “language relates to imagery”.
The Flags room represents polarization of two sides of politics in America. Depending on the position of the viewer the “red flags” become opposite side or one sea of crimson in motion.
There is a temporal quality that spans the works that crosses over from multiple decades. There is also a sense of time shifting between aspects of the current moment and the eras captured. She is digital in an analog time and analog in her more large scale newly produced contemporary works. The projection of human forms crosses story telling with reporting and the sense of transmission of self beyond the body or form as mortality.
The humor and joy that can be found in Anderson’s voice and writing is often contrasted by horrors and loss. The gift of engaging with the range of works like this is that it gives the participant a safe but expressive place to engage in questions and stories around trauma. Whether it is in the video projection and account of Mohammed el Gharani, a Guantanamo Bay detention captive or in Anderson’s own accounts of childhood paralysis and the proximity to a burn ward. These experiences are presented as portals with optional engagements and expansive depths, creativity and possibility. A participant can chose to stay with or pass through on a surface inspection. The final rooms move backward in time to Anderson’s earliest works creating experimental photography simulating homeless nights like an embedded journalist to displacement. The vulnerability and danger of the smaller prints seemed raw and less monumental than the earlier light projections but not less evocative or well crafted.
Being in a room with Laurie Anderson you never know what to expect or what tool she will pull from her box of magic light, shadows, ice blocks, parrots, planets, AI or violins.
The connecting points are everywhere and like nerve receptors or code based cross links make the work feels like a framework that will be expanded upon, retold or re-envisioned with expanded timely relevance. In mapping the connections with contemporary cross-over music and performance art Anderson’s genius has never been more relevant.
‘Laurie Anderson: The Weather’ is on view at the Hirshhorn Musuem, Washington, D.C., USA, until 22 August.
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http://www.frieze.com/article/laurie-anderson-the-weather-2022-review
