Laurie Anderson trained as a violinist, art historian, sculptor, and more recently, as a poet. For those familiar with her work, the mere mention of her name is enough to start a multimedia memory extravaganza. Anderson embraced multiple technologies before "multimedia"...
[more]Laurie Anderson trained as a violinist, art historian, sculptor, and more recently, as a poet. For those familiar with her work, the mere mention of her name is enough to start a multimedia memory extravaganza.
Anderson embraced multiple technologies before "multimedia" became an unhyphenated word. She began her performance career as an audio artist, creating minimalist sound performances such as a 1969 piece composed of beeping car horns. Throughout the '70s she broadened her shows to include a system of projectors and tape recorders, and gradually added visual and text elements. By the early '80s, her minimalist tendencies gave way to inclusive, operatic multimedia performances that melded spoken-word, musical, vocal, electronic, and film elements.
Her epic, seven-hour show, "United States" (1979-1983) consisted of four sections, "Transportation," "Politics," "Money," and "Love," and incorporated absurd text with biting commentary on our Postmodern condition. On this first major tour, Anderson honed her now-famous performance persona -- an androgynous character dressed in a man's suit whose voice is electronically distorted to obscure age, gender, and personality. Like her contemporaries Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, Anderson focuses on the semiotics of politics and popular culture. Ironically, she uses technical tools to criticize the trend towards progress and modernization that she feels has consumed America.
Performance art does not exist without the artist, and therefore it doesn't develop a broad constituency, like an object in a museum. To counter the ephemeral nature of her medium, Anderson takes her performances on the road, playing in both small alternative spaces and large concert halls. She's also released albums, videotapes, and CD-ROMs.
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