Week of January 13, 2005, Issue #482
COVER
O superwoman
By PAUL MATWYCHUK
“If I were asked what The End of the Moon was
about,” Laurie Anderson says about her new solo show (which has its Canadian
premiere in Calgary this week at One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance
Rodeo), “I would say it was about time and beauty. And then I would shoot
myself for being so pretentious.”
Critics of “performance art,” the eclectic, often-baffling and very-hard-to-define
genre that Anderson popularized and continues to be synonymous with, will be
surprised to hear her fret about coming across as pretentious—after all,
they might well remark, it’s never seemed to bother her before. Anderson’s
very first public performance, 1972’s “Duets on Ice,” took
place on the streets of New York in the summertime: she wore a pair of skates
frozen into two blocks of ice and played her violin until the blocks melted.
Similarly puzzling yet captivating creations followed; her breakthrough piece,
the seriocomic 1983 multimedia extravaganza United States, was four and a half
hours long and contained everything from stories about serial killers to songs
inspired by William S. Burroughs to hypnotically repetitive recitations of eerie
words and phrases.
Pretentious? Perhaps, but as four-and-a-half-hour avant-garde stage productions
go, surprisingly lively and accessible. United States even produced Anderson’s
only hit single when “O Superman,” a lament for the loneliness of
the electronic age, soared to number two on the British charts even though it
was more than three times as long as the average pop song and instead of a catchy
guitar riff or a hooky chorus, it was structured around a relentless tape loop
of Anderson quietly chanting “ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.” Anderson’s
music never quite connected with a mass audience that strongly again (although
her 1984 Mister Heartbreak LP did manage to crack the U.S. Top 100 Albums chart),
but she’s continued to tour new performance pieces like Happiness and
Stories From the Nerve Bible around the world while popping up unexpectedly
on TV and in the movies: she hosted Alive From Off Center for a few years on
PBS, wrote the music for a couple of Jonathan Demme movies and even contributed
a surprise vocal cameo to the first Rugrats movie.
“I am and always have been a snob,” Anderson laughs. “But
at the same time, I don’t think the stuff I do is so esoteric. Put it
this way: I came from the art world, and we were beyond snobbish about pop culture.
Pop culture was for idiots. So when I first began doing things outside of that
world, I was considered a complete traitor. But for me, it was exhilarating
to know that outside of that downtown New York art world, people not only got
my work but liked it.
“I can remember the time I learned this,” she continues. “It
was in Houston, Texas, and I was supposed to be doing something in a museum
but they didn’t have enough chairs or something and so instead they rented
this country and western bar with a big marquee with a Conestoga wagon—this
is where they put me. It was the first time I’d ever done anything on
a stage. And it was really wild, because all the bar regulars were there first.
So they stood around for a while, and then the art crowd came in really late,
all dressed in black, doing that ‘Okay, show me’ kind of thing.
And the show started, and I realized that the regulars got it perfectly well—it
was just a person playing the violin and telling stories. Maybe they were weird
stories, but you know, Texas stories are pretty weird too. And I just thought,
‘Wow! This is great! I don’t have to be so strict about where I
think my work is going to go.’”
But not even Anderson could have imagined that her work would eventually land
her a job as the first-ever artist-in-residence for NASA—a position that
paid her $20,000 and, even better, gave her unlimited access to the Johnson
Space Center in Houston and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
while she worked on the material that eventually became The End of the Moon.
“NASA has traditionally had kind of a rep problem,” Anderson says.
“First of all, there’s a lot of animosity between the government
and NASA, even though they’re kind of the same thing. Congress is always
trying [to cut their budget]. They think of them as these wirehead spendthrifts—Congress
is the jocks and they’re always saying how terrible it is that NASA spends
their money on all this stuff. Why don’t they spend it on more military
stuff, on more practical stuff and, you know, knock off all the stargazing?
“Now,” she continues, “why they would come to me to help them
solve this problem is beyond me—they’re wonderfully backwards that
way. And I really appreciate the opportunity they gave me to see all this stuff
and meet all these people I never would have met otherwise. For instance, I
met this guy in Pittsburgh at the robotics institute who was so wound up I just
couldn’t believe it that anyone could have that much energy. He’s
this guy who designs vehicles that basically go really, really, really fast
and he takes them out to different places and races them. It’s like he’s
on some kind of weird drug—he’ll be doing this demonstration for
the other scientists of this new vehicle and suddenly he’s jumping on
top of it. He’s, like, six feet above you and you think, ‘What is
with this guy?’ He has such wild energy. And he’s also a Navy SEAL
and he’s also a mountaineer and just the week before, his friend had died
climbing a mountain, and so this guy climbed the mountain in the same storm
to get his friend’s body. I mean, I just don’t know anyone like
that in the art world!”
Anderson is famous for her attraction to newfangled technology—her shows
are filled with delightful musical gadgets like a “tape bow violin”
(which has a audiotape playback head instead of a bridge and a piece of audiotape
strung on the bow), or a pair of glasses with a built-in microphone that presses
against the bridge of Anderson’s nose so that she can play her skull like
a drum with her fists. (She was also one of the first artists to explore the
artistic possibilities of the CD-ROM format, with 1995’s Puppet Motel.)
Surprisingly, though, she didn’t want technology to be the subject of
her NASA show.
“I didn’t want to do a big tech project with them,” she says.
“You know, ‘Let’s light up the dark side of the moon with
some giant mirrors....’ I was much more interested in what it means to
think about the moon and in how the robot rovers are being designed. You know,
they’re already doing art projects at NASA. They’re already like
giant art projects—a giant stairway to space! It’s unbelievable
what they’re making. They’re very visionary. So for me, I just wanted
it to go in another direction.... I mean, I wound up with so much information—what
do you do with all that information? I just didn’t know. So I wound up
focusing on a few simple things where the work of the NASA scientists sort of
dovetailed with my own work. One of those ideas was beauty—the show, in
fact, sort of started out as a poem about beauty. And the classic example related
to that is how Einstein once rejected one of his theories because he said it
wasn’t beautiful. And you go, ‘What does that mean? What is he looking
for? How is he judging things? How am I judging things?’ I mean, there
are a whole lot of rules about what a work of art should look like. What is
it that I want to do?’
“I’m just really intrigued by why people are looking into this stuff
and less so in what they’re finding,” she continues. “Besides,
what they’re finding changes every hour. Now it’s superstrings,
tomorrow it’ll be something else and none of them will ever find the ultimate
answer—if anything, it seems insane to make that your final goal. So in
my work, I’m trying to make things matter in the moment rather than have
them stack up to mean something for the future or make sense of the past. For
me, that’s what music does better than anything else: it makes you absolutely
hang in that second, in the moment of that music. That’s why I love the
violin—you can be playing along and then drop in a strange moment of silence,
and it can be drop dead scary.”
Laurie Anderson never did get around to telling me specifically what The End
of the Moon is about. It’s about “time and beauty,” sure,
and of course it’s also about NASA and outer space. But at another point
in our conversation, she suggested it was about freedom, and at another point
she said it was about grief. There are stories in it about war, stories about
Anderson’s friends and stories about her dog. An audience member told
her she thought it was all about the sense of smell—and when Anderson
thought back on the show, she realized to her surprise that the woman had a
point.
“The show became more about looking for things,” Anderson concludes,
“which in a way my work always seems to wind up being about. No matter
what I do, it always seems to come down to that: looking for things and being
unable to find them, but being very happy that I’m still doing the looking.”
V
The End of the Moon
Written and performed by Laurie Anderson • Jack Singer Concert Hall
(Calgary) • Tue, Jan 18 (7:30pm) • (403) 264-3224/(403) 299-8888