“A retrospective show that looks into the future – it must be Laurie Anderson!”
“If I had a message, I would write it down and e-mail it to everybody. I would save a lot of paint that way” (L. Anderson – Smithsonian Magazine – August 2008)
In my previous article, while reviewing The Music Critic, I highlighted the fact that humor belongs to music, also to classical music. The lesson learnt is that there is no shame in it. Music can be anything we want it to be.
A few days ago, I attended the performance of Laurie Anderson at the Philarmonie, in a show which has been conceived as a journey throughout the course of her whole artistic production. It is also a performance which gives the artist the possibility to share some episodes of her life. For example, when she was young, she used to skate in the wintertime on the lake near their house. One day, while she was pushing her younger twin brothers in a stroller on the ice, the ice cracked. The stroller went into the water, the twins still buckled in. She had a few key seconds to do something. She dove head first, found the stroller, freed the boys, and got them to the surface. The most incredible part of this story is how her mother handled the news. In fact, instead of getting mad at her for not being careful enough, she said: “I didn’t know you were such a good swimmer”.
This show is also a way to remember the great Lou Reed, Laurie’s husband, who died on October 27, 2013. There is a quote – I thought I was someone else, someone good – taken from “Perfect Day“, one of his most acclaimed successes, displayed on the big screen behind the musicians (in her performance on stage, Anderson is accompanied by the band Sex Mob). She also invites the audience to stand up at the end of the show and follow her in some Tai-Chi moves. Not everybody knows that Lou Reed started practicing Tai-Chi in 1980s, becoming an accomplished martial artist. Anderson edited his book “The Art of the Straight Line: My Tai Chi” – a comprehensive collection of Reed’s writings on Tai Chi, including conversations with Reed’s fellow musicians, artists, friends, and Tai Chi practitioners, including Julian Schnabel, A. M. Homes, Hal Willner, Mingyur Rinpoche, Eddie Stern, Tony Visconti, and Iggy Pop – which was published last March.
Laurie Anderson performed at the Philarmonie as part of the “Rainy Days” festival 2023.
The festival is centered on the theme of “memory”, how we process sound, how we associate music to specific events, people, places, and time, how music helps our brain to function, to improve to remember, how a single sound can instantly bring back memories and, ultimately, what it means to listen and to perform in relation to memory.
It is our memory that shapes us as individuals, making the exchange or transfer of memories essential for society and its development. Indeed, discussions around memory and memories have recently been picked up by many academic disciplines, especially the social sciences. According to medical and psychological research, the arts and the way they are received by the public would be unthinkable without our capacities for memory. No wonder that memory itself has become an increasingly important focus for the arts. (https://www.philharmonie.lu/en/programm/festivals/rainy-days).
Laurie Anderson is the perfect artist to represent this festival and its theme. She has always been a visionary since the very beginning of her career. She has on open mind as open is her musical production.
Laurie Anderson’s music world has no boundaries. In 1977, she even invented the tape-bow violin, an instrument that uses recorded magnetic tape in place of the traditional horsehair in the bow, and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. Anderson has also updated and modified this device over the years.
There is a lot of technology in this performance because if it is true that Laurie Anderson has a deep connection with the past and the present, it is undeniable that she has always had a step into the future.
On the big B/W screen at the back of the musicians, the audience can see letters and numbers falling down like leaves from a tree, images of her birth place (the lake where her twin brothers almost died) and quotes, a lot of quotes, like this one: “If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology — and you don’t understand your problems.” (Bruce Schneier, American cryptographer and information security author).
In 2002, Anderson was NASA’s first artist in residence and in 2018 she co-created with mixed-media artist Hsin-Chien Huang a VR installation that celebrates the fascination with lunar expeditions and which also includes artworks focusing on the strong symbolic hold the moon has always had over people.
Is she mad? Laurie Anderson could appear as completely out of her mind to some people. She is the one who said no when the the Hirshhorn Museum told her they wanted to put on a big retrospective of her job, and she refused because she was “too busy” in that moment. She is also the one who performed a concert for dogs at the Sydney Opera House.
Who is Laurie Anderson? “Laurie Anderson is a real nightmare to every gallerist” (M. Abramovic – The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 6, 2021, updated June 15, 2023).
Nightmare or not, there is a “positive madness” in Laurie Anderson, and this is one of the reasons why we love her so much.
«Laurie Anderson – Let X = X»
Laurie Anderson vocals
Doug Wieselman clarinet
Steve Bernstein trumpet
Briggan Krauss saxophone
Tony Scherr electric bass
Kenny Wollesen drums
