Laurie Anderson

""" Slam poetry, which first came into being in Chicago in 1986 as a competitive form of performance poetry, is only the latest development in a series of poetry movements in the United States that radically turned away from the written-to-be-silently-read to a written-to-be-performed poem. The book investigates contemporary American performance poetry as a continuation of poetry as an oral and social medium that finds its cultural realization in an interaction between the poet, the poem and the audience. After a survey of the historical development as well as different performance movements in the United States, the author provides an analysis of representative audio and visual poems of these movements by Jerome Rothenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Gil Scott-Heron, Ntozake Shange, Laurie Anderson, and Patricia Smith. The book is highly recommended to teachers who want to take poetry ,,off the written page in their classroom and engage their students in a multimedia experience with poetry, but will be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about this particular performance genre.
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Doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2005

In exploring the semiotics of vocal timbre as a general phenomenon within music, theoretical engagement of the history of timbre and of musical meaning bolsters my illustrative analyses of Laurie Anderson and Louis Armstrong. I outline first its reliance on subtractive filtering imparted physically by the performer’s vocal tract, demonstrating that its signification is itself a subtractive process where meaning lies in the silent space between spectral formants. Citing Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and placing the body’s perceptual experience as the basis of existential reality, I then argue that the human voice offers self actualization in a way that other sensory categories cannot, because the voice gives us control over what and how we hear in a way that we cannot control, through our own bodies alone, our sight, touch, taste, and smell. This idea combines with a listener’s imagined performance of vocal music, in which I propose that because of our familiarity with the articulations of human sound, as we hear a voice we are able to imagine and mimic the choreography of the vocal tract, engaging a physical and bodily listening, thereby making not only performance but also listening a self- affirming bodily reflection on being. Finally I consider vocal timbre as internally lexical and externally bound by a linguistic context. Citing Peirce and Derrida, and incorporating previous points, I show vocal timbre as a canvas on which a linguistic and musical foreground is painted, all interpreted by the body. Accompanying theoretical discussions is a concerto addressing relevant compositional issues.

Die Stimmen der Performancekünstlerinnen Rachel Rosenthal und Laurie Anderson faszinieren. 1 Versucht man diese Stimmen zu identifizieren, in traditionelle Kategorien zu fassen und in Systeme einzuordnen, so stellt sich allerdings schnell Verwirrung ein, geraten tradierte musikalische und phonologische Ordnungen ebenso ins Wanken wie ästhetische und geschlechtliche. Wenn Anderson in ihren Songs plötzlich die Stimme wechselt, un-1 Rachel Rosenthal und Laurie Anderson gehören zu den wichtigsten Vertreterinnen amerikanischer Performancekunst. Rosenthal, geboren 1926, kreierte ihre ersten Performances Mitte der 1970er Jahre. In der Performanceforschung wird ihre Arbeit in zwei Phasen unterteilt: So werden ihre frühen Performances der 70er Jahre als strikt autobiographische Inszenierungen interpretiert. Die zweite Phase bezieht sich auf ihre Performances der 80er und 90er Jahre, in denen Rosenthal die Verwandlung von Körper, Geschlecht und Selbst in den Vordergrund rückt, so wie sie sich über ihre eigene Biographie hinaus stärker mit globalen Themen, insbesondere der Ökologie, auseinandersetzt. (Vgl.

Français:
Cet article aborde, à la lumière d’un référentiel théorique transdisciplinaire, quelques scènes de morts canines dans la littérature et le cinéma, en vue de discuter la manière dont les relations affectives complexes entre humains et chiens, potentialisées par l’expérience de la perte et du deuil, se présentent dans des récits littéraires et filmiques de différents contextes culturels : le documentaire poétique Heart of a dog (2015), de l’artiste nord-américaine Laurie Anderson, le roman tchèque/français L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être (1983), de Milan Kundera, et le roman Vidas secas (1938), du brésilien Graciliano Ramos. Ce sont des récits qui, en plus de partager des affinités thématiques, imagées et conceptuelles, s’accordent – chacun à sa façon – avec ce que la penseuse Marjorie Garber affirme dans son livre Dog Love, de 1996 : « Dog love and dog loss are part of the same story ».

English:

This article addresses a number of scenes in literature and cinema that involve the death of dogs. Under the light of transdisciplinary theoretical references, it aims to discuss how the complex relationships of affection between humans and dogs, magnified by experiences of loss and mourning, are represented in literary and cinematic narratives within different cultural contexts: American artist Laurie Anderson's 2015 poetic doccumentary, Heart of a Dog; Milan Kundera's Czech-French novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being; and the 1938 novel Vidas Secas, by Brazilian author Graciliano Ramos. These are narratives that, beyond presenting thematic, imagetic and conceptual affinities, are, each in their own manner, in accordance with what American professor Marjorie Garber states in her 1996 book, Dog Love: "Dog love and dog loss are part of the same story".

Foreword to the brochure "Made in Catalunya. Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith reading Catalan poetry" (New York, March 23-24, 2007). Artistic Coordination: Xavier Albertí. Selection of poems: Jaume Subirana and Xavier Albertí. Institut Ramon Llull, 2007

How can we rethink the importance of voice in performance? How can we understand voice simultaneously as music and text, as sound and body, or as both personal and political?

This book explores voice across genres, media and cultures, inviting the reader to reassess established ways of analysing, enjoying and listening to voice. Using a wide range of case studies integrated with critical and philosophical frameworks, it makes audible the multiple ways in which voice contributes to how we perform identities. From opera and musical theatre to live art and immersive audio walks, Konstantinos Thomaidis presents voice as plural, elusive and ripe for reinvention.

Laurie Anderson’s uses of technology in performance art suggest a possibility of smart subversions in a culture based on technology and mediatic systems. Anderson negotiates with such a cultural configuration and questions the notions of body, language and mediation, through her electronic tales, to resist to the “words of order” of the present and to product passwords towards its resingularization.

Thirty years ago, well, thirty-one, to be more precise; Big Science, Laurie Anderson’s debut album, was published. If you want to talk in clichés, what doesn’t do justice to anybody, we could say that the American artist doesn’t need to be introduced: anyway, Lou Reed’s girlfriend, key player in various artistic scenes of the last decades, Laurie Anderson is a complex and an iconic personality, i.e., a child of the ‘80s.

Sempre me perguntei como seria voltar a falar de Laurie Anderson depois de tantos anos depois de ter realizado a pesquisa que resultou em minha tese de doutorado (2003) e posteriormente em um livro (2006). Parecia ser uma página virada até que o CCBB iniciou, no final de 2010, a primeira exposição retrospectiva no Brasil da artista americana conhecida por suas histórias, instalações e performances insólitas, que lançam mão de delicados, porém potentes sonoridades e imagens para criar suas obras. Vejo seu trabalho como uma observação sobre nossos modos de vida na atualidade, sobre como nas situações mais banais, individuais e coletivas, é possível perceber os fluxos da cultura, do poder, dos discursos, práticas e códigos sociais e das tecnologias da comunicação que nos atravessam e constituem enquanto sujeitos. Como todo grande artista, Anderson afeta-se pelo mundo e é capaz de transformar esse afeto em arte e pensamento, em forma sensível, que vai também nos afetar. O estilo de Anderson nasce da combinação dos elementos da arte dos anos 70 com elementos da cultura pop americana, com a qual mantém uma ligação até então improvável para uma artista de "vanguarda". Anderson representou, por isso mesmo, a indicação de uma nova tendência na arte da época, que rompia com o hermetismo formalista e permitia realizar um trabalho que ficava "entre a fácil compreensão, o formato pop e proposições significativas que questionam a natureza da vida em sociedade.

Poor foolish boy, why vainly grasp at the fleeting image that eludes you? The thing you are seeing does not exist: only turn aside and you will lose what you love. What you see is but the shadow cast by your reflection; in itself it is nothing. It comes with you, and lasts while you are there; it will go when you go, if go you can. -Narcissus By The Pool 1 The story of Echo and Narcissus is one of attendant proximities and unrequited caress. Its vocabulary is one of reflections that suggest a coming together but which ultimately denies any proper touch. Echo becomes locked in a pattern of vocal loops and, bound by the flighty vernacular of birds and ghosts and air, is robbed of a full bodily presence. Denied possession of her voice she begins to waste away and can never properly express her feelings for the man she loves. Potential conversation is reduced to the re-voicing of his fragmentary call; flighty Echo is the original fan girl whose identity constitutes a series of appreciative retweets.

Georgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is a highly
theatrical text. It is propelled by a particular rhetorical velocity, a virtuosic harnessing of a wide range of historical texts that serve, invariably, to buttress Agamben’s argument, yet do so largely through their own ostensible failures. This essay examines Homo Sacer’s theatricality alongside some pieces of real and imagined theatre, focusing in particular on the figure of the colossus, or kolossos, whose bulky presence looms large in the first volume of Agamben’s sprawling and itself monolithic text. In doing so I assemble an ensemble cast of my own, drawing kolossoi from the pages of Jacobean drama, the history and fiction of the twentieth century, as well as twenty-first century performance art. The construction of kolossoi is a fundamentally theatrical act, and these effigies – whether made of wax or bones or of nothing more than air and light – once brought to life and set upon their stage have much to tell us.

It is in the in-between that meaning is constructed.  In the space between matter and the immaterial.  In the dislocation between here and there.  In the discernment of absence and presence.  In the distance between an index and its referent.  In the simultaneous recognition of a thing being mirrored and its mirror image.  In the dividing line of a symmetrical subject.  In the divergence of actual and virtual.  In the distinction between physical and spiritual.  In the transition between life and afterlife.  In the intermission between live and recorded.  In the difference between analog and digital. In the transfer (and transference) of a mark from one surface to another.

This paper examines the way the subject and time sometimes fall out of alignment with each other. First, it looks at the question from a psychoanalytic perspective, drawing on both Freud and Lacan. Then, it considers two works of art, one in sound and one in visual art, that also deal with the topic. The first is a work by Laurie Anderson, “From the Air,” from the album Big Science (Warner Bros. 1982), from which the lines “This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time” are drawn. The second is a work by Walid Sadek, What Job’s Wife Said (2014).

To greatly oversimplify, Western culture’s understanding of animals has brought us to the third stage of an historical dialectic. Descartes cognito was posited amid the belief that animals do not think, ergo they are not entitled to be considered as beings, i.e. we define them by their differences from us.  Jeremy Bentham’s response was to suggest that the criteria for valuing animals was not whether they could think but whether they could suffer.  Clearly a good many of them could.  We as humans could empathize with them on the basis of their own suffering.  The synthesis of differentiation and empathy may be found in in Cary Wolfe’s concept of the animal as exemplar of a post-human world.  While animal consciousness is distinct from our own, it is also part of a reorientation of our understanding of consciousness  per se.
This paper sets out to examine Wolfe’s synthesis as it exists in two non-fictional expressions: the National Film Board interactive documentary, Bear 71 (Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes, 2012) and Laurie Anderson’s 2016 film, Heart of a Dog.  Both works focus on the depiction of the animal in an autobiographical mode.  Bear 71 offers a spoken first person narrative meant to emanate posthumously from a mother bear residing in Banff National Park.  The bear is alternatively sarcastic and perceptive as well as being cognizant of human language and behavior.  While listening to Bear 71, we are invited to move a cursor around the screen to spots where we may click to see footage taken by the park’s wildlife surveillance cameras. This footage and our freedom to choose our point of view reflects the restricted freedom of animals in the Park’s invasively human domain.  We are also free to ignore the limitations of time and narrative that would otherwise be placed on the film by the succinct and linear voice-over.
On its part, Heart of a Dog presents Anderson’s voiceover description of her dog, Lolabelle' life from the time she adopted her to her death.  Anderson is careful to identify the dog solely through the behavior she perceives.  The dog’s death leads us into Anderson’s autobiographical ruminations later in the film centered on the loss of her mother and close friend – and, by implication, the loss she cannot mention in the film proper, the death of her husband, Lou Reed.  I would argue, though, that Lolabelle is more than a narrative device.  Rather she is a mirror of Anderson’s consciousness, a bond that is both compelling and necessarily incomplete. 
Throughout the presentation I would compare the manner in which animals are depicted in these two works with the uses of differentiation, empathy and post-human perspectives.

O trabalho propõe uma discussão sobre os itinerários
do som na arte contemporânea, a partir da análise
de quatro obras em que o registro e manipulação do
ambiente sonoro concreto e dos elementos acústicos
cotidianos se colocam como procedimento expressivo
principal: “Handphone Table” (1978) e “Nothing in my
pockets” (2003), de Laurie Anderson; “Music While
we Work” (2011) de Hong-Kai Wang, e “Ultrafield”
(2013) de Jane Winderen. Ao investigarmos as
abordagens destas artistas e seus respectivos modos
de circulação, aproximamos seu potencial relacional
artístico - com ênfase nos modos culturais de escuta na
contemporaneidade - aos conceitos fenomenológicos
que apontam a percepção sensorial como experiência
e troca contínua entre as pessoas e o mundo.

"Decentring the artistic self. The alter egos of Laurie Anderson and Jennifer Walshe"

Coherent self-conceptions of artists often explicitly distinguish the public from the private, ”real” person. Paradoxically, the credibility of the public persona is dependent on a well- designed authenticity, while the ‘real’ artist’s status of authenticity is problematic. Thus, the dividing line between public and private, fictitious and real person(a) is fragile. The idea of the alter ego plays with the indefiniteness of the dividing line between fictitious and real, thereby broaching issues such as au- thenticity, subjectivity and identity. The alter egos of Laurie Anderson and Jennifer Walshe, which I understand as paradigmatic for a decentred subject, play with topics like coherent autobiographies, personal artistic styles or fixed gender identities, and thereby chal- lenge the logic of androcentric self-concepti- ons on several levels.

"Was there a sudden break in the world of art, literature, and music when modernism gave way to postmodernism?

Philip Nel attacks the notion of tremendous and sudden change in artistic understanding and literary practice. Instead, in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks he proposes that a series of small but far-reaching changes drew understanding from modernism to postmodernism.

What bonds these two periods together? The constant agent of change, Nel argues, was the avant-garde. Tracking its influence on novelists, popular culture figures, and children's authors, this book re-evaluates how twentieth-century culture has been traditionally divided into "modern" and "postmodern."

Suggesting that a modernism and postmodernism division prevents accurate evaluation of a work, Nel realigns our conceptions of twentieth-century literature, art, and music. Focusing on eight figures--Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Dr. Seuss, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Chris Van Allsburg, Laurie Anderson, and Leonard Cohen--as representative, The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks examines works along a spectrum of political involvement.

This first book to analyze postmodern children's literature revives the radical Dr. Seuss by reading him alongside avant-garde artists. Nel argues that Chris Van Allsburg speaks the internet generation's vernacular, using a surrealist idiom to pose questions that linger beyond his picture books' final pages.

The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks is a nuanced and wide-ranged re-reading of how postmodernism displays art's ability to imagine a better world."