Unconventional artist Laurie Anderson's expressive alter egos include violins, clones and a parrot, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
With her lean build, spiky hair and lively, pellucid blue eyes, artist Laurie Anderson gives the impression of barely contained, concentrated energy. Judging by the available evidence, it's an accurate enough impression. Her exhibition The Record of the Time, a retrospective of her sound works from the early 1970s to the turn of the century, has just opened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It began its tour in Lyon and has taken in two other venues prior to IMMA. She might well have looked on its latest incarnation as being just another stop. Not a bit of it.
In fact the exhibition has been substantially redesigned for every venue and, on her arrival in Dublin, Anderson threw herself into the installation process with ferocious energy and enthusiasm. So much so, she admits, that they asked her to stop.
"They had to drag me out of there," she says with a smile. "I have gotten a little out of hand." With additional walls, all painted dark grey, constructed through the run of IMMA's East Wing, the show has a magical, labyrinthine quality. It is packed with rich visual and aural environments that intrigue, engage and entertain. Anderson's hand-written, epigrammatic one-liners guide the visitor, not by providing documentary information but by tuning us into her wavelength, acclimatising us to her oblique take on things. She has always been drawn to vivid linguistic snippets. They are, she says, thoughts caught on the wing. "Word images caught before they become part of a story. You grab at them before you even figure out what they are, what they are saying."
Almost from the first, violins, often radically reinvented, and violin bows, feature large. The violin is Anderson's trademark instrument, so it's no surprise to learn that she studied it for several years from the age of seven. She even became a member of the Chicago Youth Orchestra. But she abandoned any plans of becoming a professional musician. "I told myself I wanted to devote time to other things, but the real story is that I wasn't good enough." Good enough to make a career as a violin soloist, that is.
Not that she was going to be a conventional artist, either. She studied sculpture but was thrown out three times. "I wasn't welding, and sculpture was welding, then. I didn't like the sparks." She went on to write and teach and began making her own works, none of which fitted comfortably into any predetermined category. One series of performances, documented in the IMMA show, involved her sleeping in various public spaces. She also made books. One, based on Dürer's engraving, Melancholia, is an inventory of everything she lost when her loft was burgled.
NEW YORK IN the early 1970s was a cultural hothouse. The essential strands of Anderson's complex artistic personality became apparent fairly quickly. It involves performance, music, generally manipulated or generated electronically, stories involving the playful use of language, projected imagery, both moving and still, and technological innovation. Stories are central but, again, not in a conventional sense. Her stories have the compelling "illogic of dreams." There wasn't really a terminology to describe what she was doing in the 1970s, but the terminology caught up just as she influenced what others were doing.
Because she is a performer and tells stories, there is tendency to see her work as autobiographical, which makes her uneasy. "I've used true stories, but what I do is not autobiographical in any real sense. I'm not remotely interested in self-expression, not at all." Performance involves the creation of alter egos. She regards the violin as an alter ego of a kind, but she has also devised others, including a male clone, a violin-playing puppet and a parrot. The parrot is there in IMMA and it speaks. It free-associates according to a given repertoire. "What happened was that people began to regard it as an oracle. They'd come and ask it questions."
She is best known for O Superman (see panel), an artwork that has the unusual distinction of reaching the number two slot in the British music charts in 1981. It came from an extraordinarily ambitious multimedia performance work, United States I & II, intended as a portrait of the US. It was the visual arts equivalent of the Great American Novel. A similar level of ambition was evident in her treatment of Melville in Songs and Stories from Moby Dick in 1999, which involved the invention of a remarkable electronic gadget, the Talking Stick. "I wouldn't do anything like it again," she says. Not only was it incredibly difficult, working from a set text, she was also a bit spooked by the experience. "I thought: what right do I have to do this? I was really afraid Melville's ghost was going to come and kill me."
Hearing what she has on her plate at the moment - a major project in Japan as well as other substantial projects - it is clear that she is dauntingly busy. That must make the idea of a retrospective strange. It is strange, she agrees, like looking back on another lifetime, "another century, another kind of world", but rewarding. "I've learned a lot from looking at it. It never struck me before how immediately physical so much of my work is, how much it's about how we receive information through our bodies. That's not something usually pinned on me at all." That is, she is regarded as technological, hands-off.
AS IT HAPPENS, she is trying to avoid long days at the computer. "I'm more and more into taking things away now, making things increasingly simple." She opts for outdoor projects. "Things I enjoy, that involve walking long distances," she says with a smile. "There is this tendency to get trapped into staring at the little computer box, looking at crappy graphics. We spend so much time doing that. But that's me, I'm not trying to say that people need to get out more. I'm not going to start giving advice. I don't know what other people want, I barely know what I want."
Laurie Anderson: The Record of the Time is at IMMA until May 2nd (01-6129900; www.modernart.ie) RoseLee Goldberg's definitive study, Laurie Anderson, is published by Thames & Hudson