Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson 1947-, American performance artist, b. Chicago. Originally a sculptor, she was influenced by Philip Glass and other avant-garde composers in the early 1970s and soon turned to the creation of multimedia performance art . Anderson is best known for quirky, witty, and elaborate events that typically combine such elements as electronic and instrumental music, song, theater, film, and video projections; they include United States I-IV of the 1980s and Nerve Bible (1992). In 1982 she scored a pop music hit with "O Superman," and has since made a number of albums, e.g., Big Science (1984), Strange Angels (1989), Bright Red (1994). She has also made video and film pieces, composed orchestral works and soundtracks, created and performed monologues, and written books. Her first CD-ROM, The Ugly One with the Jewels, was released in 1994.

Bibliography: See study by R. Goldberg (2000).

Anderson, Laurie (1947– ). American Performance artist, poet, and musician, born in Chicago, the daughter of a wealthy paint manufacturer. In 1967 she moved to New York, where she gained a BA in art history from Barnard College in 1969 and an MFA from Columbia University (where she trained in painting and sculpture) in 1972. She also studied privately with Sol LeWitt. In 1972 she gave her first Performance piece, Automotive, an outdoor concert for car horns, and by 1976 was well known in the USA and Europe. Her performances include numerous audio and visual effects (including slide projection and films) combined with spoken and sung elements (she is a singer and violinist, and since 1974 has been making her own instruments, notably a modified violin with an internal loudspeaker). Her sense of humour and endearing stage presence have been much admired. Anderson's major work is United States, ‘an eight-hour opus of song, narrative and sleights of hand and eye’ ( RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art, 1988). It is in four parts, and was first performed complete in 1983 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music over two nights. A song from the show, ‘O Superman', was released on record in 1981 and got to number 2 in the British singles' chart. Her first album, Big Science, was released in 1982. The entry on Anderson in the New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers (1994) says that ‘By the early 1980s she had become the best-known American performance artist, and her popularity reached its peak in 1986, the year she directed Home of the Brave, a feature film of one of her performances, toured internationally with a large pop band and even appeared in an American Express television commercial. Finding herself overwhelmed by … such undertakings, Anderson returned to a more intimate style.’ She began to concentrate more on music, and in her later works ‘her whimsical futuristic bemusement has turned into darker, less romantic visions of the future'. In 1997 she was director of the Meltdown Festival in London, an annual concert series that specializes in unusual musical events and collaborations.