June 21, 2007
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Sound zero

Wednesday, January 22, 2003
As a denizen of New York, performance artist Laurie Anderson was both horrified and inspired by the World Trade Center disaster. She is bringing the piece she wrote to Australia - with alterations, she tells Al Wiesel.
Laurie Anderson doesn't know where to start. The 55-year-old performance artist is sitting in the spacious loft overlooking the Hudson River in New York where she used to live and which she now uses as her studio, talking about Happiness, the piece she is bringing to Australia next month. Written in the months after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, much of the mostly spoken word piece with spare musical accompaniment deals with her impressions at that time, when the city she has called home for 35 years was irrevocably changed. But a lot has ­happened in the intervening year, including the Bali bombings, and Anderson feels she needs to rewrite the piece to reflect this. "That time is over and people do not feel the same way," she says.

But how to begin again? "It's a very important issue for me: how do you start? I didn't always realise this, but the first sentence in my pieces is usually about a place." Often that place has been this loft where she lived for many years. Just 10 blocks from where the WTC used to stand, it was barricaded for months after the attack while it was being cleaned of the fine grey powder, dusty remnants of the Trade Center itself, that covered everything like a frost in a nuclear winter. Originally, Happiness described how she watched "the endless line of trucks with their loads of twisted metal,", carrying the debris from Ground Zero, which paraded by the apartment a few blocks north of the studio also overlooking the Hudson, where she now lives with her husband, musician Lou Reed.

"But I don't know how to start now because it's not just this city but the world that's in that boat, whether they quite feel it that way or not, this, uh" - Anderson's eyes roll back in her head as if she's trying to read just the right word being flashed on an imaginary multi­media screen that lies just behind her impossibly high forehead, still topped by her trademark electric-shock hairdo - "well, fear, really."

Anderson wasn't in New York on September 11, 2001. She was performing in Chicago, the town where she was born. Back in New York, her husband watched the towers fall from their rooftop thinking of her but unable to contact her because the telephones weren't working. Laurie Sadly Listening, the song Reed composed about this day begins, "Laurie if you're sadly listening/The birds are on fire/The sky glistening/While I atop my roof stand watching."

A week after the attacks, she gave a previously scheduled performance at New York's Town Hall (a recording of which is available on the CD Laurie Anderson Live in New York September 19-20, 2001). It is an extraordinary performance in which Anderson's songs seem to take on a new resonance. New songs from her last album,Life on String, such as Statue of Liberty with the line, "Freedom is a scary thing", and older songs like her fluke 1981 hit O Superman, with the haunting refrain "Here come the planes," took on eerie new meanings ("I wrote O Superman during the Iran/Contra scandal," she points out. "Americans have short memories. They don't realise that this is the same war that's been going on for 20 years.")

She began that performance by referring to the event of the week before as an "opportunity", which might have seemed an odd choice of a word at the time. "I thought about that word a lot," she says. "I really believe that when something big happens, whether it seems good or seems bad, it is a chance to jump out of your preconceptions. I was very disappointed that there was no dialogue in the year since then. I suppose instead of opportunity, the word would be security because we're now just too afraid - or too lazy. These poles of freedom and fear are really interesting ones. It's a brand new question, what is it to be free and also afraid?"

In the summer before September 11, Anderson was trying to jolt herself out of her own preconceptions. She took a job at a McDonald's, where she discovered that mass-producing hamburgers could surprisingly be just as satisfying in its way as mass-producing CDs. Feeling burned out by technology, she stayed on a farm with an Amish family, whose religion rejects modern technology, but discovered to her horror that they had also lost the ability to express themselves. "The family I stayed with had zero conversational skills and very little contact with other people," she recalls. "They could not express anger if their life depended on it. It was scary."

At this point in her career, one might think she wouldn't have to go to such lengths to reinvent herself, that she could afford to rest a bit on her laurels. She is probably the world's most successful performance artist. She has recorded eight albums, the first of which, Big Science, features the hit, O Superman, that propelled her to stardom; produced a number of acclaimed multimedia presentations including United States, Home of the Brave, The Nerve Bible and Moby Dick; created a CD-ROM, The Puppet Motel, considered one of the best examples of that media; composed scores for such films as Something Wild and Swimming to Cambodia; and her work as a visual artist has been featured in such galleries as the Guggenheim in New York, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She's also picked cotton, played straight man to comedian Andy Kaufman, and trekked in the Himalayas. She was even asked by Encyclopedia Britannica to write its entry on New York, though she had to revise it after September 11, changing a reference to how far the WTC towers would reach uptown if they were to fall.

Unlike the detached persona Anderson often projects on stage, in person she is warm, almost eager to please. She peppers her conversation with self-deprecating phrases - "another quite pompous statement," she says at one point while trying to describe Happiness. Without electronic enhancement her voice is so soft it's sometimes inaudible over the wind that howls outside her window like a sound effect from a horror movie ("I suppose I could fix the window," she shrugs, "But I kind of like it"). But she seems just as intellectually restless as she does on stage, jumping with barely a pause from philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to McDonald's to rap star Eminem ("Am I huge fan?" she says. "Not really. But I'm glad he's there.")

It was this restlessness, mixed with equal parts fear and chutzpah, that jumpstarted her career. After graduating from art school in 1972, she says, "I was having trouble calling myself an artist. How am I going to pay my rent?" Eventually, she got tired of waiting for success and hatched an ingenious plan: "I invented a tour," she says. "I sent 500 letters to all these little art centres. I didn't really have a tour just an idea that I'd like to do a tour. I got three responses. So I packed some boxes and went over there with a little electronic set-up. I highly recommend this to young artists. Don't wait around for someone to ask you to do something, just do it."

WithHappiness, Anderson says, she is returning to the set-up she used on this very first tour. "It's a simple set-up," she says. "Keyboards, violin, processors. I don't try to take out strange pauses or fumbling. I hope that it's a little more conversational, a presentation in the sense that jazz is close to conversation. One thing makes me think of another thing and it goes off in another direction." This free-form structure is one she has always felt more comfortable settling into. "Plays scare me," she says. "People pretending to be other people - that's already so much like life. I'm more interested in stories that don't end." Now if she could only figure out how to begin.

  • Laurie Anderson will perform Happiness at the Perth Festival (Feb 13), Melbourne Concert Hall (Feb 15) and Sydney Opera House (Feb 16).
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