Preview
THE END OF THE MOON
Laurie Anderson
Presented by One Yellow Rabbit
and the Calgary Folk Music Festival
as part of the High Performance Rodeo
Tuesday, January 18
Jack Singer Concert Hall
(Epcor Centre)
Laurie Anderson is often narrowly defined as a performance artist, but in truth she’s a Renaissance woman – in the true, Leonardo da Vinci sense of the term. The slight, pointy-haired dynamo is a musician, composer, poet, painter, filmmaker, inventor, contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and NASA’s first resident artist. And now, add to that list of accomplishments another one: roadie.
For her new, stripped-down solo show The End of the Moon, which headlines this year’s High Performance Rodeo, the multimedia trailblazer has really gone back to the basics, touring with little more than a keyboard, a laptop and her trusty violin, and acting as her own road crew.
"I’m somebody who enjoys being a roadie," she says cheerfully, speaking by phone from her Canal Street studio in Manhattan. "I love plugging stuff in and crawling around and making sure it works. I’m pretty good at that."
As one of the world’s best-known avant-garde artists, she’s also pretty good at being a step ahead of the trends. So lately, the woman who created such eye-seducing multimedia prototypes as the seven-hour United States I-IV has been trying to put down what she calls her "dazzle tools" and find a leaner, more precise means of communication.
"I do love working with technology and I love spectacle, but I really don’t enjoy touring those big shows right now," she says. "They’re really bulky and, by the time you finish them, they get a little bit bland. I don’t know how that happens, but they can’t be as sharp as something that’s more portable, cheaper and more flexible.
"Besides, every fashion company, car company, media company has a multimedia show that’s fast and big. I’m not sure what point that makes anymore. And movies are the same way. Blockbuster stuff is becoming a bit of a blur for me; the one-upmanship in technology is so extreme now that it’s become very boring."
BIG SCIENCE AT NASA
Ironically, the Spartan End of the Moon grew out of her 2003-04 residency with the organization that wields some of humankind’s most advanced and complex technology – the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But her time spent observing at NASA’s various facilities, while a technophile’s wet dream, also became an unexpected encounter with the role of esthetics in science.
Anderson explains that the seeds for this show were sown just prior to the NASA experience, while writing an essay for a Buddhist review on the topics of time and beauty. "That particular little essay starts with this question – as does this show – which is, ‘Who taught you what beauty is?’ It was a question a friend of mine had asked and I thought, ‘What a strange question!’
"In the process of my work at NASA, I came across a lot of similar questions in the realms of science. You’d hear things like Einstein having rejected one of his main theories because it wasn’t ‘beautiful.’ I thought, ‘What could that mean? What was he looking for? How do you judge what you’ve found and how do you know what to look for in your own work?’
"It threw me into this chaotic spin. I was thinking, ‘What am I doing? I know what is considered to be art in this culture, and what it’s supposed to look like and how it’s supposed to affect people – but what is it, really?’"
The End of the Moon, therefore, tries to capture things before they can be defined and categorized. Some of the show’s writing consists of journalistic-style narrative reporting, some of it of images and fragments, based on her time at NASA, a visit to a monastery in California and other events, all of them related rather than interpreted. In the course of the piece she touches upon beauty, the cosmos, consumerism, war and the world after 9-11. The nuggets of text are strung together by the sonic thread of her violin.
Being a lo-tech solo, the show allows Anderson room to improvise from performance to performance, and the work itself has been evolving since she began touring it last fall. She says that the political content in particular has changed, reflecting the shift in attitude in the U.S. since the November presidential election.
"The first part of this tour was during the elections and, for some reason, I went to every single state that was undecided," she says. "There was a lot of crazy uncertainty, and anger as well."
In the wake of George W. Bush’s narrow re-election, however, that dissent has gone underground.
"I’m not a bad loser," says Anderson, "I can see the point in being the opposition, but I see that (opposition) disappearing in my country, and it is so disturbing to me. And I didn’t realize how embedded that was –" she stops and apologizes for using Bush administration jargon. "Gee, I’m sorry. I used the word ‘embedded.’ It’s the wrong word! But inside this piece," she continues, "there are a lot of things I was not entirely conscious of putting into it. When I look at it, there’s a lot of strange sadness in it; and I don’t feel personally sad, but I realized a lot of this sense of regret is about what’s going on politically and socially in the United States. I think, frankly, a lot of people feel that way, but it’s so unpopular to express it right now – so deeply unpopular. You’re supposed to go with the program, support the troops, raise the flag. It’s unbelievable what’s going on."
It’s probably impossible for any thinking artist in the U.S. today to avoid making some reference to America’s empire burlesque. That’s certainly true of Anderson. "Because this is a piece about society and aspiration and technology, via NASA, it also became a kind of commentary on living in the United States now," she says. "I can’t seem to get away from that. It always seeps in."
LAURIE AND LOU
Anderson, 57, has been playing with our perceptions at least since the start of the 1980s. Born and raised in suburban Chicago, trained in art history and sculpture at Barnard and Columbia, she made an unexpected leap from New York’s downtown arts scene to the pop mainstream in 1981 when her song "O Superman" climbed the charts. It led to a recording contract with Warner Bros., which released Big Science, the first of her eight albums, in ’82. Before long, Anderson was appearing on the late-night talk-show circuit, presenting her work on PBS and bringing the highfalutin term "performance art" into common currency. A rock star among performance artists, over the years she has collaborated with, among others, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, Philip Glass and, most personally, with the rock ’n’ roll animal himself, Lou Reed, her partner since the 1990s.
She and Reed have made guest appearances on each other’s projects over the years – he appeared on her Bright Red album, she performed on his Poe tribute The Raven – but it has to be asked: Have they ever considered doing a full-on, 50-50 collaboration?
"That’s so eerie you should ask," says Anderson. "On the vacation we just took, we were talking about something like that. It’s the only way we get to spend time together of a certain kind. Of course, it’s really different when you work with someone and also live with them." Still, she says, they’re mulling over some kind of joint project. "And we’d also be able to bring in Lou’s martial arts teacher (tai chi master Ren Guangyi) and our dog (a rat terrier named Lolabelle)," says Anderson. "So it would be a family kind of thing."
BREAKING THE ELECTRONIC SHACKLES
But Anderson has plenty of other projects to deal with first. Her NASA stint will also bear fruit in a film about space and time that she’s busy finishing for Japan’s World Expo this year. After that, she’s composing music to be played in a traditional Japanese Zen garden, also for the Expo. And this spring she hopes to resume a series of long-distance walks she has been taking in foreign countries. Like this solo tour, they are part of her effort to break the electronic shackles, leave the computer and video screens behind and get out into the real world.
Originally, she says, her heroic rambles were meant to be an opportunity for meditation on specific ideas or themes, a notion borrowed from the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. "But I’d hit the road and my mind would go totally blank. I just could not do that. I got completely overwhelmed by being where I was. So it became a different sort of thing, where I said, ‘I’m just going to see what’s going to happen, rather than try to predict stuff all the time.’"
So far she’s done five walks, in such places as Greece and Sri Lanka – the latter trip now unexpectedly poignant after the devastation of December’s tsunamis. "It’s unbelievable to see those images," she says quietly. "A lot of the places where I was walking just are not there anymore."
Next on her agenda is one of the most famous walks in the history of 19th-century poetry: the route between Paris and the northern French town of Charleville, trod by that runaway teenager among poets, Arthur Rimbaud.
There’s something appealing about the most high-tech and plugged-in of performance artists just logging off and hitting the open road. But Anderson says the Internet has given us a false sense of worldliness. "You say, ‘Wow, I’m surfin’ the web, I’m tapped in to the whole zeitgeist.’ But really, you’re looking at another little rectangle with lousy graphics. Is that the world? That’s not the world. It’s been amazing for a recovering technophile to get out and just see the real scale of things." |
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