Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, making particular use of language, technology, and visual imagery. She became widely more known outside the art world in 1981 when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth5 June 1947
CityGlen Ellyn, IL
CountryUnited States of America
It's good to take a longer view and think, what would I really like to do if I had no limitations whatsoever?
No single person who has ever lived will be able to tell you what happens. Period. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong.
A lot of artists who have a certain style are expected to more or less keep doing their style. It's so easy to get into that rut of production.
Audiences, whether they're seeing a film or a reading or whatever it is, a concert, they decide very quickly what kind of show it is, and then they judge it. They judge the rest of the thing by whether it conforms to their rules for what a good symphony orchestra would be.
The audience creates its own personality, I've noticed, in the first five minutes. They will either be generous, funny, silly, withholding, academic, analytical, grudging. And I'm fascinated with how that gets constructed, because it happens right away.
I genuinely have never been in an audience where most people want that person to fail. I've never been in an audience like that, and I've never seen it as a performer. Only in my dreams, in which case they are always throwing tomatoes and going, "This is the most boring thing I've ever seen."
At the School of Visual Arts in New York, you can get your degree in Net art, which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways.
I really trust audiences as having excellent taste, for the most part.
And there was a beutiful view But nobody could see Cause everybody on the island Was saying Look at me! Look at me.
All of nature talks to me - if I could just figure out what it's saying - trees are swinging in the breeze. They're talking to me. Insects are rubbing their legs together. They're all talking. They're talking to me.
Besides all those whaling details, Moby Dick is about someone who's looking for something so huge, something they've wanted all their life, yet they know when they find it, it will kill them.
There are plenty of ways you can play the game of fighting and really seem to be fighting without going for the jugular.
Last night, I had that dream again. I dreamt I had to take a test, in a Dairy Queen, on another planet.
When love is gone, there's always justice.