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
Last night, I had that dream again. I dreamt I had to take a test, in a Dairy Queen, on another planet.
The best thing about the term 'performance artist' is that it includes just about everything you might want to do.
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.
I wanted to impress people because I was kind of a kid who was lost in the crowd - was sort of my, feeling about childhood was being part of a big family.
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.
I always feel like if someone has stage fright, I really try and say, "Listen, these people want you to succeed, they want to have a good evening. They want to see something really great. They don't want to see something crappy. They don't. They want to be at something really special."
I kind of didn't believe the doctors when they came over and they said you're not going to be able to walk again. I'm sorry to tell you this. I thought who is this guy? I just was so impatient with the whole thing. I knew I was going to walk again. I knew that I was going to do that.
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.
It's just such a great miracle when things do work, and they work for such a wild variety of crazy reasons.
People are really suffering these days. There's a lot of corporate triumph and a lot of personal despair as they wonder what are they working for.
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've never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn't made money with it.
What happens when you're in a crash is you join a crash club, and you talk endlessly about your crash because you don't want to bore your friends with it. And they've heard about the crash so many times.