Laurie Anderson 1993

Laurie Anderson discussed ‘Stories from the Nerve Bible’ a retrospective spanning her first 20 years as a popular and acclaimed performance artist. She talks about traveling to Europe with Talented Teen USA, teaching art and making up stories behind the slides, a very early work called ‘Time to Go’ about a guard who must go around when the museum closes to snap people out of their art daze, her plan to open a hardware store, the balance between art and commerce, how her one hit ‘Oh Superman’ was appropriated by a car theft alarm company, the artist as a spy, why she enjoys being clumsy on stage, her skepticism about the internet, and how art can hurt you.

Transcript

Why did you call your new work Nerve Bible?

The stories I heard as a child were Bible stories. It was real Bible Belt stuff. But they were very strange stories. That was my introduction to Surrealism. There's a lot of strange stories in the Bible. . I was just in L.A. and someone was talking to me about doing some kind of spoken word project. And I looked on her list and I was, you know how you get on people's lists somehow. I was on her list to do a project with Ken Nordine. And I talked to him about doing the Old Testament. He was going to do God and I was going to do everything else. You know, like the tribes of Nubians. But I think that's a project I'm going to have to table for a while. Getting ordained for people who aren't familiar with him. The voice of God. I mean, probably the closest thing on earth to it, I would say.

People might not realize and might be surprised to hear, in fact, if they know much about Laurie Anderson, that you went to Europe as a teenager with an up-with-people style group called the Talented Teen USA.

Uh-huh. Red Blazers. We did... I saw our boys over there, did stuff for them, and my act was pretty much like what it is now.

What did you do?

I told stories. You know what a chalk talk is?

No.

You do drawings while you're talking, so that was what I was doing. I think I remember drawing pictures of hamburgers, shoes, cars, and then audience members, and then telling stories that would sort of link them up.

You also tell a story in the book about teaching art after you graduated from college, but how sometimes you'd forget sort of the facts that were in the art books and you'd kind of begin to make them up as the class went on.

Right. Egyptian architecture and Syrian sculpture and – You know, I was doing it for money. It was a job, job. I was doing sculpture during the day. So, yeah, a slide would come up, I'd look at it, and I would just draw a complete blank. You know, I couldn't remember a single thing about it. And you have to say something, unless you're like a formalist and you want to talk about the angles and the materials. So I would just make up stories about various pharaohs, and they'd write it down, I'd test them on it.

And how did you remember what it was that you told them in the first place when you were looking at their test results?

That was my downfall. And people would go on to the next year and talk to the next professor who would say, you know, and they'd say, well, Ms. Anderson told me this thing about the Bruno Faro, and they'd go into that, and she'd say... She did? Well, next faculty meeting, we'll see. I was an absolutely miserable teacher. I had a pretty good time.

One of your early recordings was a song called Time to Go for Diego. (click to listen)

words from ‘Time to Go’. Diego used to be a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. He was on the night shift. And his job was to go around the museum and tell people to leave. Or as he put it, snap them out of their art trances. People who'd been standing in front of one thing for hours. He would jump in front of them and snap his fingers. And he'd say, time to go. Time to go. Time to go. Time to go.

I'm really surprised to see it here. I haven't seen it or heard it since I made it. I mean, yeah. The image of all these people sitting in the museum in these art days in front of pictures is such a great image. You know the look, right? Sure. And having to be snapped out of it. Do you ever feel like you're in art daze? Most of the time, yeah. No Diego, though, to snap you out of it? He's doing some interesting stuff now. He's actually curating a lot of things. You know, after doing this book, I thought, wow, I really miss making stuff and things. And I stopped making it because my studio was filled with stuff, and I didn't know what to do with it. Like every artist, you just drown in it. But he just did a show in New York and I put a kind of a music box in it. It was a, it was a, it looks like a level and it has, so it's about three feet long and it has the two little tubes for, you know, of liquid and then it has On either side of those, two little scenes with that blue liquid that you find in snow globes or, you know, little desktop tchotchke stuff. And scenes of little towns drowning. And then as you move... raise one end of the level, you hear, you know, one of the towns gets completely drowned, the other one is beached, and you hear, it's a duet, there's some EEPROM chips burned, you know, sound, a minute of sound burned into each end of it with little speakers, and it's a duet for men and women, so there's, you know, as you raise one level, it tells the chip to play, and you hear her part of the song, you raise the other end, and he sings. And it's sort of like a music box, but, um, it was, uh, uh, I haven't had that impulse to make things in a long time. So it was really fun to get back to doing that. And yet you started as a sculptor, or at least you got your jury as a sculptor. I did. Yeah. But it all has to do with, I've just been looking around for, for spots in town cause I'm planning to open a hardware store sometime. And I love stuff like that. And, uh, so a lot of the sculpture I was doing was, you know, I was more interested in the tools than what I was making with it. And so a lot of the stuff looked, had something tool-like about it. So I'm getting back to these levels here. So anyway. New hardware or used hardware for your store? Well, it's going to be a selection of stuff. Some will be used new and then useless is going to be a whole category.

You write about your shock at going to a performance that you were doing at the Museum of Modern Art and seeing it was being presented by Mobil Oil. And yet you also include in this book this American Express ad that you appeared in, and it's a pitch for college students to buy tickets. And over your head it says, how to buy a performer. What happened in between the shock in the first instance and including it in your book in the second?

Take a guess. You want me to tell you?

Yeah, I did.

The first time in my life I had a manager. if he's listening to this. I went off on a long tour and came back, you know, so owing all this money to people. And we'd done really well on that tour. So he said, well, you have a chance to make some of this money back. And so I did this American Express print ad. So anyway, he then kind of, what a weasel. He disappeared. That's why I did it. I had this weird moment where I thought that, well, I really need some help, and then the kind of help you get is... So I thought I should put that in the book because it was... I didn't put in a lot of humiliating stuff, but I did put in some. After all, I was the editor, so I didn't have to... But that was in a... It seemed like an Andy Warhol kind of a thing. Like he would have just loved the fact that he'd been in an American Express commercial like that. Well, you know, now at this point, it's very hard to tell often what is that and what is Peace of Heart. And yeah, I'm sure every Gap commercial, you know, an awful lot of artists in those. Or, you know... I was in a museum in Frankfurt and saw a show that was by the photographer, I forget what his name is, he's Italian, who does all the Benetton photography. It's a whole exhibition of all of these images that they've used. Huge photographs, floor to ceiling, with the Benetton logo on them. Great big, you know, white dropped out type on green. And in an art museum. And I was like, wow, this is so strange. I mean, I have to say I have some problems with that kind of use of imagery. One of their most famous images is this huge boat with people falling off of it, all of the AIDS victims. And, you know, the message is, you know, you think AIDS is bad, we think AIDS is bad, so buy these pants. And I know that you have a chance if you're in advertising to project whatever kind of message you want, and maybe that's a better message than you're going to look cool in these pants. I still resent it. I really do. And to see it in an art museum is even wilder. Well, for some strange reason, artists have a compulsion to earn a living, and many of them do find themselves attracted to the world of commercials and commercial art.

Do you think that invalidates it as art?

Not necessarily. But I did feel queasy seeing it at Benetton. The logo is part of the image. I'm kind of going, how does that blend? Why is that there? It's not helping the image. It's yet another message, and it's a very clear one. I might have felt differently if it was done by the, in fact, I probably would have. They're beautiful photographs. They're powerful. And if his name was like every other artist's name on, you know, somewhere in the gallery, but not as part of the, part of it.

You tell a great story about Oh Superman (click here to listen) which was a hit and sold a lot of records and you did very well with it and many of your close associates at the time were saying that you were selling out although later on it became mainstreaming and became more acceptable to associate yourself with a commercial record label. but the story at the end of the story was my favorite part about how it was expropriated by a company that sold car alarms for luxury automobiles.

Oh, yeah. The song. Right. Yeah. Then it was... I was... I think I was in a studio and I heard this kind of thing, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, you know, and I thought, wait a second, I've heard this before. It was on television once and it was all these, it was an ad for, yeah, the security, the prevention of theft in luxury cars. And I called the car company and said, you know, I... I wrote a song once, it's a lot like you're at, you know, and they just, they said, like, hey, small world, you know. That was it. I couldn't get them to stop. Well, actually, I eventually did, but that was my favorite part about it was... And it seemed to blend in, you know, that the purpose of their ad was the prevention of theft, which is also how they obtained their soundtrack. So it seemed to square out in the end.

What do you think is your job as an artist?

To be a spy. Okay. And observe and then report. Spies go behind enemy. To who, you might ask. Well, spies go behind enemy lines. All the time. Yeah.

And where do you go? Where do you [go] behind enemy lines to do your spying?

Nope. Classified. Yeah. And reporting back to your viewers and listeners.

Reporting back to the same people I've been spying on?

Hey, it's a loop. Yeah.

You write that even though you were heavily involved in the censorship debate over NEA funding, that you thought the real big questions weren't being asked in that debate. Questions like, can art hurt you, which a lot of people are asking in regard to TV violence and a lot of other aspects of art. What do you think the answer is to that?

Yeah, I think it can. Often we don't give it a chance to hurt or to help us. We just sock it away somewhere else and treat it as if it's not powerful. But sometimes we're not able to prevent that. Yeah, it can hurt you and it can help you.

Does the artist always know whether it's going to hurt or help or are there unintended consequences somehow after the art gets out of your hands?

It depends on what kind of... I mean, that's a huge question. Of course, you have your own goals. Or at least I have my own goals. Just speaking for myself, not for all art or all artists. Thank you. That I think of myself as an average enough person so that if I write something... I'll respond you know I'll laugh or not or cry or not and and hope that I'm that I'm an average enough specimen so that other people have a similar reaction now sometimes I'm completely wrong about that and things are funny only to me and so I just try to be as good as judge as I can and also keep the lights on in concerts and watch people. Because people in audiences definitely think they're invisible. And I can see them very well, and I learn from them. I can tell a blank stare from an absorbed look, I think. That must be hard to be absorbing that at the same time as you're performing. No, it's no harder than being part of a conversation in which – well, it's not really a conversation. They don't have microphones. But it's – The closer it is to jazz, the more I like it. In other words, it's more like improvising. One person says something and you watch the response. It's like any conversation. You try not to just say things by rote, but really talk to who you're talking to at the time and try to leap around a little bit. At different points, you've heavily altered your persona.

You've lowered your voice to sound like a man's voice. You even created a clone, which was a guy who you created electronically. But you write about kind of moving away from that in more recent years, moving more back to your own voice, not using the man's voice quite so often.

Oh, he comes in handy.

Yeah?

Yeah.

What's he handy for?

Occasionally, it's this voice of control and authority whenever I feel like. It's also pomposity, so that's always a lot of fun to make fun of that.

There's a real naturalness in your delivery when you're telling stories at certain times. Do you do much ad-libbing or improvising on the spot when you're in a performance?

Yeah, I do. And especially when they're not like 20 people on the tech crew. Because when you start out living then, they go, wait a second, what page are we on? Once you get into making a big machine like that work, and I'm talking about a show that involves film and video and lots of electronics and lights and sound and a band. Yeah. that's the kind of show that I'm going to be doing in the fall. And in that case, once you've done it a few times, you can start. It really is a kind of collaboration between all those people. And I really love to make a situation in which we can improvise and play a little bit within that structure. And because I consider all of the people who are doing the visual things and the electronic things as... collaborators just like musicians, you know, and it's an ensemble work for everyone. They may only see the actual musicians, but I think actually people feel. It's not really a puppet show, you know. You can feel the kind of old call and response thing going on. I think that would be important just to keep it fresh for yourself, too, if you're on a long tour performing night after night. Yeah. The other thing that helped was in the last long tour I did, I did it in 12 different languages. So it drove the backup singers crazy. We're doing it in Croat. In Yugoslavia, we had to do it in three different languages, Serbo-Croatian, Czech. let's see, Slovakian and a kind of Croat dialect. And the promoter said, you know, if you slip up and, you know, if you start doing something inCroat, of course, I'm not usually, I'm not used to going along in Slovakian and suddenly lapsing into Croat. But, yeah, I don't think he thought I was going to do that. But he said, if you do, you know, you're really going to get in trouble. People take it very seriously here. very seriously. This was like right as the war was heating up. I was glad to get out of there, I'll tell you. Sort of like, it probably is sort of horrible for them to hear their language butchered like that or, you know, not done quite right. Although I worked with a lot of translators on it, trying to get slang into it and trying to get it to feel loose. But my worst fear was it would be like, you know, like a French person coming to Nashville and saying, you know, good evening. Hello, how are you? You know, I'm speaking your language now.

You write about, you've made great use of the William Burroughs phrase ‘language as a virus’ in your music and also as a concept and you talk about in your performances whether or not to use subtitles or sing and speak in English. And you talk about how both of them distance you from the audience. But then you write that you enjoyed being vulnerable and clumsy on stage, which kind of surprised me.

Oh, yeah.

What did you mean by that?

Well – Just what I was saying before about when you're trying to speak someone's language, for a while, when I hear someone else trying to do that, it's sort of charming. After a while, it's wearing. So I make the attempt, and I don't try to be clumsy. I know that I am, but it doesn't bother me enough to not try.

Okay. You're a self-described computer nerd, and you've always used a lot of technology in your national performances. What do you think now that everybody's getting personal computers and people are putting out recordings that the listener can mess around with and remix and the information highway is supposedly open for business? Do you think this is a positive step?

Business is the right word for this, and information is the wrong one. You know, I just think it's such a hoax, this highway. You know, and I think you're absolutely right to say business because I think of it as a way to keep, you know, credit ratings rolling. And why would it be different, like, suddenly to have everybody in this country interested in the well-being and access to information for every citizen? You know, you think... wait a second, something's going on here. How come they're so interested in this all of a sudden? So I'm pretty cynical about it. But because it's an image, it's, you know, it's, I don't know how powerful it's going to be. You know, the last big image was, you know, the high-tech war type image, you know. From the Gulf War. Yeah, I mean, any kind of power and high-tech stuff is supposed to go. But that was combined, of course, with a certain kind of ego and driving on a highway and winning and being number one and being in a traffic jam on the information superhighway. I'm not sure it's going to sustain in the same way, you know. So I have... I have my doubts. It's funny because advocates say it's going to connect us together and we'll be able to circumvent and we're already able to speak to one another across the globe through the internet and not have to go through centralized authority and information flows much more freely. Who puts that information in? How? When? You know, I am so mistrustful of it. I truly am. I mean, I think it's okay as a kind of telephone. But I don't think it's going to be. You know, one of the reasons that I bother to go around and do live things. is because I think that's a really great way for people to communicate and be together and see each other's faces. So many people's jobs now are sitting at home with their PC, and you don't get a lot of the real dirt that's going on that way. You're just in this other world. And I'm afraid I'm going to fall into it myself. I do that as well. I'm a PC hermit a lot of the time. But what I really like is the messiness. And I could stay at home, make videos, make CD-ROMs, do stuff and ship it out. And it's a lot messier to fill up two big vans of equipment and giant trucks of stuff. and go out into another sort of 19th century world, a theater world, where a lot of the theaters are, you know, they're made of sandbag and rope. And you go and set something up there and hope somebody shows up. It's a very old-fashioned way of doing things, and I really like it. You know, because it has the possibility of disaster, you know, of something really not working, and then you have to fix it on the spot. It's very... And when you make a video, everything's cleaned up. Every single edit is perfect or as good as you can make. And I like the sloppiness of being with people. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people now, maybe I'll just go rent the ”Home of the Brave” video instead of going to see Laurie Anderson live. But that's interesting. Maybe the PC and all this connecting is yet the next phase after TV, another way to keep us home rather than going out and interacting. And getting into trouble. Yeah. It's harder to get in trouble at home. I don't think you can get into as much trouble at home on your PC.

You're touring with readings from the book Stories from the Nerve Bible, and you've described it as kind of a radio play, and that got me wondering, have you ever worked in radio as a medium?

I did a little bit, and during the last election, I did something for NPR on the campaign, featuring the Admiral. Stockdale? Yeah. Remember him? Mm-hmm. Why am I here? What was his line? What was his line? What am I doing here? Something. Like he got dropped in there from outer space. Yeah, and talking about the civilization that he ran. Three or four hundred wonderful men. And you didn't know what the hell he was talking about. It was his POWs and he was king for a while. He was reminiscing. I saw that in a midtown bar in Manhattan. He came on and people's jaws just dropped. It was a great evening.