ARTicles vol. 3 i.2a: Music of the Spheres

Who could have dreamt up the life of performance artist Laurie Anderson? NASA’s first artist in residence. Early collaborator with guerilla-comedian Andy Kauffman. Composer of O Superman, the number 2 pop-chart hit in England for 1982. Host of the radical PBS television series Alive From Off-Center<.em>. Live-in partner of underground rock icon Lou Reed. Unclassifiable as an artist, Anderson is best known for the magical synthesis of sound and image in her groundbreaking performance work. In 1972 in Duets on Ice, Anderson stood on a New York street corner in a pair of ice skates frozen into a block of ice, playing duets along with a small tape recorder hidden inside her violin. The composition ended when her stage, the block of ice, had melted away. Her unique career was launched long before these vanguard days of the NYC performance art scene. Desperate for attention at age twelve, she made an impulsive first-time leap off the high dive of a suburban Illinois public swimming pool. Bouncing off the cement edge of the pool, she broke her back, spending the next three months in traction, unable to move or speak. There, in the unexpected meditation that a hospital bed provided, the artist was born. Sound and vibration passed through her paralyzed body, awakening her to the sensations which became her life’s passion. Later, the adult artist Anderson would recall this experience through a sculpture entitled Music Table that played music through the listener’s body when they leaned their elbows on top of it and pressed their hands tightly to their ears. Extending subjective experience through shared performances would become a life quest for the artist. In preparation for Happiness, a large-scale, multi-media production presented in 2002, Anderson spent a year challenging herself in tangential life experiences: she spent a month cooking hamburgers at a MacDonald’s in New York City’s Chinatown, lived for a time on a rural farm with an Amish family, and made a “vow-of-silence”‘ canoe trip down Utah’s Green River. Anderson be-lieves in writing about what she knows, and if she doesn’t know something, she’ll dive into the experience. “I think of myself as an experimental artist. So I thought maybe I’d better start experimenting. I put myself in a lot of, let’s say, odd and inappropriate situations in which I don’t know what to say or how to act. I can’t fall back on any patterns. …” For Laurie Anderson, it’s impossible to define where the boundaries between life, art and music fall. She’s determined to blur her everyday experience into performance as a twenty-first century artist she takes it as her responsibility. “Starting in the last century with Marcel Duchamp, artists began to challenge existing definitions. A playwright could write about a boring day and say ‘That’s beautiful.’ An artist’s affairs with her collectors could constitute her art – and that’s beautiful. Pretty soon all of life will be a work of art and that will be incredible.” In 2003, Anderson was awarded the first-ever position of artist in residence for the nation’s space program at NASA, offering the artist who finds beauty in the ordinary a chance to make art from the extraordinary. Given complete freedom at NASA, she followed the rule of working the way scientists do, setting strict limits for experimentation, working towards results that everyone can share. Anderson’s multi-media performance piece End of the Moon evolved through telling the story of her adventures with NASA scientists and space technology. The twenty-first-century composer is always in her element when she can take the listener on a sensory journey “A lot of works teach you how to function through your eyes and ears, how to appreciate everything you see and hear, how the definition of art can be expanded. Just look around you, and it’s all gorgeous in some way.” For her collaborative sound work on Canadian director Robert Lepage’s far side of the moon, Anderson continues her exploration of music in space. In scoring Lepage’s brilliant production, she creates a soft, mystical soundtrack that describes what a child’s dream of space travel might be. Like all of Anderson’s works, expect it to be breathtaking. Mark Poklemba is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.