Laurie Anderson: A Fantasy Notebook for Freedom
Written by Vittoria de Franchis
“As a child, I was a kind of a sky worshipper. This was the Midwest and the sky was so vast. It was most of the world. I knew I had come from there. And that someday, I would go back.” (Heart of a Dog, 2015) Is Laurie Anderson an alien? Or a “strange form of life”, as Pitchfork suggested in 1982 when reviewing her debut album “Big Science”? Laurie Anderson’s relentless contributions over the past four decades have often been reminders that our imagination makes us all aliens. Through fantasy, we can expand the sense of what is possible. “Speak my language” (Speak My Language, 1994). A call from the underwater inviting the brainy Ulysses to put aside his goal and intuitively plunge into the unknown. “I’m lost in your words. I’m swimming.” (Freefall, 1994).
Laurie Anderson can hardly be labelled; she is a total artist, a spatial innovator. Operating from New York since the late Sixties, her practice suggests a diversity that should be maintained unrestricted, something translatable through an onomatopoeia, a free-spirited idiom, “Yodellayheeh” (Big Science, 1982). Laurie Anderson’s work is rarely frontal, rather multi-sensorial and four-dimensional, be it a standing performance with an ‘augmented’ violin that ends when the ice blocks holding her melt (Duets on Ice, 1974-5), a Virtual Reality piece that brings us to the moon (To The Moon, Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang, 2018), a Grammy-awarded album recounting the experienced catastrophe and magic of a destructive hurricane (Landfall, with Kronos Quartet, 2018), or a room whose surfaces are so full of stories and images we can lose ourselves in it (Laurie Anderson: The Weather, Hirshhorn Museum, 2021).
