Still speaking her mind

Spoken-word artist Laurie Anderson’s work is as political now as it was when she moved to New York in 1969, says Ed Power

LAURIE ANDERSON thinks she has stumbled into an alternate reality. Halfway through a European tour, the acclaimed multi-media artist and avant-garde pop star has passed through economic disaster zones Greece, Spain and Portugal (she’s due in Ireland next week).

Now she is in Israel where a creepy calm prevails. Nobody is on the streets waving placards; nobody in the bars and cafes is talking about the economy. It is unnerving her.

“I’ve been to Madrid and Athens, where the crisis has really boiled up and is the biggest story,” she says. “That’s not happening here. It’s very eerie. The biggest thing they are worried about at the moment is the price of cottage cheese. That was actually the headline in the paper today. I’m finding it deeply strange.”

Anderson was last in Israel the evening Barack Obama was elected US president. New York resident Anderson, along with her husband Lou Reed, is a supporter. In right-wing Israel (“the only English-speaking country where people approved of George W Bush”), everyone was cheering Obama’s opponent John McCain. Three years on, Anderson, while still in Obama’s corner, isn’t drinking his brand of Kool Aid. Any politician who thinks he can meaningfully influence the lives of his voters, much less alter history, is, she says, deluded.

“About a week after they are elected, something happens to presidents. I don’t know what they tell them but they bring them into a room and when they come out afterwards, their hair is grey. They look kind of haunted. It’s as if they’ve been told, ‘you’re not running the show pal’. It’s just raw capitalism that is in charge,” she says.

Such were the themes Anderson explored in her last major performance piece, Homeland. An exploration of America’s place in a post 9/11 world, Homeland, which toured internationally and became a hit album, incorporated Anderson’s trademark mix of spoken word, throbbing beats and post-modern musical accompaniment. As she is an artist not a polemicist, Homeland didn’t offer answers. It presented a feverish vision of an America that had forgotten its values and lost sight of where it was going. Even if you had no interest in politics, it made for a profoundly chilling work.

On her current tour, she’s tacking in the opposite direction. Instead of contemplating humanity’s woes, Anderson has been travelling with a deeply personal piece, Delusion, in which she meditates on autobiographical events such as the death of her mother. When she visits Cork at the weekend, it will be to perform something different again: a stripped-down suite of narratives entitled Transitory Life.

“It’s a collection of adventure stories,” she says. “Some of them are old, some brand new — and a few improvised. The art of telling stories is something that has started to fascinate me lately. How do you structure a story? And how do you break it up in a way so that it works a little bit more the way your mind does, flitting from topic to topic?”

A fixture on the New York art scene since leaving her native Chicago to enrol at Columbia University in 1969, Anderson had a brief flirtation with popular entertainment in the early ‘80s, when her song O Superman became a chart hit. Despite going on to record with Peter Gabriel and Meat Loaf, the pop mainstream never attracted Anderson.

“Let us say it wasn’t a world I was enamoured of,” she says. “It was the world of pop culture and I was from the art world and, really, kind of a snob. Pop culture, for me, was for 10-year-olds. Now I have nothing against 10-year-olds. They have to have their own thing too. I didn’t want to be in that world. I wanted to be in the world of ideas. I didn’t really care if people liked what I do. In fact, if people did like something, it made me a little nervous. I thought, I must be doing something wrong here.”

Anderson may have renounced the shallow thrills of life as a pop star, but her brief success as a recording artist yielded strange results. Inspired by novelist Thomas Pynchon, one of her final hits was Gravity’s Angel. Encouraged by the positive reception, she wrote to the reclusive author, to ask if she might turn his profoundly weird book Gravity’s Rainbow into an opera. The response was ‘Pynchon-esque’.

“I sent him a note saying, ‘I love your book and I would like to make an opera about it.’ Of course, I thought he was never going to respond. In fact he wrote me a beautiful letter. He said, ‘I love your music — absolutely. I would love you to do an opera based on my book. I have only one request — that is the whole score be done for solo banjo.’ I thought, ‘some people have such a wonderful way of ‘no, no, no — over my dead body.’ Can you imagine, three hours of banjo?” she says.

New York has changed beyond recognition since Anderson first moved there as a wide-eyed grad student. But she has little nostalgia for the New York of the 1970s, when creativity flourished but you stood a strong chance of being mugged on your way to the subway. “I love New York. Of course, I have a studio in Brooklyn as well — and that’s a cool place. If I was a young artist now, I would not go to New York. I would go to Brooklyn or Berlin. The centre shifts so often in the art world. It’s good to be a bit of an itinerant really,” she says.

- Laurie Anderson performs Transitory Life at Triskel Christchurch this Saturday and Sunday as part of Cork Midsummer Festival