Laurie Anderson: Intersection of Arts

Laurie Anderson: On Performance provides a revealing look into the artists thoughts and ideas even more than it explores her particular works. Laurie Anderson is an interesting artist because she crosses into so many areas with her artwork. She has taken performance art and technology to new levels and even made her way into pop music and inventing with tools for her violins and other compositions. Some of her concepts are more interesting, but what is most important is the way she keeps developing and changing herself with the times. It is remarkable that she can keep going and sustain some of her methods and concepts so consistently and is not afraid to create a body of work and then change direction or back off from a particular idea when it is no longer foremost in her mind. I find her personality and thoughts to be most interesting and I find similarities in some of her perspectives with some of my own thoughts on the issues. I found her fascination with Van Gogh and the need to compare artists to him whether there existed a direct parallel or not to be a humorous, but understandable occurrence. I think we all run into something that is so relevant to us that we fixate on it to the point that it bothers others. I also understand her desire to incorporate her daily experiences into her life since that is one of the directional influences on my current video project. I also see a parallel in the wish to explore the voices each person adopts in each context that they find themselves in. This sort of interest is one of the reasons why I am attracted to the idea of combining daily happenings and scripted events with the sort of personal interview to show the different sides of characters. My ideas also tie into the way Anderson chooses to view her work as a sort of discourse with the viewer, I value that sort of perspective on the relationship between artist and viewer as well. I do hope that my project will open up ideas and concepts to my viewers in the same fashion. I think that artwork is more valuable to both parties when the works are capable of opening such an exchange of ideas. Her discussion of documentation of her work was quite provocative and reminded me of Walter Benjamin's famous essay, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I often have conflicting concerns about documenting my own work and it is easy to see that the exact occurrence of the performance event, or the "aura" of an original work for Benjamin, cannot be summarized or substituted in any way. There are certain works, especially in crossover and performance art that just cannot have a surrogate or faithful preservation and it begs the question, "should we even try to preserve something that is inadequate?" I think Laurie is right in classifying our culture as overly fast and I feel there needs to be those individuals willing to take the time to slow people down and scare people to thinking about what they take for granted. Such a message is needed far more frequently than it is received. The last point of interest for me in Anderson's perspective was that of the love-hate relationship that she has with technology. I often feel some of the same frustrations and elations that she also gets from technological advancement. People do use language as a defense and a crutch to help or protect them from the things they find uncomfortable, but I find this unacceptable and unhealthy because there are some times when one really needs to experience something uncomfortable for a change. If you only had comfort all the time, you would cease to know what it is. Discomfort is necessary to know comfort by comparison. I also agree that people have different styles of communication just like voices depending on context. I personally hate talking on the phone and always have had this sort of aversion because it makes people act differently and makes them feel like it is okay to be less polite or formal and to say things that they ordinarily wouldn't. Anderson spoke about this more in terms of the computer and how e-mail changes conceptions of communications to encourage the feeling of no responsibility for increased use of profanity and a reduction of flexibility through fixed comments and policies. I think this is a very perceptive observation. I notice more personal frustration with people's tendencies to be less formal, clear, or grammatically correct than is necessary and at the same time they are reducing their actual social interactions by substituting with computer chat or other networking made possible by the internet.
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Jordan Severson