LAURIE ANDERSON TALKS ABOUT THE WEATHER

The multimedia artist speaks of John Cage, telling the national story, and abstract things.

INTERVIEW BY CHRIS BYRNE

Spending the summer at the Elaine de Kooning House and Studio in East Hampton, artist-in-residence Laurie Anderson is always looking forward. This month the Hirshhorn Museum will close Anderson’s largest US career retrospective, The Weather, which included a series of live performances, but the groundbreaking multimedia artist never remains idle. Here, Chris Byrne shares a recent interview with Patron.

Chris Byrne (CB): Is it true that you initially declined the Hirshhorn Museum’s proposed survey of your work? Was this due to your schedule? Laurie Anderson (LA): Yes, I didn’t want to spend time looking back. I have a lot of new projects that are taking up most of my energy these days. CB: There’s no aversion to being institutionalized in a national museum? LA: I have nothing against institutions. I work with them often in many different ways. It was just a question of how to spend my time,

Laurie Anderson, Four Talks, installation view from Laurie Anderson: The Weather at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Ron Blunt.

which I prefer to do working in the present than in the past. CB: The New York Times’ Sam Anderson described The Weather as “a sort of non-retrospective retrospective of one of America’s major, and majorly confounding, modern artists...” LA: I always thought of my work as pretty straightforward storytelling. And I think that seems pretty clear in The Weather, which is stories in various forms: film, sculpture, drawings, paintings, and music. Pretty standard art forms really. CB: Your work remains uncategorizable in many ways—you’ve described it as an attempt to “tell and retell the national story…” LA: The national story itself is the thing that’s now hard to categorize. We’ve been living for years with the word “unprecedented,” and that’s an accurate description of our time. As soon as politicians recognized that telling stories—and having them actually believed to the point of fighting for them—is where the power really lies, this country has been torn apart by stories. Each side is fully convinced that their version is the only way to see the world. As a storyteller, this is a deep, wild, and treacherous thing to learn. CB: You were trained as a violinist and sculptor, eventually pursuing performance in the late 1970s… LA: I wouldn’t call this training. It somehow sounds so utilitarian and formal. I took violin lessons from the age of five and was not a particularly good student. I was afraid of my first teacher, who threatened to attach nails to the fingerboard so I would cut myself when I played out of tune. Even though I found it hard to picture an instrument of torture and music, the idea of this still made me shake when I walked into his dark little studio, unpacked my violin, and started to play out of tune yet again.

Laurie Anderson, My Day Beats Your Year (The Parrot), 2010/2021. On view in Laurie Anderson: The Weather at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Jason Stern. CB: And you became friends with the composer John Cage? LA: I interviewed him for Tricycle magazine. Here’s a story I wrote about that:

TIME TUNNEL

You know Steven Hawking has this theory about information and where it goes when it disappears. According to his theory, when a black hole implodes, all the information about the objects that have disappeared begins to skid down an infinitely long tunnel. All those numbers and calculations and deviations are swirling around in a huge whirlwind. So here are the questions: Is time long? Or is it wide? Are things getting better or are they getting worse? Can we start all over again?

You know, I did an interview with John Cage, and I spent some time with him, and I noticed that he seemed to be such a happy guy. I mean, he was eighty years old, and he was always smiling, and a lot of old people are in pretty bad moods by that point, but he wasn’t, and I was supposed to be asking him about music and information theories, but what I really wanted to know was whether he thought things were getting better or worse. Because I’d been looking around and that was something that was really on my mind, but it seemed like such a stupid question that I was afraid to ask, so I talked around it for a while, sort of building up to it, and I was saying things like: “Well, according to theories of evolution, if there was a race between a modern horse and a prehistoric horse, the modern horse would win because it’s faster, more efficient—it has adapted, and are we like that too? And then, on the other hand, according to Richard Dawkins there are some problems with this—for example it would have been a great thing if fire-breathing animals had evolved. I mean this would have been a very convenient thing just—wwwff!—cook your food on the spot, and then asbestos-coated nostrils could have evolved so the nose wouldn’t get singed,” and so on. And finally Cage said, “Um, exactly what are you trying to say?” And I said “Arethingsgettingbetteroraretheygettingworse?” And he stopped only for a moment and said, “Oh better. Much better. I’m sure of that. It’s just that we can’t see it. It’s just that it happens so slowly.”

CB: It was during a visit to Julian Schnabel’s Montauk studio that you began to paint again? LA: Yes. He made some big stretchers for me and handed me some brushes and more or less commanded me to make a painting. CB: Can you tell us about the paintings you’re making at the Elaine de Kooning House and Studio? Are you focusing on portraits? LA: I was planning on making portraits but have shifted to bigger, more abstract things. I never have any idea what I’m making and try very hard not to put it into words, especially when I’m working. I like to have the feeling of improv that I sometimes have in music. CB: What upcoming projects can we look forward to? LA: These are shifting all the time right now. But I’m working on several books, a film, a new museum installation, and what might or might not become an opera. P

Left: Laurie Anderson, All Things Fractured: Lola in the Night Sky, 2011, aluminum and light. Originally commissioned by the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Jason Stern.