Annie Lennox Cleans House. An Exhibition Is the Result.
Annie Lennox is talking about death. It isn’t morbid, nor is it vain, a celebrity’s ponderous concerns about her legacy. Instead, the former Eurythmics singer is matter-of-fact about being a woman of a certain age — 64 — and thus someone who has begun to look backward rather than forward.
“The one thing guaranteed us all, what is it?” she asks. “That we’re going to die.”
Since the 1990 breakup of the Eurythmics, the hugely successful pop music duo she led with Dave Stewart, Ms. Lennox’s concerns have become more grounded and existential. In the intervening decades, she’s released only sporadic solo albums, and took time off to raise her two daughters.
Inspired, she said, by her experiences with Nelson Mandela’s 46664 campaign, she became an AIDS activist, focusing specifically on the plight of women and girls in Africa. She left behind fame for a chance to live, and maybe even make a difference in the world.
“In my time, I always thought that fame is a result of some really great thing you’ve done musically or artistically. It’s just a symptom,” she said. “I’ve dipped in, and I’ve dipped out. And it’s the dipping out that has kept me human.”
Her humanity is the subject of Ms. Lennox’s latest project, which reveals a more personal side of her that fans haven’t had a chance to see, in an entirely different medium: installation art. Last month, at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, Ms. Lennox unveiled a roughly 2.5-meter-high and 20-meter-long mound of earth containing nearly 250 objects she acquired during her life: the makeup case she used while touring, her mother’s sewing machine, a mask that was a gift from a boyfriend, Mexican Day of the Dead figurines, dozens of pairs of her children’s shoes, and more.
The items are arranged in miniature displays that suggest associations and stories, and they’re embedded throughout a heap of glitter-dappled dirt, which is cordoned off by red velvet ropes. Atop the mound sits a piano. It is partially illuminated by a spotlight. “The piano has been so, so, so significant all through my life,” Ms. Lennox said. “Since I was 3 years old, and I was given a toy piano.”
The exhibition, titled “‘Now I Let You Go …’” represents a kind of cleaning house, both physically and emotionally. “I was confused about what to show, what was relevant, what wasn’t,” Ms. Lennox said. “But it’s beautiful that I can do this. Because we don’t have a ritual in the Western world for this. We just don’t know what to do with what’s left behind.”
On a recent visit, the mood in the gallery was hushed, the lighting low. Slow and gentle piano melodies rang out — songs improvised by Ms. Lennox, who calls them “butterfly music” for their calming effect. The mountain of dirt recalls ancient burial mounds and mass graves in addition to an archaeological dig. Some of her music videos screen on the back wall, silent and playing backward so that her expressive face and piercing eyes often loom over the whole space.
Ms. Lennox said she hopes the installation, which runs through next spring, will inspire reflection on “our common humanity.” Leaving behind the alter egos she spent years creating for music videos and photo shoots — celebrated in a 2011 show at the Victoria and Albert Museum — she has deconstructed herself for a compelling self-portrait.
“It’s an aspect of me that would’ve wanted to be an actual conventional visual artist,” she said, explaining that she had briefly studied art in school. As a child growing up in a working-class tenement in Scotland, Ms. Lennox took refuge at the Aberdeen Art Gallery. But the musician, who now divides her time between London and Los Angeles, has no pretensions about starting a new career late in life and credits much of the success of the installation to MASS MoCA’s director, Joseph Thompson, who took her proposal for the mound seriously, and the curatorial and technical staff who made it a reality. “It is my dream,” she said, “and they’ve helped me realize it.”
Ms. Lennox says she has become increasingly attuned to life’s dreamlike quality, but as a songwriter, she has deftly captured it all along — it is there in the synth pop of 1982’s “Sweet Dreams,” the 2007 power ballad “Dark Road, ” and in many other songs. Now she has given that sensibility a physical form that is, ultimately, more fleeting than her music.
“If you had met me in the ’80s, I was in my youth,” she said. “I was experimenting and trying to figure it all out. I’m not saying I’ve figured anything much out, but one thing I’m starting to realize more and more is that life is but a dream, and we carry it in memory.”