Laurie Anderson reflects on brilliant, motley work
A truism about live performance of any kind is that it is ephemeral. Laurie Anderson’s hybrid, highspirited and highly engaging “All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language, and Code” commences with a calm reminder that really, all art is ephemeral; in fact, everything is ephemeral, subject to being swept away by impersonal forces over which humans have little to no control.
Anderson opens the collection with the 2012 landfall of Hurricane Sandy, when “the black water rose up over the banks, crossed the highway, and turned our street into a dark silky river. ” Two days later, she goes down to the basement she shares with her husband, Lou Reed, “to have a look at the equipment and materials I had assumed were soaked but still salvageable” only to find that “Nothing was left.”
Yet in spite — or perhaps because — of this sober opening, Anderson presents here a lively, lucid and life-affirming look at her own dizzying career, an honest and seemingly exhaustive excavation of her philosophies and motivations. “And I looked at them floating there/ all the things I had carefully/ saved all my life,” she writes in the opening piece, “And I thought how beautiful/ how magic and how catastrophic.”
As this book essentially floats the reader back over these transitory things, one begins to realize: In a world that increasingly encourages artists to hyperspecialize and stick to a personal brand, Anderson remains one of our most fascinating and exuberant polymaths. Having released seven albums and counting, as well as having exhibited around the world at such venues as the Park Avenue Armory in New York and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Anderson joyfully refuses, as the saying goes, to stay in her lane, ranging instead across fields and projects with uninhibited abandon and intense thoughtfulness.
As a performance artist, composer, musician, installation artist, software designer, writer and filmmaker, Anderson has a brilliant and motley oeuvre spanning 40-plus years. Lavish yet intimate, “All the Things I Lost in the Flood” arrives as the first book assessing her prolific output as a whole.
“I’ve tried to make a personal as well as a somewhat casual book,” she says.
The book has the person-to-person feel of a private tour of the artist’s archive as she herself makes real-time discoveries, like when she notes: “In looking at the way I’ve told the story of the United States, I realize I’ve been describing the shift from aspirational democracy to privatization and corporate culture.” Or when she writes, “My difficulties in designing endings is also the reason I never have intermissions in my concert which require you to have two beginnings and two endings.”
Composed of eight chapters, the book affords a nonchronological retrospective of her major projects, ranging in scale, scope and tone from 2015’s critical, serious and heartbreaking “Habeas Corpus” — inspired in part by Mohammed el Gharani, one of the youngest detainees at Guantanamo — to the lighthearted and moving “Concert for Dogs,” which is exactly what it sounds like, and which she began touring in Sydney in 2010.
As fans might expect, the book — as gorgeous an object as it is, crowded with photographs, film stills, virtual reality renderings, diagrams and scripts — has a pleasingly improvisatory and handmade feel. Paging through, one senses that the term that encompasses the multifarious work that Anderson has done over the decades is “story” — and how even when she’s at her strangest and most conceptual, language and narrative serve as her indispensable anchors.
Her obvious love and admiration for her influencers and collaborators — Gertrude Stein, Sol LeWitt, William S. Burroughs, Brian Eno, Susan Sontag, Laura Poitras and Herman Melville, to name a few — feels joyful to behold. And her work ethic takes one’s breath away, even as she admits, disarmingly, that “I usually feel I am running out of time and haven’t accomplished enough.”
Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.”