I Coulnt Tell Him That He Was the Most Beautiful Work of Art Song
Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans
For one-half a century, she has taken the things we know all-time— our bodies, our rituals, our nation — and shown u.s. how foreign they really are.
Laurie Anderson. Credit... Philip Montgomery for The New York Times
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When the Hirshhorn Museum told Laurie Anderson that it wanted to put on a big, lavish retrospective of her work, she said no. For one thing, she was decorated. She has been busy at present for roughly l years, hauling her keyboards and experimental violins all over the world to put on huge bonanzas of lasers and noise loops and incantatory monologues that she delivers in a voice somewhere between slam poetry, an evening newscast, a final confession and a bedtime story. Although Anderson plays multiple instruments, her signature tool has always been her voice. Words emerge from her mouth deliberate and hyperenunciated, surrounded past unpredictable pauses. She piles up phrases the way van Gogh piled upwardly brush strokes.
Over the class of her incessant career, Anderson has washed simply about everything a artistic person can do. She has helped design an Olympics opening anniversary, served as the official artist in residence for NASA, made an opera out of "Moby-Dick" and played a concert for dogs at the Sydney Opera House. She has danced the tango with William S. Burroughs and flown to a tropical island with John Cage. And she is still going. As Anderson once put it to me, during a cursory pause between trips to Paris and New Zealand, only before a Carnegie Hall performance with Iggy Pop: "Lately, I'm doing a stupid amount of things."
On top of all this, Anderson had philosophical qualms virtually a retrospective. She is 74, which seems like a very normal age to finish and look back, and yet she seems determined, at all times, to keep moving forward. She is a perpetually cresting wave, a niggling light-green shoot constantly emerging from its seed. The terminal thing she wanted was to stop and stand however and be institutionalized in a large museum. This is the paradox of Laurie Anderson: What makes her worthy of a retrospective as well makes her basically retrospective-proof.
Join The Times'south Jazmine Hughes for a free virtual event, as she welcomes special guests Laurie Anderson, Lynn Nottage and Sarah Schulman to explore the eternal reinvention of the city, and how fine art and creativity often fuels these moments of rebirth.
Anderson's response to the Hirshhorn was a counterproposal: How about a show of entirely new work?
"In some ways, I wasn't surprised," Melissa Chiu, the museum's managing director, told me. "She's so interested in the here and now. We had to make peace with that. We made a decision, early on on, to say: OK, Laurie's got this."
The Hirshhorn gave Anderson the whole 2d floor then followed her lead. (There were a few exceptions. When Anderson proposed filling part of a room with stinky wet mud, the museum, citing policy, said no.) The result is a show called "The Weather," a sort of nonretrospective retrospective of 1 of America's major, and majorly confounding, mod artists. Chiu says the show is less a traditional exhibition than a giant artist's projection that happens to be set up in our national museum of modern art.
The Hirshhorn sits right on the National Mall, midway betwixt the Washington Monument and the Capitol. This makes it the perfect site to showcase Anderson's work. She has ever been obsessed with America; her whole career, as she describes information technology, has been an attempt "to tell and retell the national story." This is, of grade, a fraught, impossible project. Only then Anderson is a fraught, incommunicable storyteller.
"Americans have traditionally demanded coherent and simple national stories," she has written. "Now many of these stories no longer make whatsoever sense. Only so far nada has replaced them. We are in story limbo, and for a storyteller this is an intensely interesting identify to exist."
Anderson's stories tend to be broken and fragmented, unfinished, nonlinear, elusive, pointless — stories nigh the impossibility of stories. They are often gender-fluid. (She appears, sometimes, every bit a graphic symbol called Fenway Bergamot, a male person alter ego with thick eyebrows and a mustache.) In identify of coherence, in place of the auto logic of propaganda, Anderson inserts dream logic, joke logic, the self-swallowing logic of Buddhism. She likes to hollow out triumphant national stories and fill them with dubiety. She one time summarized "The Star-Spangled Imprint," for instance, as "but a lot of questions asked during a burn." ("Say, isn't that a flag?" she asked, pointing into the distance. "Couldn't say," she answered, "it's pretty early in the morning.")
Chiu told me, with what sounded similar a mixture of awe and feet, that she could imagine Anderson wanting to change the Hirshhorn show fifty-fifty after it was installed.
I asked Anderson if she could see herself doing this. Absolutely, she said. In fact, she was planning on information technology. She wanted to hang her new paintings in the museum and then pigment over them, right at that place on the walls. She even fantasized, aloud, near painting over them again after the bear witness opened.
When I mentioned this to Marina Abramovic, one of Anderson'southward longtime friends, she laughed admiringly.
"Laurie is a total nightmare for every gallerist," she said.
At various times, the Hirshhorn show was touch and go. There were issues with paperwork, logistics. In that location was a whole pandemic. At i point, Chiu told me that Anderson basically disappeared.
"She's offline," Chiu said.
"She's offline?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Did she send out a annunciation or something?"
"No, she just told us that she was going offline."
"OK," I said.
"Until information technology subsides," she said.
"Until it subsides?"
"Yes," Chiu said, and paused. "She'south very mysterious."
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I wintertime day, Anderson invited me to her studio at the end of Canal Street, right where it meets the Hudson River. She has been working here since the 1970s — since the downtown glory days of Warhol, Basquiat, CBGB, Patti Smith, the Ramones, David Bowie, etc. etc. etc. I sat there petting her scruffy terrier, Little Will, while Anderson talked to me about basically everything in the universe. She told me about ponies ("If ponies were people they'd all be in jail") and donkeys ("They have the best retention in the fauna kingdom") and about how the Hudson River is total of seahorses — not the elegant tropical wiggly jewels that you tend to see in aquariums, but New York Metropolis seahorses. Survivors. "Funky, chocolate-brown, crusty," she said.
I had come prepared with a notebook total of nervous sweaty questions, considering Anderson is an icon of the avant-garde, a titan and a pioneer, and her career is so staggeringly full and deep and weird that my brain kept breaking whenever I tried to recall nearly it. But my questions turned out to be unnecessary. Anderson is possibly the easiest person to talk to I have ever met. A conversation with her is self-propelling and unpredictable, an instant overflowing of ideas and funny stories and book recommendations and factoids. Did you know that a mosquito, in really bad storms, can hang onto a raindrop and ride safely toward the ground? Anderson will pause to show you viral videos on her telephone and websites on her laptop. She will ask questions — "Accept you noticed that?" or "How do you handle that?" or "Do you lot think so?" — and and so she volition actually mind to the answers. Because of the circles she moves in, fifty-fifty the virtually basic stories about her life tin can sound similar outrageous name dropping. She had simply been to Yoko Ono's 87th birthday party. She told me a funny story about Donna Karan and quoted something Brian Eno in one case told her. ("You don't tell other people what'southward in your banking company account — it's the terminal taboo.") At 1 point, she was reminiscing about Alice Waters, an old friend, when of a sudden her phone rang, and the caller ID really said, right out loud, "Julian Schnabel." That'southward what information technology'southward similar to exist effectually Anderson.
"I'm a really blabby person," she told me. "I learn about things by talking nearly them."
After a few minutes, however, the conversation paused. Anderson asked if I would mind helping her carry some stuff downwards the stairs. She had to rehearse, later, with a cellist she'd been improvising with. Of course not, I said. Anderson is small and slim and slight, a sort of national heritage site of a man, and I told her I would be happy to booty whatever needed hauling.
"How virtually one of these?" she said. She handed me a small electric cord, neatly coiled. "And 1 of these?" She handed me a second cord.
Anderson, meanwhile, walked over to a huge black box, roughly the size of a filing cabinet, the kind of mysterious example a magician might drag onstage for the final pull a fast one on of the night. She heaved it off the ground, then proceeded to lug it, all by herself, down a narrow spiral staircase. I followed her with my two cords. It became clear to me that she hadn't needed my help at all. She but had something to do, and she wanted to keep moving while we talked.
One floor downward, in her music studio, Anderson clunked the black box down. She knelt and opened it, revealing a whole nest of sci-fi-ish equipment: keyboards, screens, metal frames, a shipyard'south worth of cords and wires. This, cleaved into pieces, was her performance rig — a big block of gear that she has assembled and disassembled and hauled across the world infinite times.
She is the American heartland affectionately alienated from itself.
For the next xxx minutes or and so, I watched Anderson unpack and construct this rig. She worked with deep absorption, with quick expert movements, clonking pieces together, kneeling then popping upright, tightening knobs, unfolding frames, zipping zippers, testing the connections of cords. It was strangely mesmerizing. Every time I thought the case was empty, she would pull out something else: a microphone, an iPad, a synthesizer, a chunk of wood. Earlier long, Anderson had assembled a multilevel architecture of screens and keyboards. One entire keyboard was simply for her anxiety. From somewhere, I didn't even see where, she pulled out a futuristic-looking violin, and she hooked it over her shoulder, and then suddenly the whole rig started to vibrate with dissonance: thumping bass, organ chords, tinkling piano, wild gusts of piercing sustained notes. She seemed to exist marshaling whole armies of instruments, lining them up in unlike formations, setting them against one some other. Anderson has been perfecting her command center for decades at present, streamlining it and juicing up its weird powers. Watching her bring it to life felt less like watching a musician prepare for a rehearsal than like some kind of religious ceremony: a ritual, a discipline. The equipment and the noises it fabricated seemed to reach down into her bones and spirit.
Anderson, her banana told me, insists on setting this whole rig up herself, every single time, whether she is alone in the studio or nigh to play Carnegie Hall. Sometimes, when Anderson is setting upwards out in public, on a stage, she will avert interruptions by wearing a disguise: a roadie T-shirt and a long black wig. It is minimalist merely, apparently, extremely convincing. Once, Anderson told me, a close friend came upward to her before a show, while she was absorbed in constructing her rig — and she asked Laurie Anderson, from just inches away, if Laurie Anderson was in the building even so.
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Iggy Pop, who grew upwards in a trailer park in Michigan, helped me understand something essential about Anderson.
"Is she from Ohio?" he asked me, in a voice and then deep and rough and weather-beaten I worried information technology was going to blow out the speakers in my phone.
"Illinois," I said.
"Shut enough," he said.
Then he explained. "She has this really nice, steady, clear free energy," he said. "She looks straight at you and doesn't bring whatsoever problems with it. That'south something special about her. There'southward some clear-cut, no-nonsense, Midwest stuff in there."
This is the elemental force that Iggy Pop was picking up on: Midwesternness. Although Anderson has come up to exist associated with New York, with Europe, with cosmopolitan intellectualism, her baseline vibe is extremely Midwestern — normal, practical, unpretentious, clearly kind. This is a good manner to read her work — all those advanced stories spooling out effectually familiar things (weather, sweaters, pet dogs, J.F.G.). She is the American heartland affectionately alienated from itself. Anderson is the middle of our nation asking out loud, in a spirit of loving marvel, what on Earth it thinks it is doing.
Anderson was born in 1947, into a large, eccentric family outside Chicago. She was one of 8 children. Growing upwardly in that household meant marinating, constantly, in language and stories. One of her brothers was named Thor; a sis was named India. At dinner, each child was expected to tell the story of their 24-hour interval — a recitation that could go on indefinitely and include a inexplainable diverseness of incidents and styles. On Sundays, their grandmother took the kids to church, and Laurie became fascinated past the dreamlike surrealism of the Bible: "talking snakes, an body of water that suddenly parted to form a route, stones that turned into bread and dead people brought back to life." These stories, Anderson would later write, "were the start clues that we live in an irrational and complicated world." Two of Anderson's younger brothers were twins, and every bit kids they invented a private language then elaborate that it drew the attention of a linguistic researcher. It was, in other words, a perfect childhood for producing Laurie Anderson: deep normalcy inflected past precipitous stabs of strangeness.
With and so many people around, Anderson institute it easy to slip away and do her ain thing. She relished her freedom. She took long cycle rides and went ice skating on ponds. In uncomplicated schoolhouse, she joined an all-girl gang that threatened to poke boys' optics out with sharp sticks. In sixth grade, Anderson founded a painting social club whose members posed for each other nude. Every day, for many hours, she skilful her violin. On Saturdays, she took the railroad train to Chicago, where she would report painting at the Art Constitute and play in the Chicago Youth Symphony.
Anderson's parents were a study in contrasts. Her male parent was personable, funny, affectionate. Her mother was formal, afar, intimidating, hard to read. Anderson describes her mother every bit a kind of bottled-upward genius: She went to college at xvi, married young and immediately started having children. In her rare spare fourth dimension, she read voraciously. She designed the family's house herself. One of Anderson's earliest memories is of waking up in the heart of the dark, effectually 4 a.g., and seeing her mother still awake, lone, reading. "She was very smart, very focused," Anderson told me. "She really should have been, like, the head of a big corporation. But she got caught in a generation of women who didn't get to do that. " Every morn, when Laurie left the house, her female parent would offer a single word of communication: "Win!" Anderson remembers thinking: What does that mean?
After, the voice that Anderson would use in her art performances — that distinctive blend of casual and formal, fluid and halting, warm and cold — was a combination of her parents' voices. Her male parent'due south sly deadpan; her mother'due south precise, ironic detachment.
In higher, Anderson studied biology for one year. But this merely confirmed her want to make fine art. In 1966, she moved to New York and dove headfirst into that globe. She studied at Barnard and wrote reviews for Artforum. At the School of Visual Arts, she studied sculpture with Sol Lewitt and Carl Andre. The trend, back then, was to brand huge, heavy steel monoliths, but Anderson decided to piece of work more often than not with newspaper. She would lurid The New York Times and shape information technology into bricks, or cut multiple newspapers into long, thin strips and weave them together. Already, she was manipulating stories, slicing and crushing and blending them.
The art world, Anderson realized, was not ready up to showcase storytelling, this art form she had learned to honey every bit a child. Museums were designed for objects, not the human vocalisation as information technology moved words through fourth dimension. Early on on, Anderson became obsessed with the challenge of smuggling stories into fine art galleries. She began experimenting with sound, video, performance. Her work became increasingly about vocalization: looking for the line between vocalisation and nonvoice, oral communication and nonspeech, story and nonstory. She built a talking "robot" out of plywood and organized a concert for automobile horns. She made little dirt figures, onto which she projected Super eight films and then that the statues seemed to move, to speak, to live. "Imitation holograms," she chosen them. Little past little, she managed to bring her Midwestern origins into New York. She plant a fashion to invite the whole art world to sit down at her childhood dining-room table.
Marina Abramovic first heard about Laurie Anderson in 1975. Abramovic was living in Europe at the fourth dimension, hand-to-oral fissure, sleeping in her car, traveling from one country to the next to practise the performance pieces that would somewhen brand her reputation. She and her partner, Ulay, would complect their pilus together and sit back to back in a gallery for 17 hours, or they would become naked and run across the room and repeatedly slam into each other and autumn over. In the midst of all this, Abramovic heard about something wild happening down in Italy: A young American woman was doing street performances in Genoa. Every 24-hour interval she would selection a unlike spot in the city and stand up there playing some kind of cyborg violin — it had tape loops and speakers inside of it, then the violin would play prerecorded violin music, and the American would stand there and play the violin forth with itself. A "cocky-playing violin," she chosen it. Merely that wasn't even the best part. The best part was that this young American was playing her experimental violin while standing on ice skates, and the blades of the skates were frozen into two huge blocks of water ice — so as she played her cyborg violin, every bit crowds of baffled Italians gathered to spotter, the ice blocks she was continuing on would slowly melt, and somewhen the skates would clunk down onto the pavement, and that would exist the terminate of the performance. Anderson would stop playing and walk off. She chosen the piece "Duets on Ice."
Marina Abramovic idea that this was basically the well-nigh wonderful thing she had always heard of. Soon the two artists met. The first matter they talked well-nigh, Abramovic says, was money. Like about young artists, they were hustlers, eking out a living from stingy gallery owners. Anderson approached it all as a kind of game. She had inserted herself into the European art excursion through a fabulous charade: She wrote to roughly 500 venues and told them, falsely, that she had booked a European tour. Would they similar to exist added to it? As she tells it, 498 venues said no. But the two that said yes were enough to become her going. From at that place, she improvised. She dragged her huge black box — the keyboards, cords, lights, amps — back and forth across the continent. To Abramovic, Anderson seemed minor and vulnerable. But she apace learned non to underestimate her new friend.
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"I always take this feeling to protect her," Abramovic told me. "I feel bigger, you know. I come up from Montenegro, which is similar a globe of potent warriors in the mountains. But I don't think she needs protection. Really, she's a very stable little strong babe. Non weak at all."
Today, Abramovic looks dorsum fondly at those sometime European struggles.
"It was so incredibly pure," she told me. "The art was no commodity. You were doing it because you believed in it. There was so much purity and innocence."
Anderson, despite all her success, still works in this spirit. The anti-careerism of her career is part of what has made her illegible, and oftentimes invisible, to mainstream audiences. Although she is a legend in some circles, she is totally unknown in others. She remains uncategorizable in a way that strikes me equally both naïve and deliberate, pure and perverse, simple and profound. She moves in the tradition of John Cage, Fluxus, Schoenberg, Warhol. I mentioned to Julian Schnabel that I was having problem summarizing Anderson's career. "Well, it's non really a career," he said. "She's really unemployable."
If people outside the art world have heard of Anderson, it is probably because of her vocal "O Superman (For Massenet)," 1 of the least likely popular hits in music history. Anderson recorded the song in a studio she gear up up in her hallway. It is 8 minutes long, with a background beat that is entirely a loop of Anderson'due south voice, heavily processed, proverb the word "Ha." On top of this — ha ha ha ha ha ha ha — she layers cryptic and haunting electro-poesy: "So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. In your automated artillery. … Your petrochemical arms. Your armed forces artillery." (The song was inspired past the 1979 Iran hostage crunch, although you wouldn't really know it, going in cold.) Anderson had 1,000 copies of "O Superman" pressed; she kept them in her flat and sold them, personally, via mail club.
Then, in 1981, the ridiculous happened. Anderson's experimental art song caught the attention of an influential English D.J., and "O Superman" shot up the British charts all the style to No. 2. It was voted best single in The Village Vox'south influential Pazz & Jop critics poll — tied for the elevation spot with the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Upwards," a song that is its opposite in basically every fashion. The music critic Robert Christgau called it "the pop event of the yr." Iggy Pop told me the "O Superman" video was the only thing on MTV that year that he could relate to. A British distribution company ordered 80,000 copies. Warner Brothers signed Anderson to an eight-album bargain. Pitchfork would later on rank her ensuing anthology, "Big Science," the No. 22 album of the 1980s, adding accurately: "Listening to Laurie Anderson's beginning album is similar sitting down with a strange course of life that has been studying usa for a long time."
Anderson was of a sudden a paradox: mainstream avant-garde. Her scrappy little art career morphed, almost overnight, into touring, songwriting, recording. She poured her inventiveness into increasingly elaborate stage shows. She got tired, for instance, of projecting films onto screens — she hated trapping all those moving images within of flat rectangles. And so she fabricated screens that were cylinders, cubes, spheres. She started projecting things onto couches, into corners, onto huge pieces of crumpled newspaper. She wore a big white canvas clothes and projected images onto herself. She put cameras on violin bows and microphone stands.
When Iggy Pop finally saw Anderson in concert — this multimedia set on of loops and text and vocalism and images — he was duly impressed.
"She was upward there lone with her fiddle," he said. "I don't remember what was said, but what I took away was just that she had big balls. Those stages are huge, you know? And there she was, all by herself. Boy, I thought. That's a heavy chick."
He laughed apologetically. "Hey, you can take the boy out of the country, you lot know?"
Anderson met Lou Reed in 1992, in Munich, at a music festival. They were each, in unlike ways, underground royalty. Reed was a legendary stone-'n'-whorl badass: erstwhile frontman of the Velvet Underground, critically acclaimed solo artist, writer of the 1970s hitting "Walk on the Wild Side." Anderson didn't really know who he was. Again, she was very busy. Later the festival, Reed suggested that they encounter up in New York. Certain, she said. How almost in iv months?
Their beginning date was at an sound-equipment convention; they met in the tube microphone section and spent all afternoon discussing gear. Anderson didn't realize it was a appointment until Reed invited her to coffee, then a film, and so dinner, then on a walk. "From and then on," she writes, "we were never really autonomously."
Well, they were and they weren't. They met later in life, when both were established in their careers. Anderson remained, as always, busy and free. They never fully moved in together; she kept her ain space and continued to disappear, for long stretches, to elevate her blackness box around Europe. In New York, she worked at her studio on Canal Street. Reed stayed at his apartment on 11th Street. They each had a view of the Hudson River, and Reed would call her sometimes during the day to point out an interesting cloud. Then they would stay on the phone together, looking at information technology for a while.
Reed was notorious, in music circles, for his fiery temper. But anybody was struck by how in honey he was with Anderson. It was one of the nifty wonders of the world. Anderson mellowed Lou Reed. Equally Reed'south biographer Anthony DeCurtis puts information technology: "People who met them together and expected the fearsome Lou Reed were struck by how puppyish he could be around her."
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"She was ever running all over the world performing and doing all these things," Schnabel told me, "and he missed her quite a bit. But at the aforementioned fourth dimension, he was and so impressed by her. He kept saying to me: 'You lot know, she'due south a genius. Laurie is a genius. You know that?' They really loved each other a lot. And they got so much from each other, in the most buoyant and loving way."
Reed wrote lyrics about Anderson: "I've met a woman with a thou faces, and I want to make her my married woman." But they didn't ally until 16 years after they met. It was a chiliad romantic gesture. In 2008, the two of them were talking on a cross-continental telephone call — he was in New York, she in California — and Anderson said that she regretted never marrying. Reed insisted that they marry the next day. So they did. They met each other halfway, in Colorado. Immediately later on the ceremony, they went off together to perform in a evidence.
Just a few years later, Reed got sick: hepatitis C, diabetes, liver cancer. He worked, stoically, to keep upward his regular life. He dressed every morning. He did tai chi. But shortly he started to decline. A liver transplant seemed to be working for a while, until all of a sudden it wasn't. One particularly bad day, Reed and Anderson went to visit Julian Schnabel'due south studio in Montauk. Anybody was horribly depressed. Schnabel set upwards a huge sheet and told Anderson to paint. She didn't want to. She had given upwardly painting decades earlier. But Schnabel insisted. So Anderson picked upward a brush and made some black marks. All of a sudden she could not terminate. She slathered the canvas in black. When she was done, Schnabel looked at her work. "You know," he said, "reddish tin be black. So can pink." For some reason, in that moment, Anderson found the thought of pink beingness black terrifying. Just eventually she took his advice. She started to experiment with colors, started to love painting again. At her Hirshhorn bear witness, Anderson's favorite room features only new paintings: no multimedia wizardry, no noise, just large canvases covered with splashes of color.
In 2013, Lou Reed died. It was belatedly Oct. The last thing he asked for was to exist taken exterior, into the light. Anderson, of course, was past his side.
"I accept never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died," she wrote afterward. "His easily were doing the h2o-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the almost in the world, and talking to him every bit he died. His centre stopped. He wasn't agape. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life — and so beautiful, painful and dazzling — does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of decease is the release of love."
I spoke with Anderson for this article, off and on, for nearly two years. Which ways that our relationship spanned multiple apocalyptic spasms. Pandemic. Public murders. Protests. Insurrection. Storms and fires. I asked her, multiple times, what it all meant. What story could nosotros tell ourselves virtually this moment? But she always seemed to defer. Information technology'southward too early to tell that story, she said. We have to look and see.
The concluding fourth dimension I saw Anderson, my family unit and I had just come dorsum from Oregon, the identify of my birth, a place I tend to meet, still, through the arcadian glow of early babyhood. After ii years stranded on the East Coast, I missed it terribly. Simply out in the real globe, Oregon had inverse. Downtown Portland, after months of clashes between protesters and the law, was largely boarded upward. People were living in tents on the sidewalks and streets. Early our first morning, we woke up to the audio of a adult female screaming outside, over and over. We walked past human being carrion on the sidewalk. It was the eye of a deadly heat wave, the hottest temperatures ever recorded, and to the due east wildfires were raging out of control — in every direction, the horizon was blurred past smoke. The ragged trees of my youth, upward on the hills, looked like ghosts. Finally nosotros drove south, away from the big cities, and the smoke simply thickened. Some of the nigh cute places I accept e'er been, my favorite places on Earth, were nearly unrecognizable. Yous couldn't see the scenic mountains right on the edge of town. The air was like barbecue smoke. It felt similar an apocalypse, like a failed society.
In her studio in New York, Anderson told me that she, besides, has been thinking about the end. The plummet of civilization. The possibility of human extinction. What stories will be possible, she asked, when everything is gone? Can we tell a story if no one is listening?
Paradigm
Anderson said she has become obsessed, lately, with bogus intelligence. An Australian academy she has collaborated with has created a text engine designed to write in three styles: Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed and a combination Anderson/Reed. Yous just take to feed information technology a little information — vi words, or a photo — and it volition produce, well-nigh instantly, a whole virtual text.
The program isn't perfect yet, Anderson said. Roughly a third of what the computer spits out is total nonsense — "monkeys with typewriters" — and another 3rd is only boring. Merely the last 3rd is surprising, even accurate, some kind of new fresh magic. That final third is what keeps her coming dorsum. Sometimes she sits there with the hunger of an addict, feeding words and pictures into the engine, seeing what comes out. For a long time, she would salve the texts. They felt so precious. After a while, though, she realized that the texts were infinite. She could take 1 whenever she needed it. So she read them and and so let them become.
Anderson got out her laptop, turned it toward me and opened the A.I. text box.
"Enquire it a question," she said.
I thought for a 2d. "What is the story of America?" I asked.
Anderson typed it in. After a few seconds, the A.I. answered with a long paragraph in Anderson's vocalization. It was actually a good impression — it talked almost America elliptically, as Anderson would, using a metaphor of a theater product. "Theaters who really know what they're doing don't just copy other people's lines simply rework them, amplify them, make them their own," the fake Anderson said, and the real Anderson read it aloud. "And people tell each other their story which is called the story and there are lots of stories well-nigh betrayal and redemption and love and detest and heroism and sacrifice and the stop. And and then of grade there are the countless movies that are fabricated every day past some kind of activeness hero or action hero with a lot of running and talking and bravery and some sort of commonwealth."
Cracking, nosotros agreed.
Then Anderson ran that same question through the A.I. — "What is the story of America?" — merely asked information technology to reply in the voice of Lou Reed.
The reckoner answered with a poem:
The story
Of the dirt
It hurt
To be and so good
And then to exist so bad
You should
Non accept come up
All the way
From Europe and back again
Just to run into
What would happen
To these people
If they found out
What yous had washed
But what could they do
With all the bear witness
That they had gathered
Both from yous
And from others
Namely, from your confront
The albino friend
Who came disguised
Every bit a bird from the air
To ask for coin
Because he or she was worth
More than than y'all or your parents
Were worth more
Because of what
They did in the name
Of whom you were made
The bondsman walks slowly
In front of me
Holding his audience
Until I walk
Slowly in front of him
Toward the lite at the
At the end of the streetlights
Anderson read this out loud to me: this poem nigh America, her lost country, in the voice of her dead husband, catastrophe with the discussion of him moving toward one terminal low-cal. She did a few more Lou poems, including i in which he spoke in the about intimate terms: "my eyes are thin and dry, my heart is beating very fast." Anderson's whole career has been most voice, voice as presence, and here — in the room with us, coming out of a reckoner — was her husband'southward vocalisation. I asked her how that felt, to hear this simulacrum, this figurer-Lou, referring to himself like that.
"Wonderful," she said. "Just smashing. He'southward talking to me from somewhere else. I definitely practice feel that. The line is pretty thin for me."
Finally we fed the A.I. a photo of one of Anderson'south recent paintings, a huge whirl of color that she hung in the Hirshhorn a few weeks before, then painted over and renamed "Autumn." We fed it to the A.I. and waited. We waited longer. We kept waiting. The A.I. had nil to say.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/magazine/laurie-anderson.html