Post-Punk Apocalypse

By Michael Walsh

In United States, Laurie Anderson creates an art for the '80s

"I met this guy," Laurie Anderson is saying, in a flat but mellifluous Midwestern voice, suggesting unexpected hospitality amid cold, wide-open spaces. "And he looked," she continues, "like he might have been a hat-check clerk at an ice rink." She is onstage, a post-punk dream clad in black satin, electric-pink socks the only splash of color. "Which, in fact, he turned out to be." Her hair is short, spiky, capping a high-cheekboned, all-American visage. An organ chord swells in the background. "And I said, 'Oh boy. Right again. Let x equal x.' " Behind her, a small rock band plays softly. "It's a sky-blue sky," she says. "Satellites are out tonight. Let x equal x."

The images are familiar yet disturbing, snapshots from a country of the mind. Welcome to Laurie Anderson's United States, Parts I-IV, given its full-length premiere last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Part narrative epic, part rock opera, part home movie, United States is a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, aphoristic examination of 20th century life in 78 segments, lasting six hours and taking two evenings to perform. Wagnerian in its scope, Carrollian in its absurdist wit, Carsonian in its deadpan, stand-up-comic timing, Anderson's work is the biggest, most ambitious and most successful example to date of the avant-garde hybrid known as performance art.

"I think of the work I do as a kind of opera," says the petite, fine-boned Anderson, 35, and in a sense it is. With its roots in movements as disparate as Dada and the '60s happenings, performance art may be described as the 20th century equivalent of 16th century Florentine opera, an attempt to fuse many diverse art forms into a new, coherent whole. In her loft in lower Manhattan, Anderson, the object of a cult following since the mid-'70s, has been working on United States for four years. O Superman, a song included on her first commercial album, Big Science, has sold nearly 800,000 copies worldwide, and went to No. 2 on the British pop charts in 1981. With United States, which tours Europe beginning this week, she may enter the cultural mainstream. In its quirky combination of wry humor and looming menace, Anderson's is an authentic voice of America in the '80s.

"I came home today, and I opened the door with my bare hands. And I said, 'Hey, who tore up all my wallpaper samples? Who ate all the grapes? The ones I was saving. ' And this guy was sitting there, and I said, 'Hey, pal! What's going on here?'And he had this smile, and when he smiled he had these big white teeth like luxury hotels on the Florida coastline. And when he closed his mouth it looked like a big scar. And I said to myself, 'Holy smokes--looks like some kind of guest-host relationship to me.

Raised in Glen Ellyn, Ill., a Chicago suburb, Anderson first studied the violin but decided to major in art history at Barnard College in New York City. Influenced by minimalists like Sol LeWitt, she tried her hand at sculpture. In the '70s, Manhattan galleries also featured musicians like Minimalist Composer Philip Glass, and Anderson gradually drifted into performance art. In one early conceptualist effort, she stood playing the violin while wearing ice skates implanted in a block of ice; when the ice melted, the piece was over.

United States, however, is much more than a vanishing block of ice. Anderson's theme is nothing less than the dehumanizing crackup of modern society, and she treats it with an elaborate structure of symbols and images. Airplanes are a metaphor for physical risk (she was in a plane crash once), weightlessness and enforced camaraderie; dogs become a symbol of nature in harmonious, trusting alliance with humanity; the telephone is used both as an instrument of impersonal communication and the conveyor of whispered intimacies. Although there is no story line, Anderson strings her ideas together with deft, homey wordplay in a series of vignettes whose precise meaning may be ambiguous but whose effect is not. "The genius of American English is inflection," she explains. "I place phrases in different spots so they can resonate differently and leave lots of room for people to make connections."

"She said: 'It takes. It takes one. It takes one to. It takes one to know one.' He said: 'Isn't it just like a woman?' She said: 'She said it. She said it to no. She said it to no one. Isn 't it. Isn 't it just?Isn't it just like a woman? Your eyes. It's a day's work to look into them.' "

If Anderson's targets are largely conventional--the despoiling of the environment, the horrors of war--her methods are not. A voice-activated synthesizer called a Vocoder allows her to speak and sing in chords. Her violin bow has prerecorded tape where the hairs should be, and is drawn across a tape playback head on the instrument's bridge, enabling the violin to "speak." Her back-up band includes saxophones, amplified drums and synthesizer, even a jazz bagpiper. Films and slides are projected onto a giant screen, to reinforce and complement the sense of the words. It could all easily degenerate into a kitchen-sink philosophy; it is a tribute to Anderson's artistry that it does not.

With United States finally complete, Anderson will next turn her critical eye to another technological icon, television. "People don't know what to do with TV," she says. "It's used as a way to relax and be entertained, but I think Americans are insulted by the level of their TV." Characteristically, Anderson is equally leery of the cultural upholstery on British television ("It's creepy and dangerous"). But before she can begin work on her new opus, she will have to buy a television set, something she has so far resisted. "When I'm in front of a TV," says the multimedia artist par excellence, "I can't stop watching it. Anything with that much power is amazing to me."

"Big Science. Hallelujah. Big Science. Yodellayheehoo. Hey, Professor! Could you turn out the lights? Let's roll the film."

--By Michael Walsh. Reported by Nancy Newman/New York

With reporting by Nancy Newman This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.