For going on four decades now, I have been a big fan of Laurie Anderson. Her work is singular, genre-defining, and also very easy to imitate and lampoon. If we attempt some labels, she is a “spoken word artist,” a “multimedia pioneer,” a “musician,” a “William S. Burroughs superfan,” or a “literary critic specializing in Herman Melville.”
For me, it is not too great a stretch to find lines of continuity between what Anderson was doing on the stage in the 1970s and 80s, through the avant-garde sampling of Negativland and Hip-Hop, right on through to the well-oiled TED talks of our latter-days.
My first encounters with Laurie Anderson’s work were these old-school vinyl LP record albums, and the pieces were often more musical and were presented aesthetically as songs. So albums like Big Science and Mister Heartbreak presented one aspect of what Anderson was up to and gave a glimpse into her methods.
However, the real revelation for me was when I got a copy of a huge box set, entitled United States I - IV, which was a set of recordings of a multi-night performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. All told, United States encompasses more than six hours’ worth of material and takes the listener on a sonic (and, for audience members, also a visual) journey into the “heart-land” (the “heart,” the “land,” and the “heartland”) of America in the 1980s. It’s funny, and maddening, and confusing, and beautiful. It self-referentially understands itself to be difficult listening, and radically embodies that insight from John Cage: “If something bores you after five minutes, try it for ten…”
So I was very interested to happen upon this short clip from Laurie Anderson, talking about the urges that animate her process. She advises young artists to gather up the labels that are most ambiguous, the labels that allow the most freedom to follow interests and digressions. “Stay loose,” she says. “I became an artist because I wanted to be free.”
A couple of years ago, my friend Maia Kotrosits said to me that writers are best when they are writing at the edge of their comfort zone. Good writing should involve risky thinking, and the results should be a little scary - even to the writer. I hear an echo of that in what Laurie Anderson is saying here. A label can give us firm boundaries; it can produce a zone of safety — but that safety can keep our zone of connections small. It is more terrifying to live in a zone of ambiguity, but that freedom can also yield surprising and transcendent results.
One of the things I love about Laurie Anderson is that she felt the freedom to use old things in new ways. Moreover, when what she imagined didn’t exist, she invented it. The results of her explorations are not to everyone’s taste, I recognize that. For me, however, Anderson’s body of work is a continual fount of inspiration and challenge.
I encourage you today to think about your own work. Are you feeling blocked? (I often am.) Are you feeling limited? Try giving what you are doing a fuzzier label. Live for a little while in the risky bliss of ambiguity.
Courage.