The five questions Laurie Anderson asks of her art: “Is it stupid enough?”
Forever keeping an eye on technology’s ever-evolving frontier and the new creative possibilities it sparks alongside the likes of Brian Eno and Björk, experimental artist Laurie Anderson has reached for every facet of multimedia to explore the innovative and unorthodox ways that storytelling can unfold, from her days in the underground comix scene drawing 1970’s Baloney Moccasins to 2023’s Looking into a Mirror Sideways exhibit highlighting her myriad art techniques.
Anderson’s ceaseless pursuit of innovation can demand new tools to realise her forward-thinking visions, working with Interval Research to craft her novel talking stick Midi-controller for live works in granular synthesis.
Anderson was born in 1947 in the Glen Ellyn suburb outside Chicago, one of eight children whose parents encouraged each to tell a story at the dinner table every evening. The imagination the siblings harboured was so fierce that her twin brothers invented their own complex language, which drew professional linguistic attention.
Anderson’s love for storytelling was triggered by the trips to church on Sundays: “Talking snakes, an ocean that suddenly parted to form a road, stones that turned into bread and dead people brought back to life,” Anderson wrote, “were the first clues that we live in an irrational and complicated world.” Initially studying biology, the art world proved too alluring, training in the violin and sculpting before embarking on the road of the avant-garde.
“Is it crazy enough?”
laurie anderson
Anderson’s renowned body of work can be split between pre and post-1981. Inspired by Jules Massenet’s 19th-century arias and the American Embassy hostage crisis in Iran, ‘O Superman’ was one of the most unique songs to reach number two in the UK Singles chart.
Eight minutes long and largely consisting of a repeated “ha” voice sample with the Eventide Harmonizer and her maternally disquieting vocals cryptically alluding to US foreign policy and telecommunications failure via the Roland VP-330 vocoder, her austere single caught the attention of BBC Radio 1’s John Peel who championed the art-pop piece, affording Anderson the chance to bring her United States show to London’s Dominion Theatre plus an eight-album deal with Warner Bros.
Soldiering on with the electronic vanguard as you approach your 60th year in the arts requires a robust discipline, a framework to keep one’s project thematically focused yet engaging and memorable. Anderson offered a piece of wisdom that could well serve as guidance for life, let alone budding creatives and journalist Sam Anderson revealed on The New York Times podcast, The Daily, in 2021 that Laurie Anderson kept her conceptual works in check with five questions: “Is it complicated enough? Is it simple enough? Is it crazy enough? Is it beautiful enough? And finally, Is it stupid enough?”
They’re excellent little targets to spitball your ideas to, ensuring your piece possesses affecting depth, is clear in its messaging, takes enough of an intrepid leap into the creative wilderness, is imbued with a touching comment on the human condition, and is grounded in a healthy level of irreverence. Considering Anderson’s rich and inventive career is still going strong to this day, it’s a set of principles that only a fool would disregard.
