Structural Disintegrity

            We are so excited this evening to welcome our keynote speaker, experimental composer and visual and performance artist Laurie Anderson. A native of Chicago, Anderson is an alumna of Barnard College and Columbia University. She found her artistic voice in the cultural stew of downtown New York City’s arts scene in the early 1970s and has grown to become one of the most persistent, emphatic, and creative female voices in music. In 1979, Anderson premiered her work United States at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, an eight-hour stage exploration of transportation, politics, money, and love in the United States. She became NASA’s first ever (and last ever) artist in residence in 2003. Her most well-known work by far is O Superman from 1981, which reached number two on the UK pop charts. The eight-minute work tackles the ubiquity of dichotomy and conflict – the difference between stability and instability, direction and atmosphere, hope and dread, fear and joking, and the reality that these differences are often inescapable.

Anderson’s art represents a radical departure from, as well as a feminist answer to the misogynist undertones of previous experimental art movements such as Futurism, Dadaism, and Fluxus. As the fight for women’s suffrage gain steam at the dawn of the twentieth century, the Futurist movement published its manifesto, promising to “glorify … scorn for women” and to “fight moralism [and] feminism” (Le Figaro 1909). Anderson helps to steer experimental art away from its misogynist history by rejecting the fundamental notions of the gender binary and prohibitive gender roles, questioning and undermining the very structure of the historically male-dominated world of traditional analysis and composition, and challenging the Western discomfort with the human body. In United States, Anderson portrays herself as androgynous, denying the historical and problematic tendency of the female body being subverted and delegitimized by the male gaze. Her extensive use of technology and electronics in her performances is indicative of her overall departure from societal expectations about women’s relationships with machines and, more importantly, power. Anderson’s music is also less goal-oriented and more atmospheric, as well as harmonically less complicated than traditional music, encouraging more creative and interpretive analyses and reactions than traditional music theory dictates. She is unashamedly within her body during performance, refusing to give credence to what musicologist Susan McCrary defines as Western culture’s “puritanical, idealist suspicion of the body” (McCrary 136). Hers is art that needs to be seen to be appreciated. Bodyless recordings and virtuosic symphony orchestras hiding themselves in black clothes cannot convey the whole story of Anderson’s work, which often includes elements of body percussion, vocal modification, and dance. Anderson is a prolific feminist figure and a major force in modern music. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Laurie Anderson.