Laurie Anderson | Dream Book

Laurie Anderson
Dream Book
New York City, USA: Self-published, 2005
81.6 x 87.3 x 63.8 cm.
Edition of 5 signed copies [plus 2 AP]

A hand bound book of iris prints, stone pedestal and wooden plinth. One of the artists' proofs recently sold at Christies auction for $5000 US.



"Arguably the most spectacular cinematic dream sequence of all time, Salvador Dali's contribution to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) featured a Surrealist stage set par excellence. Replete with a hallucinogenic landscape, it included morphing objects, a faceless man, and--above all--lots and lots of enormous, blinking, staring eyes. Dali seems to contend that in dreams, despite--or perhaps because of--our eyes being closed, ocularity takes on a heightened, anxious role: We are able to see things normally deemed invisible or impossible. Most disturbingly, we often see ourselves, and thus occupy the roles of actor and audience simultaneously.

The particulars of this strange inner sight (which might be termed dream vision) propelled Laurie Anderson's recent exhibition "The Waters Reglitterized." Having spent months touring her solo performance The End of the Moon, Anderson found she was sleeping fitfully. While on the road, her dreams became increasingly vivid and violent, so she started to keep a log in an attempt to exert control over them. Jolting awake after an unwelcome visitation by headless squirrels or an existential foray into being and nothingness, Anderson would reach for her digital notepad. The results, dashed-off drawings and haiku-like descriptions, culminated in Dream Book, a hand-bound collection of iris prints that reads with the obscene clarity of a schizophrenic's diary.

Thumbing through this tome, visitors to Sean Kelly Gallery might have noticed the entry for April 17, 2005: "In a deserted hotel lobby a fox is pleading with a corpse. The fox is sobbing, 'I loved you--I always loved you!' I'm thinking, 'You know, there's something really fake about that fox.' My brother stands in the doorway taking photographs." One gets the feeling that Anderson is less interested in the fox's ability to speak than in its unaccountable "fakeness"--an ersatz quality familiar to anyone who finds him or herself immersed in a dream's hyperbolic terms. …"

- Johanna Burton, Artforum