Laurie Anderson | Night Life

Laurie Anderson

Night Life

Gottingen, Germany: Edition 7L/Steidel, 2006

[unpaginated], 24x15.5 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

A year-long dream diary in the form of computer tablet drawings, made while touring her solo performance The End of the Moon, twenty years ago. 

Anderson’s statement about the work, below, inadvertently ties the project back to two of her very earliest works. In terms of producing work in “self-defence”, the 1973 project Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity) involved the artist carrying a camera and shooting pictures of men who verbally harassed her on the street:

"I had always hated this invasion of my privacy and now I had the means of my revenge. As I walked along Houston Street with my fully automated Nikon, I felt armed, ready. I passed a man who muttered ‘Wanna fuck?’ This was standard technique: the female passes and the male strikes at the last possible moment forcing the woman to backtrack if she should dare to object. I wheeled around, furious. ‘Did you say that?’ He looked around surprised, then defiant. ‘Yeah, so what the fuck if I did?’ I raised my Nikon, took aim, began to focus. His eyes darted back and forth, an undercover cop? CLICK.” 

A year earlier she began the Institutional Dream Series (Sleeping in Public), in which she slept in eight different public places in order to measure their institutional impression, "to see if the place can color or control my dreams.” She spent the night at the bureau of immigration and naturalization, in the women's bathroom at Columbia University Library, in the halls of a night court, on Coney Island beach, etc. When she woke up she recorded her dreams. 

This black cloth book reproduces the colour drawings she made in a half-waking state in hotel rooms around the country as well as written accounts of the dreams. 

"For the last year I've been on the road with a solo performance. Every night another theater, another hotel room. Gradually my dreams became wild, vivid, more and more relentless. Headless singing squirrels, vast empty spaces, bizarre clatterings and invasions. My own dark and private theater was slowly taking over. I began to draw these dreams literally out of self-defense. I kept the computer drawing tablet next to the bed and tried to capture them in their most raw state. After many months of drawing my dreams I was drawn into the odd language and logic of the images. Often I drew my own head in the foreground. What did that mean? Who's watching who? Often the dreams were alternate versions of the day's events. Sometimes they were heavily charged atmospheres, sensations, emotions. Depictions of bewilderment, ecstasy, weightlessness, abandonment, freedom."

 - Laurie Anderson