Laurie Anderson | United States

Laurie Anderson

United States

New York City, USA:  Harper & Row, 1984

232 pp., 12 x 7”, softcover

Edition size unknown

Despite being over forty years old, Laurie Anderson’s United States is still viewed as her magnum opus - an eight hour performance spread out over two evenings in February of 1983. Split into four parts, the multi-media event featured songs, spoken word pieces, and animated vignettes about live in America. 

A five disc box set followed (later reissued as a four CD collection), as did this companion volume, which features texts, drawings and photographs by the artist. 

"United States is usually classified as performance art, but this is misleading. It was much more conventionally staged than performance art ordinarily is. It used the proscenium for the standard theatrical purpose—to establish an unambiguous distinction between the performer and the audience—and it rigorously excluded the element that gives most performance art its edge, which is contingency. In performance art, a piece isn’t performed; the performance is the piece. The work of art is whatever happens within a set of conditions the artist has laid down. But Anderson was performing pieces she had already created, some of which her audience already knew from listening to her hit single “O Superman” (released in 1981) and her album Big Science (1982). Her appearance at BAM had a lot more in common with Barry Manilow at Wolf Trap than it did with Chris Burden at The Kitchen. United States was a concert.

[...]

People like me, coming out of the ’60s, once dreamed of a fusion between something like pop music and something like Conceptual art, of an expressive form that would integrate the urgency and excitement of a rock concert with the cool detachment of an art without illusions. We wished for energy and imagination without pretension, for entertainment that did not pander and art that was not antagonistic to commercialism, merely indifferent to it. I suppose we hoped to strike such a balance in our own lives. Glimpses of what that sensibility might have been like were pretty rare. United States was one of them."

- Louis Menand, Artforum