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

David Platzker on Ed Ruscha

"THE DISTANCE from the Knox-Less service station in Oklahoma City to Bob’s Seaside Service, not so far from the Santa Monica Pier at the terminus of Route 66—both pictured in Ed Ruscha’s 1963 artist’s book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations—was about 1,400 miles. It’s a drive Ruscha has taken many times since he traveled it with Mason Williams in Ruscha’s lowered 1950 four-door Ford, with throaty Smitty Glasspack dual muffler, following their graduation from Oklahoma City’s Classen High School in 1956.1

The trail from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles via Route 66 holds a mythic place within the lore of the American West, from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—typed in 1951 and published in September 1957, a full year after Ruscha and Williams’s journey—to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which the author framed the trip from Oklahoma to California as one driven by drought and depression."

Continue reading "Station to Station: David Platzker on the art of Ed Ruscha" in the current issue of Artforum, here. 

Brian Eno | Glint

Brian Eno
Glint
New York City, USA: Artforum, 1986
Flexi-disc, 8", 33 ⅓ RPM
Edition size unknown


A single-sided flexi-disc record featuring an eight minute and thirty second ambient recording titled
Glint (East Of Woodbridge). The disk was released as a tear-out disc as part of Artforum magazine Volume XXIV No. 10, Summer 1986.

Three years later a version of Glint appeared with the new title of Suspicions on a non-commercial LP called Textures, which consisted of ambient tracks designed to be licensed for use in film and television productions. Three years after that, it reappeared again as Lanzarote and on Eno's 1992 LP  The Shutov Assembly.

The song can be heard on Youtube, here.

Laurie Anderson | Let X = X

Laurie Anderson
Let X = X
New York City, USA: Artforum, 1982
5:00, 33 1/3 rpm 7" flexi-disc record
Edition size unknown

Two months prior to be releasing on her debut album (Big Science, Warner Brothers) a shorter version - without the tango and horns - was released as a flexi-disc tear-out in the February 1982 issue Artforum magazine. A sleeve for the disc could be cut out from the pages of the periodical and assembled.

Anderson was invited to contribute to the issue by Ingrid Sischy, who was the editor of Artforum from 1979 and 1988 (and later Interview Magazine and Vanity Fair, before dying of breast cancer at age 63 in 2015). 

Four years later, Brian Eno (who produced Anderson's fifth studio LP, Bright Red in 1994, among other collaborations) released the only other Artforum flexi-disc that I'm aware of, Glint (see next post). 

Hear Let X = X on Youtube, here. 

"In the early ’80s, Ingrid was one of the few people in the art world who had a very broad idea of the way art fit into the overall culture. Pop culture didn’t scare her. Neither did fashion. She was interested in everything. At the time, I had just signed a deal with Warner Bros. Records and was getting a lot of criticism from artists for “selling out.” Ingrid called it “crossing over,” and soon a lot of artists were trying it out. I’ll always be grateful to Ingrid for her support of my work. Every time I got an award, I would find out that Ingrid was somewhere behind it, pulling some strings. She invited me to put a flexi-disc of one of my songs, “let X = X,” into the February 1982 issue of the magazine. “Why not records?” she said in her voice that was half language, half laugh. She talked as if she were thinking of the words for the first time. In her grave mode, she could also speak in a way such that each word came out carved in stone. Ingrid was brilliant."

- Laurie Anderson on Ingrid Sischy, Artforum  2015