Laurie Anderson | Hearring

Laurie Anderson

Hearring

Zurich, Switzerland: Parkett Editions, 1997

10.2 x 4.5 x 2 cm.

Edition of 150 signed and numbered copies

Over thirty-three years, Parkett Editions produced several wearable works, including gloves by Meret Oppenheim and Roman Signer, eyeglasses by Rirkrit Tiravanija, a tie by Sophie Calle, a shirt by Luc Tuymans, a ring by Jenny Holzer, and this earring by Laurie Anderson. 

Produced for Parkett issue #49 (which featured Anderson, Jeff Wall and Douglas Gordon), the piece consists of a brass, copper, circuit board, loudspeaker, lithium battery, Plexiglas and wires. It features a playable sound message of approximately twenty seconds.

Anderson stated that the work "sings into your ear and also yells various instructions". These include phrases like “Hey You! I’m right behind you!” and "Hello! It’s me. I’m right behind you”. 

The jewelry is by Josiah Dearborn, and the 'engineering design' is by Bob Bielecki, who previously collaborated with Anderson on works such as her signature magnetic tape violin.

Yesterday Anderson was named the 2026 Kyoto Prize laureate in Arts and Philosophy, alongside chemist Tsutomu Miyasaka, in Advanced Technology, and marine microbiologist Farooq Azam, in Basic Sciences. The Kyoto Prize is Japan’s highest private award for global achievement. The prizes will be awarded in a ceremony on November 10th.

She released the following statement:

“I would like to express my gratitude to those who decided to give me the great honor of receiving the 2026 Kyoto Prize,” Anderson says. “I’m very aware of the magnitude of this prize and of the long line of people before me who have received this great honor. So I accept in the spirit of deepest humility. Like many artists, I’ve spent my life making work that I hoped would be understood and, above all, useful to others. But to have this dream of being understood acknowledged is a very emotional experience for me. And it also gives me an enormous amount of joy. I am also grateful to the many teachers who have shown me ways to live, love and make art.”

Sophie Calle | La Visite Guidee

Sophie Calle

La Visite Guidee

Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1996

[48]pp., 17.7 x 25.2 cm., hardcover 

Edition of 1500

A 1996 exhibition catalogue/artists' book hybrid, consisting of images of the artist's personal possessions, which were placed in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen Rotterdam display cases, alongside the museum's own holdings. Visitors were given a guided tour on a walkman. Calle, accompanied by music by Laurie Anderson, offered autobiographical recollections of the objects. For example: 

"...When I went to her house to find a memento of her, I chose the TV guide that was still on a table by the television: her last issue of Tele Star. For my grandmother and her home, life had stopped the week of the 16th to the 22nd August, 1986." 

The cover image features my favourite work by Calle [below], in which she responded to a display case of historic chamber pots by placing a plastic red bucket among them. The intervention was accompanied by the following story: 

"In my fantasies, I am a man. Greg was quick to notice this. Perhaps that’s why he invited me one day to piss for him. It became a ritual: I would come up behind him, blindly undo his pants, take out his penis, and do my best to aim well. Then, after the customary shake, I would nonchalantly put it back and close his fly. Shortly after our separation, I asked Greg for a photo-souvenir of this ritual. He accepted. So in a Brooklyn studio, I had him pee into a plastic bucket in front of a camera. This photograph was an excuse to put my hand on his sex one last time. That evening, I agreed to the divorce."

In addition to the impact of the anecdote, the work causes the viewer to look differently upon the other historical objects displayed. A museum goer might be well aware of the intimate nature of their purpose, but Calle's candor illuminates and embellishes our relationship with these relics, encouraging a visceral, not academic, response to artifacts that people once pissed and shat into.

"In the Spring of 1994 a walkman offered visitors a guided tour of the museum a part of Sophie Calle's exhibition 'Absent', held from March 27 tot [sic] may 29, 1994. To the accompaniment of music by Laurie Anderson, the listener was lead past Calle's personal possessions, supplemented by autobiographical notes and scattered throughout the museum. We decided to preserve the temporary character of the arrangement by publishing a book of the objects and the accompanying texts. The companion CD re-enacts the tour for everyone.”

- La Visite Guidee, preface

Laurie Anderson | Notebook

Laurie Anderson

Notebook

New York City, USA: Collation Center, 1977

47 pp., 14 x 18 cm., softcover

Edition of 1000

A small, oblong Artist’s Book (Anderson's second) documents compositions for electronic violin performed in various ourdoor city spaces. The contents include Film/song in 24/24 time, Duets on ice, Two songs for violin and projector, Duet for door jamb and violin, etc.

“Duets On Ice was performed at five locations in New York City in 1974 and three places in Genoa, Italy, in 1975. The concerts were performed on a violin with a built-in speaker...a self-playing violin. Half the music was on tape, coming out of the violin. The other half was played, simultaneously, live. The timing depended on the a pair of ice-skates, their blades frozen in blocks of ice. When the ice melted, the concert was over.”

- Laurie Anderson, Notebook

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

You're A Hook: The 15 Year Anniversary of Dial-A-Poem (1968-1983)

[Various Artists]

You're A Hook: The 15 Year Anniversary of Dial-A-Poem (1968-1983)

New York City, USA: Giorno Poetry Systems, 1983

12” vinyl record

Edition size unknown

A collection of authors, poets, musicians and composers collected to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Dial-A-Poem project, and the (tenth, eleventh?) anniversary of the record label. 

Side One

1. John Giorno: (Last Night) I Gambled with My Anger and Lost (Greene Street Recording, New York, August 1983)

2. William S. Burroughs: “Old Man Bickford” from The Place of Dead Roads (Kabuki Theater, San Francisco, February 25, 1983)

3.  Laurie Anderson: Song from America on the Move (The Nova Convention, New York, April 29, 1977)

4. Philip Glass: A Secret Solo (Big Apple Studios, New York, April 29, 1977)

Side Two

1. Lenny Kaye: No Jestering (The Place, Eugene, Oregon, May 9, 1978)

2. Patti Smith: “7 Ways Of Going” from The Histories of the World (New York, January 1, 1975) / Fire of Unknown Origin (The Nova Convention, New York, December 1978)

3. Jim Carroll: From The Basketball Diaries (Giorno Poetry Systems, New York, March 30, 1969)

4. Frank Zappa:  The Talking Asshole (The Nova Convention, New York, December 2, 1978)

5. Allen Ginsberg: Father Death Blues (ZBS Media, Fort Edward, New York, February 28-March 1, 1981, courtesy of Hammon Music Enterprises

"In 1961 I was a young poet who hung out with young artists like Andy Warhol, Bob Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, as well as with members of the Judson Dance Theatre. The use of modern mass media and technologies by these artists made me realize that poetry was 75 years behind painting and sculpture, dance and music. And I thought, if they can do it, why can't I do it for poetry. Why not try to connect with an audience using all the entertainments of ordinary life: television, the telephone, record albums, etc? It was the poet's job to invent new venues and make fresh contact with the audience. This inspiration gave rise to Giorno Poetry Systems” 

- John Giorno

 

Laurie Anderson | Puppet Motel

Laurie Anderson

Puppet Motel 

Santa Monica, USA: Voyager, 1995

CD-ROM

Edition size unknown

Eleven years ago on this site I characterized Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel CD-ROM as an anomaly in her discography, an Ebay oddity (see full post, here). 

Nora Claire Miller tracked down a copy of the work (and a computer old enough to play it) and met up with Laurie Anderson recently to discuss the project, thirty years after its release. Below are a couple of quotes from the interview. Read the entire piece at Hyperallergic, here. 

"We didn’t think of it as a game, ever. I wanted to get away from the idea of achieving anything or winning or losing. I don’t like games that much. When I was a kid, I went to school and instead of saying goodbye, my mother would say, “Win.” I was like, “Win, what?” But there’s always a contest. I didn’t want to be involved."

"Bob Stein decided in the ’90s to form a company called Voyager to try to make electronic books, because he loved Bill Viola and artists who were doing visual narratives and thought, “We should package this somehow. They’re books.” 

And he said, “Okay, I want you to do this CD-ROM, and let’s do it about the tour.” He sent people from Voyager to every gig and they would set up in the lobby and have these Puppet Motel CD-ROMs. And nobody had a CD-ROM player. They’re like, “What’s that?” I wouldn’t say that it took off. People want a t-shirt. They don’t want to see me roam.” 

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