Woodrow B. Hood

University of Missouri–Columbia
c562611@mizzou1.missouri.edu

 

Anderson, Laurie. Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972-1992. Performed at the Lied Arts Center, Lawrence Kansas, March 29, 1994.

 

Performance theorist Philip Auslander has argued that whatever theoretical or empirical value finally attaches to the term “postmodernism,” the contemporary performance artists that we call postmodern share a certain critical distance from modernism and are able to historicize the contemporary “in the Brechtian sense of getting some distance on the world we live in and thus gaining a better understanding of it.” ¹ Gaining distance from the world of late capitalistic America seems indeed to be the focus of Laurie Anderson’s new performance piece currently touring the United States and Canada. The work is ostensibly to promote Anderson’s book Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972-1992, but it more importantly offers a contextualization of Anderson’s art from the early 1970s up to current day. The event details the growth of Anderson as an artist from her rougher beginnings like the song “Walk the Dog” to her more polished performance pieces from Empty Places.

 

The show is a work in progress and it may change from venue to venue as it tours the country over the next few months. This review is being based on the March 29th performance at the Lied Center in Lawrence, Kansas. Though Lawrence seems an unlikely venue for an Anderson performance (she generally sticks to larger, more urban areas), she frequents this small, Midwestern town for the sake of her friend and artistic mentor William S. Burroughs, a local resident who was in attendance at the Lawrence show.

 

The evening is rather brief–a little over one hour. The performance consists of Anderson sitting in front of a keyboard with two microphones (one is processed and the other isn’t) and a large sound board to her right. Underneath the sound board lies a DAT machine which plays the underscoring of Anderson’s readings from a collection of pages in front of her.

 

This is the most intimate Anderson to date. The mise-en-scene has been stripped to its bare technical bones. The videoscreens, lasers, techno-gadgetry, and spectacle wizardry are gone. Lighting effects consist mainly of gel changes and primarily only light her well enough to be seen. What one sees is Anderson reflecting back on her career with an eye towards her future. She even says that the show is a retrospective about the future; by looking at where you’ve come from, you see where you’re going.

 

The stories and talk-songs that comprise the performance are arranged by the series of associations based upon the “Nerve Bible”–by which she means the body. ² What the audience gets is an apparently free association of juxtaposed images and ideas; the responsibility of finding meaning in the juxtapositions is placed solely upon the audience. The arrangement of the pieces may vary from night to night as Anderson creates new material or deletes old, establishing a whole new arena in which meanings can be created.

 

Anderson performs a sampling of performance pieces from all periods of her work. Several of the pieces come from her recent notes, and will presumably go onto her upcoming album, Bright Red (produced by Brian Eno), and eventually the album’s multi-media promotional tour next year. She begins with the end of the Nerve Bible book, by talking about the future in “My Grandmother’s Hats,” a story about her Bible-thumping grandmother who kept waiting for the end of the world to arrive:

 

. . . I remember the day she died, she was very excited. She was sitting in her hospital room waiting to die and she was very excited. She was like a small bird perched on the edge of her bed near the window and she was wearing this pink nightgown and combing her hair so that she would look pretty when I came to get her. And she wasn’t afraid but then something happened that changed everything.

 

After years of preaching and predicting the future, suddenly, she panicked. Because she couldn’t decide on whether or not to wear a hat.

 

And so when she died she went into the future in a rush, in a panic, with no idea of what would come next.³

 

From this point, Anderson meanders around in her book, retelling earlier songs and monologues like “White Lily,” bits of “Coolsville,” and other previously presented material. Other stories surface as Anderson wanders back to the front of the Nerve Bible book where she tells of being offered roasted dog by the chief of a tiny Pacific island, Panope, in 1980 and watching the cremation tapes of the father of the Prince of Ubud in 1984.

 

The most pronounced through-line one discerns in these scattered materials is that of Anderson’s emergence as an explicitly political artist. Despite some marginal elements of political critique in her early periods, Anderson primarily focused on examining American identity and myths; her early work contained no discernible political positioning. But a shift began with the 1989 performance of Empty Places. By then, Anderson had come to feel that her work was too mainstream, part of the establishment; it had been institutionalized. As she told John Howell, “I was tired of being “Laurie Anderson.” I wanted to start over. ⁴ Using the same performance style and methodology she had mastered in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she began to place a new emphasis on socio-political commentary. By the late 1980s, she had shifted away from the exploration of form to a new, subversive attack directed at the American status quo.

 

In this regard, Anderson’s career is consistent with the broader trajectory of American performance art from the 1970s to the present. Other well-known artists such as Diamanda Galas, Karen Finley, and Orlon have made Marxism and cultural feminism standard elements of contemporary performance art. As Auslander has remarked (here paraphrasing New York Times art critic Andy Grundberg):

 

in place of the detached, often opaque ironies of postmodernism, young artists are displaying renewed interest in art that addresses spiritual values, on the one hand, and overtly polemical, political art addressed to the AIDS and censorship crises on the other.⁵

 

Anderson herself is fully conscious of this turn or transition in her work. “Like many people,” she says, “I slept through the Reagan Era politically.”

 

When I woke up, everything looked really different. Homeless men and women were living on the streets of New York, hundreds of thousands of Americans were dead or dying of AIDS, and the national mood was characterized by fear, intolerance, and straight-ahead greed. Suddenly everything seemed deeply unfamiliar. Was this really my country? I decided to write about this new place, not because I had any solutions, but because I needed to understand how and why things had changed.⁶

 

In Empty Places Anderson continued to employ her usual artistic practice of juxtaposing disparate images and objects, but there was a decisive change in her mode of operation. If Anderson’s early performances could have been called subversive at all, it was only in the broadest sense of the term: they questioned the established framework of American identity in an abstract way. But beginning with Empty Places her work became subversive in the narrow sense: it mounted a direct and confrontational attack on the American political system. And in the five years since, Anderson’s work has become ever denser with political references and ever more aggressively counter-hegemonic. Her Voices from the Beyond tour, which resembled the current one in its lack of spectacle, was also read from notebooks and dealt with the contemporary political atmosphere of America as the events of the Gulf War unfolded. She also did a piece on the 1992 presidential election for National Public Radio and a “Rock the Vote” PSA for VH-1.

 

Much of the newer work centers on more global political concerns. She describes an encounter with an Israeli explosives expert which teaches her of the seductive power of bombs: “Here I am, a citizen of the world’s largest arms supplier, setting bombs off with the world’s second largest arms customer, and I’m having a great time.” ⁷ The earlier Anderson might have simply capitulated to this pleasure, rather than calling it into question. The question for her now is no longer that of the beauty of the image, but that of the articulation between particular political stances and particular ideas of beauty. “Night in Baghdad,” for example, examines the implicit aesthetics of media coverage of the Gulf War, which enabled this hideous event to be represented as a sort of cross “between grand opera and the Superbowl.” ⁸

 

I do not mean to suggest that all of Anderson’s pieces now thematize national and international politics. There are moments in Nerve Bible when she explores the relation between aesthetics and politics on more local or personal registers. She tells some interesting stories, for example, about her relationship with the early 1980s comedian Andy Kaufman. She recalls the confusions of art and life that Kaufman sought to effect through his strange performances, and her own confusion when she served as one of the staged “victims” of his wrestling act. Kaufman would dare women to come up on stage and wrestle him, and Anderson was one of the women he hired to take him up on the challenge. She was not eager to participate in this seemingly sophomoric routine, she says, and only agreed to do it after she had consumed a few whiskeys and Kaufman had goaded her with his offensive behavior. But once on stage she found that Kaufman’s aim was really to wrestle. He sought to unravel any distinction between the performance of violence and the reality, and this was a project with which Anderson was simply not comfortable.

 

Yet Anderson was clearly drawn to Kaufman and his attempts to break down the boundaries between artistic practice and everyday life. She tells another story, about going to an amusement park with Kaufman and doing the ride on which people enter a large drum and lie against a wall. The drum spins and the bottom drops out after the people have been anchored to the wall by centrifugal force. Kaufman would wait until the ride was about to begin its spinning and the crew was checking the bindings to make sure everything was safe, and then he would start screaming, “We’re all going to die!” What struck me as most significant in this part of Anderson’s show is that in telling this story she broke with her familiar, carefully controlled speaking rhythm and began screaming in the manner of Kaufman himself. Here, for the first time that I am aware of, Anderson collapsed somewhat the always carefully judged distance between her performing and her personal life. The cool, controlled performance artist is perhaps giving way to a more personal, emotional storyteller.

 

The more personal Anderson is on display after the performance as well, when, after leaving the stage for a few moments, she returns to take questions. Anderson moves out of the performance mode at this point and seems to speak directly and candidly to the audience–about her creative practices, the relation of her stories to her actual life, and so forth. On this particular night, her most interesting remarks concerned the place of her art in a market economy. She argues that she tries to make a performance that does not rely on pop-star identification, on the desire to emulate and consume. She wants to avoid becoming a product for sale and wants to create a more resistant and viable art, an art that is not simply subsumed within institutions of power.

 

This kind of rhetoric comes somewhat uneasily from Anderson, who after all maintains contracts with Warner Brothers Records and Harper/Perennial Books, and is arguably the most successful individual–the closest thing to a pop star–in the performance art genre. But Anderson’s ambigous stance is consistent with that of other politicized performance artists today. As Auslander has remarked, postmodern political art has found that it “must position itself within postmodern culture, it must use the same representational means as all other cultural expression yet remain permanently suspicious of them.” ⁹ Such a stance leaves us with many paradoxes and problems still to be worked out. But we are fortunate to have Anderson among those who are performing such work.

 

Notes

 

1. Philip Auslander, Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 6.

 

2. Laurie Anderson, Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972-1992 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 6.

 

3. Anderson, Nerve Bible, 281.

 

4. John Howell, Laurie Anderson (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), 12.

 

5. Auslander, 1.

 

6. Laurie Anderson, Empty Places: A Performance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), back cover.

 

7. Anderson, Nerve Bible, 273.

 

8. Anderson, Nerve Bible, 276.

 

9. Auslander, 23.

 

Works Cited

 

• Anderson, Laurie. Empty Places: A Performance. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.
• —. Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972-1992. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.
• Auslander, Philip. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
• Howell, John. Laurie Anderson. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992.