Laurie Anderson: The Language of the Future Selected Works 1971–2013
On entering the Laurie Anderson exhibition at the Samstag Museum one encounters the centrepiece, a major projected work—six projectors beam down over a long rectangle of uneven surface of minced paper. My initial impressions are of passing shadows: black and white with momentary red over the rise and fall of the paper; much like rolling clouds—an aerial view over a mountainous landscape perhaps? But this is an abstract work and one has to work at it to gain the pleasure of signifying meaning.
I am fortunate that I am accompanied by Samstag Museum curator Gillian Brown who starts to fill in the gaps. The work is entitled The Swimmer (2009-12) and as I watch the six minute loop again, episodic images become clearer, with children swimming, garish nurses’ faces, and nostalgic farming country vistas passing by in what Brown calls ‘snatches of memories’ from Anderson’s life. Brown mentions an ‘accident’ as the red light flashes. Is the red light the accident I wonder?
Above an ominous soundtrack plays: an industrial roar and clang that repeats. Brown explains that though the sound is from a separate work Anderson did not mind this chance interaction and ‘interplay’ between two separate works. The notion of interplay is a key aspect here as the five works exhibited connect and reinforce each other.
Next to The Swimmer is a work entitled A Story About a Story (2012), that completes the narrative. Anderson writes of her true story of breaking her back in a swimming accident and subsequent stay in hospital at twelve years old, ‘floating’ in traction with a ward of burn victims. She is told she will never ‘walk again’, but does. However in