Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work encompasses performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York City during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.
Anderson's debut studio album Big Science was released in 1982 and has since been followed by a number of studio and live albums. She starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. Anderson's creative output has also included theatrical and documentary works, voice acting, art installations, and a CD-ROM. She is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several musical devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows.
Laura Phillips Anderson was born in Chicago on June 5, 1947, and grew up in the nearby suburb Glen Ellyn, Illinois, one of eight children born to Mary Louise (née Rowland) and Arthur T. Anderson. Growing up, she spent weekends studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and played with the Chicago Youth Symphony.
She graduated from Glenbard West High School. She attended Mills College in California, and, after moving to New York in 1966, graduated in 1969 from Barnard College with a B.A. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, studying art history. In 1972, she obtained an M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia University.
Her first performance-art piece — a symphony played on automobile horns — was performed in 1969. In 1970 she drew the underground comix Baloney Moccasins, which was published by George DiCaprio. In the early 1970s she worked as an art instructor and as an art critic for magazines such as Artforum, and illustrated children's books — the first of which was titled The Package (1971), a mystery story in pictures alone.
Anderson performed in New York during the 1970s. One of her most-cited performances, Duets on Ice, which she conducted in New York and other cities around the world, involved her playing the violin along with a recording while wearing ice skates with the blades frozen into a block of ice; the performance ended only when the ice had melted away. Two early pieces, "New York Social Life" and "Time to Go", are included in the 1977 compilation New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, along with works by Pauline Oliveros and others. Two other pieces were included on Airwaves, a collection of audio pieces by various artists. She also recorded a lecture for Vision, a set of artist's lectures released by Crown Point Press as a set of six LPs.
Many of Anderson's earliest recordings remain unreleased or were issued only in limited quantities, such as her first single, "It's Not the Bullet that Kills You (It's the Hole)". That song, along with "New York Social Life" and about a dozen others, was originally recorded for use in an art installation that consisted of a jukebox that played the different Anderson compositions, at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York City. Among the musicians on these early recordings are Peter Gordon on saxophone, Scott Johnson on guitar, Ken Deifik on harmonica, and Joe Kos on drums. Photographs and descriptions of many of these early performances were included in Anderson's retrospective book Stories from the Nerve Bible (1993).
During the late 1970s, Anderson made a number of additional recordings that were either released privately or included on compilations of avant-garde music, most notably releases by the Giorno Poetry Systems label run by New York poet John Giorno, an early intimate of Andy Warhol. In 1977, she was granted an artist-in-residence stay at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris, France. In 1978, she performed at the Nova Convention, a major conference involving many counter-culture figures and rising avant-garde musical stars, including William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, Malcolm Goldstein, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg. She also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s.
In 1980, Anderson was awarded an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1982, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts — Film. In 1987, Anderson was awarded an honorary doctorate in the fine arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Anderson became widely known outside the art world in 1981 with the single "O Superman", originally released in 1980, in a limited quantity by B. George's One Ten Records, which ultimately reached number two on the UK singles chart. The sudden influx of orders from the UK (prompted partly by British station BBC Radio 1 playlisting the record) led to Anderson signing a seven-album recording contract with Warner Bros. Records, which re-released the single.
"O Superman" was part of a larger stage work titled United States Live (1984) and was included on her debut studio album Big Science (1982). Prior to the release of Big Science, Anderson returned to Giorno Poetry Systems to record the collaboration album You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With (1981); Anderson recorded one side of the double-LP set, with William S. Burroughs and John Giorno recording a side each, and the fourth side featured a separate groove for each artist. This was followed by the back-to-back releases of her albums Mister Heartbreak and United States Live (both 1984), the latter of which was a five-LP (and, later, four-CD) recording of her two-evening stage show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She also appeared in a television special produced by Nam June Paik broadcast on New Year's Day 1984, titled "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell".
She next starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave and also composed the soundtracks for the Spalding Gray films Swimming to Cambodia (1987) and Monster in a Box (1992). During this time, she also contributed music to Robert Wilson's Alcestis at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She also hosted the PBS series Alive from Off Center during 1987, after having produced the short film What You Mean We? for the series the year before. What You Mean We? introduced a new character played by Anderson: "The Clone", a digitally altered masculine counterpart to Anderson who later "co-hosted" with her when she did her presenting stint on Alive from Off Center. Elements of the Clone were later incorporated into the titular "puppet" of her later work, Puppet Motel. In that year, she also appeared on Peter Gabriel's fifth studio album So, co-writing and performing on the song "This is the Picture (Excellent Birds)". (The first version of "Excellent Birds" had been released on Mister Heartbreak.)
Release of Anderson's first post-Home of the Brave album, 1989's Strange Angels, was delayed for more than a year in order for Anderson to take singing lessons. This was due to the album being more musically inclined (in terms of singing) than her previous works. The single "Babydoll" was a moderate hit on the Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1989.
In 1991, she was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival. In the same year, Anderson appeared in The Human Face, a feature arts documentary directed by artist-filmmakers Nichola Bruce and Michael Coulson for BBC Television. Anderson was the presenter in this documentary on the history of the face in art and science. Her face was transformed using latex masks and digital special effects as she introduced ideas about the relationship between physiognomy and perception. Her varied career in the early 1990s included voice-acting in the animated film The Rugrats Movie (1998). In 1994, she created a CD-ROM titled Puppet Motel, which was followed by Bright Red, co-produced by Brian Eno, and another spoken-word album, The Ugly One with the Jewels (1995). This was followed by an appearance on the 1997 charity single "Perfect Day".