Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson (born Laura Phillips Anderson on June 5, 1947) is an American artist, musician, and filmmaker known for avant-garde work in performance, pop music, and multimedia. She began with training in violin and sculpture, then created performance art in New York City during the 1970s, often exploring language, technology, and visual imagery. In 1981, her song "O Superman" unexpectedly became a commercial hit, reaching number two on the UK singles chart.

Her first studio album, *Big Science*, came out in 1982, followed by several studio and live albums. She directed and starred in the 1986 concert film *Home of the Brave*. Her output also includes theater, documentaries, voice acting, art installations, and a CD-ROM. Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented musical devices for her recordings and performances.

Anderson was born in Chicago and grew up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, one of eight children. She studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago on weekends and played with the Chicago Youth Symphony. After graduating from Glenbard West High School, she attended Mills College, then moved to New York in 1966, earning a B.A. magna cum laude in art history from Barnard College in 1969. She received an M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia University in 1972.

Her first performance piece, a symphony played on car horns, occurred in 1969. In 1970, she drew the underground comic *Baloney Moccasins*, published by George DiCaprio. During the early 1970s, she taught art, wrote criticism for magazines like *Artforum*, and illustrated children’s books, starting with *The Package* (1971), a wordless mystery.

In the 1970s, Anderson performed in New York. One noted piece, *Duets on Ice*, involved her playing violin with a recording while wearing ice skates frozen into blocks of ice, ending when the ice melted. Early works like "New York Social Life" and "Time to Go" appear on the 1977 compilation *New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media*. Other pieces were included on *Airwaves*, and she recorded a lecture for *Vision*, a set of artist lectures on six LPs.

Many early recordings remain unreleased or limited, such as her first single, "It's Not the Bullet that Kills You (It's the Hole)." That song and others were made for a jukebox installation at the Holly Solomon Gallery. Musicians on these recordings included Peter Gordon, Scott Johnson, Ken Deifik, and Joe Kos. Photos and descriptions of early performances appear in her retrospective book *Stories from the Nerve Bible* (1993).

In the late 1970s, she made more recordings, some privately released or on compilations by John Giorno's Giorno Poetry Systems label. In 1977, she was an artist-in-residence at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris. In 1978, she performed at the Nova Convention, alongside figures like William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, and John Cage. She also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman.

In 1980, Anderson received an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, and an honorary doctorate from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1987.

She gained wide fame in 1981 with "O Superman," originally released in limited quantity on One Ten Records. After a surge in UK orders, partly from BBC Radio 1 airplay, she signed a seven-album deal with Warner Bros. Records, which re-released the single. The song was part of the stage work *United States Live* (1984) and appeared on *Big Science* (1982). Before that album, she collaborated with Burroughs and Giorno on *You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With* (1981). She then released *Mister Heartbreak* and *United States Live* (both 1984), the latter a five-LP recording of her show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She also appeared in a 1984 television special by Nam June Paik, "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell." She later directed and starred in *Home of the Brave* (1986) and composed soundtracks for the Spald...