LUNAR ESCAPE
Laurie Anderson Makes Much Ado About The Moon

NEWS FLASH: quirky musical performance-art diva Laurie Anderson was recently recruited by the Russian space program as a consultant. The Russians wanted her to advise them in Star City, Russia’s big mission control and cosmonaut training center. That may seem less bizarre if you know that Anderson was NASA’s first — and fatefully, last — official artist-in-residence in 2003. Or, maybe it’s actually more bizarre.

“I have never, never been so happy to come back to the United States,” she sighs in a phone conversation from her New York studio upon returning from Russia.

“I never know what I’m supposed to do,” Anderson says. “I went over there to look at stuff; that’s how NASA started as well. [NASA] had no idea what I should do when they asked me to be artist-in-residence. That’s what this show is about in a way.”

On Sunday, Anderson will present The End of the Moon, a live show incorporating new music and an “epic poem” related to her NASA experiences. Like her most famous performances, it will incorporate projected visuals and innovative staging, although much simpler and more intimate than past multimedia extravaganzas. Since Anderson was forced to define her own NASA job description, she decided, “If there’s no template, I’m just going to go out, look at stuff and make something up.”

“And so I went to a lot of these places — the jet propulsion lab, Hubble, and Ames, and Mission Control — and tried to make something out of that which was half journalistic and half a more fractured and impressionistic version of what was going on,” she explains. “I think they kind of knew more of what they didn’t want more than what they did. In a lot of ways, I think they would have preferred some sexy techno project, like a ‘bouncing light from a satellite onto another one and onto the dark side of the moon’ kind of thing. And when I said I was going to do a poem, they were like, ‘A poem?!?’ Their faces fell and it was like, ‘Why would you do a poem when you could do, you know, something else?’”

One answer seems to be that Anderson’s in a different place now than she was in the 1980s, when she was dancing in an electronic-percussive silver suit and playing synthesizers in front of projected computer graphics. The way she personally relates to technology has changed.

“It’s not disenchantment, it’s just realizing that [technology] is not really going to do all that much for you,” she says. “It really doesn’t solve my bigger problems, like what does any of this mean? Those kinds of things that I maybe used to romanticize a little bit more don’t have [as much] allure.”

So, would NASA have gotten different results if they called Anderson 20 years earlier?
“Yeah, I would have done the ‘bouncing the light off the satellite onto the dark side of the moon’ thing,” she says. “And it would have been a lot of fun. I’m not trying to say that stuff is ridiculous, I’m just saying that I can’t personally find the reason to do that right now.”

One recurring conceptual thread that Anderson recognized throughout both The End of the Moon and her past body of work was, in her words, “how to understand time. I know that sounds super-pretentious, but that’s okay, it really is!”

“To a large extent, I think my own work is trying to — and I don’t think I’ve really articulated this before, but — [provide] a way to stop time,” she continues. “You know, really look at something in a way that feels like the first time and forces you to really be in the present. I think that’s why artists like to do stuff that’s new — to put yourself in a situation where you go, ‘I’m not sure where I am.’ I know I love that feeling myself.”

Has perhaps the core essence of art itself over the centuries mostly been humanity’s attempt to stop time? Anderson strongly agrees, “Oh, yeah. I think you could make a really good case for that.”

(Originally published inThe Cleveland Free Times, Published November 2nd, 2005)