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80-547: Laura Phillips " Laurie " Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work spans 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

160-511: 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, as an art critic for magazines such as Artforum , and illustrated children's books—the first of which

240-460: A dialectical approach to such political stances by avant-garde artists and the avant-garde genre of art. Sociologically, as a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists, writers, architects, et al. produce artefacts — works of art, books, buildings — that intellectually and ideologically oppose the conformist value system of mainstream society. In the essay " Avant-Garde and Kitsch " (1939), Clement Greenberg said that

320-444: A "talking stick", a six-foot-long (1.8 m) baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds. The tape-bow violin is an instrument created by Laurie Anderson in 1977. It uses recorded magnetic tape in place of the traditional horsehair in the bow, and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. Anderson has updated and modified this device over the years. She can be seen using a later generation of this device in her film Home of

400-777: A Box . 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

480-603: A Mirror Sideways", an exhibit that highlights various different styles of her art techniques. It opened at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. Since opening, this artwork has been Anderson’s biggest solo show in Europe. While in Europe, Anderson teamed up with Sexmob , a New York jazz band. Sexmob and Anderson toured Europe where they performed multiple versions of her songs, but adding a twist to them all. This tour

560-622: A book of drawings based on her dreams, titled Night Life . Material from Homeland was performed at small work-in-progress shows in New York throughout May 2007 supported by a four-piece band with lighting and video visuals mixed live by Willie Williams and Mark Coniglio , respectively. A European tour of the Homeland work in progress included performances on September 28–29, 2007, at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin; on October 17–19 at

640-509: A conversation on the phone with Burroughs in 1968, Giorno initiated the Dial-a-Poem Poets concept, which he claimed would later influence the creation of information services creation over the telephone, such as sports and stock market. Fifteen phone lines were connected with individual answering machines: people would call GPS and listen to a poem they were offered from fragments of various live recordings. Dial-a-Poem, from 1969 on,

720-575: A decade followed before her next album release. During this time, she wrote a supplemental article on the cultural character of New York City for the Encyclopædia Britannica and created multimedia presentations, including one inspired by Moby-Dick ( Songs and Stories from Moby Dick , 1999–2000). One of the central themes in Anderson's work is exploring the effects of technology on human relationships and communication. Starting in

800-474: A few hundredths of a second. Granular synthesis can sound smooth or choppy depending on the size of the grain and the rate at which they're played. The grains are like film frames. If you slow them down enough, you begin to hear them separately. A recurring motif in Anderson's work is the use of an electric pitch-shifting voice filter that deepens her voice into a masculine register, a technique that Anderson has referred to as "audio drag ". Anderson has long used

880-506: A limited quantity by B. George 's One Ten Records, which ultimately reached number two on the British charts. 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 deal with Warner Bros. Records , which re-released the single. "O Superman" was part of a larger stage work titled United States and

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960-521: A little fishy—a lot of this stuff wakes up displaying LED program readouts that have names like Atom Smasher, and so it took a while to convince them that they weren't some kind of portable espionage system. So I've done quite a few of these sort of impromptu new music concerts for small groups of detectives and customs agents and I'd have to keep setting all this stuff up and they'd listen for a while and they'd say: So um, what's this? And I'd pull out something like ( Bergamot: ) this filter, and say, now this

1040-852: A non-narrative structure. Alongside, a film shows the development of the new work. Anderson was appointed the 2021 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and presented a series of six lectures titled Spending the War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds over two semesters. In 2021, Anderson created a show on the second floor of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., titled "The Weather" and described by The New York Times as "a sort of nonretrospective retrospective of one of America's major, and majorly confounding, modern artists". In mid-2023, Laurie Anderson created "Looking into

1120-549: A post-modern time when the modernist ways of thought and action and the production of art have become redundant in a capitalist economy. Parting from the claims of Greenberg in the late 1930s and the insights of Poggioli in the early 1960s, in The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks (1983), the critic Harold Rosenberg said that since the middle of the 1960s the politically progressive avant-garde ceased being adversaries to artistic commercialism and

1200-421: A standoff. Perhaps the zenith of this configuration was her multimedia performance, 'United States I – IV.' [...] [Anderson displays] her vast, incisive range of talents on the 'United States Live' recordings." Avant-garde In the arts and literature , the term avant-garde (from French meaning ' advance guard ' or ' vanguard ' ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art , and

1280-476: A team from Interval Research and Bob Bielecki . It is a wireless instrument that can access and replicate any sound. It works on the principle of granular synthesis . This is the technique of breaking sound into tiny segments, called grains, and then playing them back in different ways. The computer rearranges the sound fragments into continuous strings or random clusters that are played back in overlapping sequences to create new textures. The grains are very short,

1360-400: A wide open space to explore, to reach a broad audience not limited anymore to that of the poetry magazines. Beginning in 1965, Giorno would explore tape and phonograph recording, along with colleagues William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin , using a variety of tape experiments such as loops and cut techniques Giorno was introduced to Bob Moog , who was working on his Moog synthesizer, on

1440-589: A wild guess. She moved to New York in 1966 and now lives in Tribeca . Anderson met singer-songwriter Lou Reed in 1992, and she was married to him from April 2008 until his death in 2013. Anderson is a long-time student of Buddhism and meditation . She first learned meditation on a retreat with the Insight Meditation Society in 1977. She has since become a student of Tibetan Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche . The single "Sharkey's Day"

1520-583: Is a virtual reality work by Anderson and Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang in which the reader flies through an enormous structure made of words, drawings, and stories. To the Moon , a collaboration with Hsin-Chien Huang , premiered at the Manchester International Festival on July 12, 2019. A 15-minute virtual reality artwork, To the Moon allows audience members to explore a moon that features donkey rides and rubbish from Earth in

1600-525: Is another definition of "Avant-gardism" that distinguishes it from "modernism": Peter Bürger, for example, says avant-gardism rejects the "institution of art" and challenges social and artistic values, and so necessarily involves political, social, and cultural factors. According to the composer and musicologist Larry Sitsky , modernist composers from the early 20th century who do not qualify as avant-gardists include Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Igor Stravinsky; later modernist composers who do not fall into

1680-638: Is facilitated by mechanically produced art-products of mediocre quality displacing art of quality workmanship; thus, the profitability of art-as-commodity determines its artistic value. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord said that the financial, commercial, and economic co-optation of the avant-garde into a commodity produced by neoliberal capitalism makes doubtful that avant-garde artists will remain culturally and intellectually relevant to their societies for preferring profit to cultural change and political progress. In The Theory-Death of

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1760-498: Is foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music . Anderson has invented several experimental musical instruments that she has used in her recordings and performances. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she collaborated with Interval Research to develop an instrument she called

1840-546: Is not reducible to a kitsch style or reactionary orientation, but can instead be used to refer to artists who engage with the legacy of the avant-garde while maintaining an awareness that doing so is in some sense anachronistic. The critic Charles Altieri argues that avant-garde and arrière-garde are interdependent: "where there is an avant-garde, there must be an arrière-garde ." Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of music working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner. The term

1920-615: Is used loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether. By this definition, some avant-garde composers of the 20th century include Arnold Schoenberg , Richard Strauss (in his earliest work), Charles Ives , Igor Stravinsky , Anton Webern , Edgard Varèse , Alban Berg , George Antheil (in his earliest works only), Henry Cowell (in his earliest works), Harry Partch , John Cage , Iannis Xenakis , Morton Feldman , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Pauline Oliveros , Philip Glass , Meredith Monk , Laurie Anderson , and Diamanda Galás . There

2000-519: Is what I like to think of as the voice of authority. And it would take me a while to tell them how I used it for songs that were, you know, about various forms of control, and they would say, now why would you want to talk like that? And I'd look around at the SWAT teams, and the undercover agents, and the dogs, and the radio in the corner, tuned to the Super Bowl coverage of the war . And I'd say, take

2080-700: The 61st Annual Grammy Awards , held in Los Angeles, Anderson and Kronos Quartet's Landfall won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance . It was Anderson's first collaboration with Kronos Quartet and her first Grammy award, and was the second Grammy for Kronos. Inspired by her experience of Hurricane Sandy , Nonesuch Records said, " Landfall juxtaposes lush electronics and traditional strings by Kronos with Anderson's powerful descriptions of loss, from water-logged pianos to disappearing animal species to Dutch karaoke bars." Chalkroom

2160-902: The American Academy in Rome . She narrated Ric Burns ' Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film , which was first televised in September 2006 as part of the PBS American Masters series. She contributed a song to Plague Songs , a collection of songs related to the 10 Biblical plagues. Anderson also performed in Came So Far for Beauty , the Leonard Cohen tribute event held in the Point Theatre, Dublin, Ireland, on October 4–5, 2006. In November 2006, she published

2240-946: The Moby Dick presentation. In 2001, she recorded the audiobook version of Don DeLillo 's novel The Body Artist . Anderson went on tour performing a selection of her best-known musical pieces in 2001. One of these performances was recorded in New York City a week after the September 11, 2001 attacks , and included a performance of "O Superman". This concert was released in early 2002 as the double CD Live in New York . In 2003, Anderson produced albums with French musicians La Jarry and Hector Zazou and also performed with them. Zazou's album Strong Currents (2003), which brought together well-known soloists, features her alongside Melanie Gabriel , Irene Grandi and Jane Birkin , among others. She became NASA 's first artist-in-residence in

2320-871: The Opera Garnier in Paris in December 2004. She mounted a succession of themed shows and composed a piece for Expo 2005 in Japan. In 2005, Anderson visited Russia's space program—the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre and mission control—with The Arts Catalyst and took part in The Arts Catalyst's Space Soon event at the Roundhouse to reflect on her experiences. In 2005, her exhibition The Waters Reglitterized opened at

2400-471: The Philip Glass album Songs from Liquid Days , and contributed a spoken-word piece to a tribute album in honor of John Cage . Formal music videos have been produced for: In addition, in lieu of making another music video for her Strange Angels album, Anderson taped a series of one- to two-minute "Personal Service Announcements" in which she spoke about issues such as the U.S. national debt and

2480-471: The Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City. According to the press release by Sean Kelly, the work is a diary of dreams and their literal recreation as works of art. This work uses the language of dreams to investigate the dream itself. The resulting pieces include drawings, prints, and high-definition video. The installation ran until October 22, 2005. In 2006, Anderson was awarded a Residency at

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2560-636: 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

2640-428: The artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus,

2720-458: The moral obligation of artists to "serve as [the] avant-garde" of the people, because "the power of the arts is, indeed, the most immediate and fastest way" to realise social, political, and economic reforms. In the realm of culture, the artistic experiments of the avant-garde push the aesthetic boundaries of societal norms , such as the disruptions of modernism in poetry, fiction, and drama, painting, music, and architecture, that occurred in

2800-473: 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

2880-534: The 1990s, Anderson and Lou Reed , whom she had met in 1992, collaborated on recordings together. Reed contributed to the tracks "In Our Sleep" from Anderson's Bright Red , "One Beautiful Evening" from Anderson's Life on a String , and "My Right Eye" and "Only an Expert" from Anderson's Homeland , which Reed also co-produced. Anderson contributed to the tracks "Call on Me" from Reed's collaborative project The Raven , "Rouge" and "Rock Minuet" from Reed's Ecstasy , and "Hang On to Your Emotions" from Reed's Set

2960-809: The Arts in Adelaide, South Australia. Anderson performed her Duets on Ice outside the Samstag on opening night. Anderson received the Honorary Doctor of Arts from the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2013. In June/July 2013, Anderson performed "The Language of the Future" and guest curated at the River to River Festival in New York City. In November 2013, she was

3040-533: The Avant-Garde ( Theorie der Avantgarde , 1974), the literary critic Peter Bürger looks at The Establishment 's embrace of socially critical works of art as capitalist co-optation of the artists and the genre of avant-garde art, because "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work [of art]". In Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (2000), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh argues for

3120-697: The Avant-Garde (1991), Paul Mann said that the avant-garde are economically integral to the contemporary institutions of the Establishment, specifically as part of the culture industry . Noting the conceptual shift, theoreticians, such as Matei Calinescu , in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), said that Western culture entered

3200-563: The Brave during the Late Show segment in which she manipulates a sentence recorded by William S. Burroughs . This version of the violin used MIDI-based audio samples, triggered by contact with the bow. The talking stick is a six-foot-long baton-like MIDI controller. It was used in the Moby-Dick tour in 1999–2000. She described it in program notes as follows: The Talking Stick is a new instrument that I designed in collaboration with

3280-752: 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

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3360-982: The High Performance Rodeo. Anderson was named the Inaugural Distinguished Artist-In-Residence at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York , in May 2012. In March 2013, an exhibition of Anderson's work entitled Laurie Anderson: Language of the Future, selected works 1971-2013 at the Samstag Museum was part of the Adelaide Festival of

3440-840: The Melbourne International Arts Festival; and in Russia at the Moscow Dom Muzyky concert hall on April 26, 2008. The work was performed in Toronto, Canada, on June 14, 2008, with husband Lou Reed , making the "Lost Art of Conversation" a duet with vocals and guitar. Anderson's Homeland Tour performed at several locations across the United States as well, such as at the Ferst Center for the Arts , Atlanta, Georgia; The Lincoln Center for

3520-833: The Nerve Bible . 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 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

3600-766: The Performing Arts , New York City; and Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park , Chicago, Illinois, co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago . In February 2010, Anderson premiered a new theatrical work, titled Delusion , at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games . This piece was commissioned by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad and the Barbican Centre, London. Anderson

3680-480: The Twilight Reeling . In late 1998, Artist Space, New York presented an exhibit of Anderson’s work from 1970s to 1980s, along with her 1990s work, Whirlwind . Life on a String appeared in 2001, by which time she signed a new contract with another Warner Music label, Nonesuch Records . Life on a String was a mixture of new works (including one song recalling the death of her father) and works from

3760-463: The army. In 19th-century French politics, the term avant-garde (vanguard) identified Left-wing political reformists who agitated for radical political change in French society. In the mid-19th century, as a cultural term, avant-garde identified a genre of art that advocated art-as-politics, art as an aesthetic and political means for realising social change in a society. Since the 20th century,

3840-484: The art term avant-garde identifies a stratum of the Intelligentsia that comprises novelists and writers, artists and architects et al. whose creative perspectives, ideas, and experimental artworks challenge the cultural values of contemporary bourgeois society . In the U.S. of the 1960s, the post–WWII changes to American culture and society allowed avant-garde artists to produce works of art that addressed

3920-458: The artistic vanguard oppose high culture and reject the artifice of mass culture , because the avant-garde functionally oppose the dumbing down of society — be it with low culture or with high culture . That in a capitalist society each medium of mass communication is a factory producing artworks, and is not a legitimate artistic medium; therefore, the products of mass culture are kitsch , simulations and simulacra of Art. Walter Benjamin in

4000-593: The artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times. As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In the essay "The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist" (1825), Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues 's political usage of vanguard identified

4080-459: The arts scene. Some of the music used in these productions came from her soundtrack of Swimming to Cambodia . The PSAs were frequently shown between music videos on VH-1 in early 1990. In 2013, Dale Eisinger of Complex ranked United States as the third greatest work of performance art ever, with the writer arguing that Anderson is "able to ascertain just exactly the climate of life in the United States, without being so punctuated that it causes

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4160-518: The avant-garde traditions in both the United States and Europe. Among these are Fluxus , Happenings , and Neo-Dada . Brutalist architecture was greatly influenced by an avant-garde movement. Giorno Poetry Systems In the early 1960s, young New York City -born poet John Giorno became acquainted with artists who were at the threshold of their successful careers, most notably Andy Warhol , Roy Lichtenstein , Merce Cunningham and John Cage . Warhol would have an important impact on Giorno, as

4240-416: The category of avant-gardists include Elliott Carter , Milton Babbitt , György Ligeti , Witold Lutosławski , and Luciano Berio , since "their modernism was not conceived for the purpose of goading an audience." The 1960s saw a wave of free and avant-garde music in jazz genre, embodied by artists such as Ornette Coleman , Sun Ra , Albert Ayler , Archie Shepp , John Coltrane and Miles Davis . In

4320-534: The early 2000s, produced benefit concerts and provided emergency grants for medical expenses to poets and artists, most of whom were people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. With political activist Abbie Hoffman, Giorno recorded a radio show for Radio Hanoi. And since 1986, GPS has hosted monthly retreats for those who study the Nyingmapa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. GPS remains active today. After having

4400-514: The essay " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (1939) and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) said that the artifice of mass culture voids the artistic value (the aura ) of a work of art. That the capitalist culture industry (publishing and music, radio and cinema, etc.) continually produces artificial culture for mass consumption, which

4480-412: The featured Guest of Honor at the B3 Biennale of the Moving Image in Frankfurt , Germany. In 2018, Anderson contributed vocals to a re-recording of the David Bowie song "Shining Star (Makin' My Love)", originally from Bowie's 1987 album Never Let Me Down . She was asked to join the production by producer Mario J. McNulty , who knew that Anderson and Bowie had been friends. On February 10, 2019, at

4560-420: 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

4640-412: The late 19th and in the early 20th centuries. In art history the socio-cultural functions of avant-garde art trace from Dada (1915–1920s) through the Situationist International (1957–1972) to the postmodernism of the American Language poets (1960s–1970s). The French military term avant-garde (advanced guard) identified a reconnaissance unit who scouted the terrain ahead of the main force of

4720-406: The latter became the protagonist of Warhol's film Sleep (1964), which depicts Giorno sleeping for five hours, and the unreleased Handjob , following Giorno's face while masturbating. Giorno believed that, at this level, poetry was running behind. Evidently, these artists in music and painting etc., would act whenever an idea arose in their minds, while the availability and progression of poetry

4800-457: 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 and Monster in

4880-646: The matters of the day, usually in political and sociologic opposition to the cultural conformity inherent to popular culture and to consumerism as a way of life and as a worldview . In The Theory of the Avant-Garde ( Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia , 1962), the academic Renato Poggioli provides an early analysis of the avant-garde as art and as artistic movement. Surveying the historical and social, psychological and philosophical aspects of artistic vanguardism, Poggioli's examples of avant-garde art, poetry, and music, show that avant-garde artists share some values and ideals as contemporary bohemians . In Theory of

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4960-535: The mediocrity of mass culture , which political disconnection transformed being an artist into "a profession, one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing [the profession of being an artist]." Avant-garde is frequently defined in contrast to arrière-garde , which in its original military sense refers to a rearguard force that protects the advance-guard. The term was less frequently used than "avant-garde" in 20th-century art criticism. The art historians Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris argue that arrière-garde

5040-510: The phone. GPS Records, begun in 1972, released over 40 albums featuring a wide range of musicians and poets such as Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass as well as unique performances by Frank Zappa , Diamanda Galás , Allen Ginsberg , John Cage , and Brion Gysin , as well as Giorno and Burroughs. The Nova Convention, in 1978, was a legendary three-day multi-media festival inspired by the writings of William Burroughs. The AIDS Treatment Project and The Artists & Poets Fund, running from 1985 to

5120-443: The resulting character in her work as a "voice of authority " or conscience , although she later decided that the voice had lost much of its authority and instead began using the voice to provide historical or sociopolitical commentary, as it is used on "Another Day in America", a piece from her 2010 album Homeland . For much of Anderson's career, the voice was nameless or called the Voice of Authority, although as early as 2009 it

5200-593: The rock music of the 1970s, the "art" descriptor was generally understood to mean "aggressively avant-garde" or "pretentiously progressive". Post-punk artists from the late 1970s rejected traditional rock sensibilities in favor of an avant-garde aesthetic. Whereas the avant-garde has a significant history in 20th-century music, it is more pronounced in theatre and performance art, and often in conjunction with music and sound design innovations, as well as developments in visual media design. There are movements in theatre history that are characterized by their contributions to

5280-434: The same day. She appears as a guest musician on several tracks from experimental jazz musician Colin Stetson 's 2011 album New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges . Anderson developed a theatrical work titled "Another Day in America". The first public showings of this work-in-progress took place in Calgary, Alberta, in January 2012 as part of Theatre Junction Grand's 2011–12 season and One Yellow Rabbit 's annual arts festival,

5360-438: The same year, which inspired her performance piece The End of the Moon . In May 2004, she received an honarary doctorate from Columbia University. She was part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and collaborated with choreographer Trisha Brown and filmmaker Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo on the multimedia project O Zlozony/O Composite for the Paris Opera Ballet which premiered at

5440-448: The titular "puppet" of her later work, Puppet Motel . In that year, she also appeared on Peter Gabriel 's album So , co-writing and performing on the song "This is the Picture (Excellent Birds)". (A version of “Excellent Birds” was also 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

5520-498: The verge of its fame. Giorno started GPS as a way to push poetry off the printed page and into visual, musical, social, and political realms. His goal was to highlight the work of other artists, poets, and musicians, and reach audiences through everyday “venues” such as the telephone, radio, and records, as well as rock clubs, shirts, and even consumer products. For Dial-A-Poem, first launched in 1968, recordings by hundreds of poets, spoken word artists, and activists are delivered over

5600-483: Was born in Chicago on June 5, 1947, and grew up in the nearby suburb of 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

5680-520: Was dubbed Fenway Bergamot at Lou Reed's suggestion. The cover of Homeland depicts Anderson in character as Bergamot, with streaks of black makeup to give her a moustache and thick, masculine eyebrows. In "The Cultural Ambassador", a piece on her album The Ugly One with the Jewels , Anderson explained some of her perspective on the character: ( Anderson: ) I was carrying a lot of electronics so I had to keep unpacking everything and plugging it in and demonstrating how it all worked, and I guess I did seem

5760-656: 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 Charts 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

5840-599: Was followed by Bright Red , co-produced by Brian Eno , and another spoken-word album, The Ugly One with the Jewels . This was followed by an appearance on the 1997 charity single " Perfect Day ". In 1996, Anderson performed with Diego Frenkel (La Portuária) and Aterciopelados for the AIDS benefit album Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin produced by the Red Hot Organization . An interval of more than half

5920-635: Was for many years the theme song of Lifetime Television . Anderson also recorded a number of limited-release singles in the late 1970s (many issued from the Holly Soloman Gallery ), songs from which were included on a number of compilations, including Giorno Poetry Systems ' The Nova Convention and You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With . Over the years she has performed on recordings by other musicians such as Peter Gabriel , Lou Reed , and Jean Michel Jarre . She also contributed lyrics to

6000-742: Was honored with the Women's Project Theater Woman of Achievement Award in March 2010. In May/June 2010, Anderson curated the Vivid Live festival in Sydney, together with Lou Reed. Her new album Homeland was released on June 22. She performed "Only an Expert" on July 15, 2010, on the Late Show with David Letterman , and her song "Gravity's Angel" was featured on the Fox TV show So You Think You Can Dance

6080-487: Was included on the album Big Science . Prior to the release of Big Science , Anderson returned to Giorno Poetry Systems to record the album You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With ; 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 ,

6160-432: Was limited to books and magazines, let alone multimedia or performance. Analogue to then active Pop-Art ideas, Giorno wanted to change poetry's situation by communicating to his audiences through everyday means such as telephone, television, records and so on. After all, phonographs and radio were a perfect terrain for people to listen, as Giorno called it poetry’s venue . Furthermore, these ways would offer Giorno's ideas

6240-551: Was seen as "an attempt at defying gravity, resisting the pull, [and] reverting the downward fall". In 2024, Anderson withdrew from a guest professorship at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen , after university officials objected to her support of a "Letter Against Apartheid" organised by Palestinian artists, calling for "an immediate and unconditional cessation of Israeli violence against Palestinians ". She

6320-406: 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 . In 1994, she created a CD-ROM titled Puppet Motel , which

6400-486: Was titled The Package , 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

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