Laurie Anderson
Drum Dance from Home of the Brave, 1986
Digital video projection on continuous loop
53 seconds
© Laurie Anderson; Courtesy the Artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery
From performances for “six people in a loft” to “O Superman,” MTV fame, and her time with Lou Reed, the artist reflects on her many years in New York.
As a teenager in suburban Chicago, Laurie Anderson was a cheerleader, star of the senior play, an editor on her school paper, runner-up for a Junior Miss scholarship and the girl voted most likely to succeed. In New York, she studied sculpture with Sol LeWitt, played the violin while wearing ice skates frozen in blocks of ice, recorded a song that reached No. 2 on the British charts, was queen of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade and became NASA’s first artist-in-residence. She once went a year without a winter coat. Philippe Starck hired her to make his hotel lobbies sound bigger.
She does a very good Laurie Anderson imitation.