Laurie Anderson: An Interview

Laurie Anderson (b. 1947) began her career as a gallery artist specializing in photography, before moving to critical work as a writer for Art News and Art in America. She later returned to the art world, making groundbreaking multimedia performance art. Her most widely known work dates back to the early-to-mid-’80s, and is marked by an innovative use of technology in blending media-based and staged performance. The range of her subject matter—from politically charged critiques of American society to more personal themes—has inspired many artists, and secured her position as an icon of American performance art.

In this interview by Kate Horsfield Anderson recalls her early sound experiments. She describes one of her many manipulated violin instruments: “At that point I was really involved with audio tape.  It was mostly whatever sound I could make at the time.  I had just built a violin that I had just taken apart and put a speaker inside, so that it was self playing, and also its strings, and it went out to a little cassette tape recorder.” 

A historical interview originally recorded in 1977 and re-edited in 2004 with support from the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.