http://www.miaminewtimes.com/issues/2004-10-21/music2.html

Deep Space
Laurie Anderson is no astronaut, but a performance artist who wants to
take her audience to the moon
By Michael Alan Goldberg 

From a strictly visual standpoint, Laurie Anderson is on a simplicity
kick these days. For the bulk of her nearly 30-year career, the famed
New York City performance artist treated audiences to elaborate
multimedia blowouts combining monologues and poetry with experimental
film and video, synthetic music, modern dance, still photography, and
even mime. Her 1995 solo extravaganza The Nerve Bible, for example,
featured girders, ramps, three rear-projection screens, two giant
sphere- and cube-shaped screens dangling from the rafters, laser
lights, and banks upon banks of electronic gear -- nearly 40 tons of
stuff that filled two semi trucks.

Over the past couple of years, though, Anderson has scaled things back
dramatically. The stage setup for her newest work, The End of the
Moon, is downright bare: It's just the 57-year-old storyteller, her
trademark custom electric violin, and a messenger bag's worth of
high-powered software to help run the show.

And yet, from a philosophical standpoint, The End of the Moon might be
Anderson's most complex and challenging creation to date. It's an
impressionistic, dreamlike collection of stories and observations, all
glued together with music interludes, which attempt to shed light on
some of the most brain-melting quandaries we face. What is the meaning
of art? What is this strange universe we live in?

"The piece looks at beauty, fear, the perception of time, and some
other things," says Anderson somewhat cryptically in her soft,
deliberately paced voice during an early morning phone call from a
hotel room in Illinois. "It's stories about the colors of stars,
animals, people I knew as a kid, all sorts of different stuff. There's
a lot going on, and it keeps evolving as I go along."

Speaking with Laurie Anderson reminded me of those brief-yet-odd
run-ins I had on occasion with a particularly quirky college
humanities professor after class. She's sweet and exceptionally
gracious, but there's little time for small talk or small ideas. Just
seconds after our initial pleasantries, she's already digging into the
theories of Marcel Duchamp.

But that's not Anderson's fault. Far from being pretentious,
condescending, or willfully oblique, she appears to inhabit a world of
perpetually deep thoughts, lofty concepts, and strange snippets of
logic and revelation, few of which can be adequately explored in the
context of a short conversation, but which become clearer, more
accessible, and much more profound when articulated from the stage.

"My very first question in this piece has to do with a conversation I
had with a friend who said, "Who taught you what beauty is?" and so
in some ways this work is an attempt to deal with that," she
explains. "People call piles of dirt art. A playwright can write about
a boring day and call it art. But maybe all of life is art if you can
just see it that way. Maybe the only things you call art are the
things you were taught to see as art, and that if you look at everyday
things in a different way, you can see them not just for what you're
gonna use it for, but for what it is."

Much of The End of the Moon is rooted in Anderson's two-year stint as
NASA's first artist-in-residence; she views the work as a final report
on her experience, which comes to an end in the next few months. Since
1962, NASA has sponsored an art program, inviting more than 200
artists, including Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol, and Robert
Rauschenberg, to render impressions of rocket launches, Shuttle
missions, space probes, and other subjects in paintings, sketches, and
photographs.

But when Anderson was selected last year to become NASA's resident
artist, neither she nor the agency knew what direction her tenure
should take. "Some of these guys were a little skeptical," she
laughs. "They were kinda saying, "Well, whatcha gonna do, write a
poem or something?' And I was thinking, "Yeah, you know, I am gonna
try to write a poem about it,' and in a way that's what Moon is."

Later, when she visited the Kennedy Space Center, the Ames Research
Center, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and observed myriad projects
in various stages of development, Anderson began drawing parallels
between art and science.

"There's things going on at NASA that are very, very similar to art
projects in that so many of the NASA projects are wild and visionary,"
she says. "And some of the things they're coming up with are just
really beautiful designs, whether you're talking about manned
spacecraft or space stations or exploratory devices or any number of
things. They're just all over the place. Some of their designs are
pure theory. But it all looks like art to me!

"Some of the things they're creating are breathtaking," she
continues. "If you're troubled about some of the things that are going
on in this country, take a look at aspects of the space program and
it's just thrilling. And not only aesthetically. I mean, we're
actually getting ready to go to Mars. That is absolutely incredible."

One might surmise that in our post-9/11 world, it has become more
difficult for an esoteric artist like Laurie Anderson to connect with
audiences, since eras of uncertainty tend to make people grasp onto
concrete ideas and firmly entrenched beliefs in order to feel stable
and secure, and thus they're less willing to contemplate concepts that
could further shake those foundations. But she sees things in quite
the opposite way.

"It's a wonderful time to do this, because I don't think anyone wants
to close off entirely, to close their doors and just be afraid," she
says. "Our world is really dangerous, but what do you do with that?
And how do you find beauty within that?

"There are so many questions in this piece. And I don't have all the
answers yet, no one ever could, but I'm finding some of them as I go
along and I hope others do, too."