Laurie Anderson

"Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There's this attraction to light and to this kid of power, which is both warm and destructive." (Laurie Anderson)

Visit the Official Website of this electrifying performer to find out about her current projects, tour dates and records.

A brief biography of Laurie Anderson is available on the Art in the Twenty First Century site.

Jim Davies maintains a website about Laurie Anderson: HOMEpage OF THE BRAVE

Available from your Public Library

Laurie Anderson
by RoseLee Goldberg (2000)
This book examines one of the most acclaimed and innovative performance artists and musicians working today. It covers her early works from the 1970s to the present, including an electronic opera; her scores, her videos, her stage sets and her violins are covered.

At the State Library

You can find profiles and interviews with Laurie Anderson, in the State Library:

Keyboard, Vol. 15, no. 12, (Dec. 1989), p. 74-90,
‘Laurie Anderson’: an interview by Mark Dery with Laurie Anderson, the cool high priestess of the avant-garde’. It also includes a biographical page and a selected discography.

Contemporary Musicians, p.4-7,
The article on performance artist, Laurie Anderson in the reference book Contemporary Musicians, describes her as “A performance artist [who] ‘treads the high-wire between art and popular culture', between ‘refined consciousness’ and ‘dumbness’…”. The article includes a select discography.

Rolling stone, No. 706 (20 April 1995), p. 33,
The Rolling Stone article by Bill Van Parys starts: ‘Talking to America’s pre-eminent performance artist is kinda like dropping acid. Her largely autobiographical stories are often funny, taking you on a wild roller-coaster ride of intonation and imagery right up to the brink, and then when you think you’ve hit the point of no return, she brings you back home safely with a sense of revelation. Which, strangely enough, is a lot like one of her shows…’

Duckworth, William. Talking music, p.368-85,
‘The two stories I’ve always liked the most about Laurie Anderson are the one about the time she hitchhiked to the North Pole, and the one about her teaching, unprepared, at one of the New York colleges, by making up stories to go with the slides…’.