By Nora Griffin
A response to Refiguring the Spiritual, a public conversation with artist Laurie Anderson on February 10, 2011.
Dressed in her trademark puckish attire, Laurie Anderson captured the audience’s attention that evening at Columbia with the charisma of a nightclub comedian mixed with the quiet mindfulness of a long-time devotee of Buddhism.
She began the conversation with a disclaimer that the word “spirituality” made her uneasy – she preferred the Buddhist approach of comprehending the world ‘as it is.’ In her attempt to convey her own definition of “spirituality,” I was reminded of Richard Tuttle’s similar response to the matter of defining “spirituality”; he said he preferred the word “mind” over “spirit.” Both artists fit neatly into the role of “holy fool,” a character whom Mark C. Taylor brought up in relation to the Anderson’s boundless wit and energy. A beautiful moment of direct, emphatic engagement with audience happened when, instead of responding directly to Professor Taylor’s questions, Anderson told a ridiculous joke about Jesus and the Crucifixion, which had everyone in the room in stitches. Holy fool, indeed.
Anderson’s talk was organized as a looping series of interrelated vignettes, meditations and recent project descriptions. A fine line of meaning was traced from the Japanese gardens she designed for the World EXPO in 2005 to her experience at NASA. She was particularly taken with the rover robots designed to explore Mars (“to find out what was alive and what was not”) and made the connection to her experience in Japan where such questions as “are mountains aware?” became cornerstones to her working process. Her ideas for the garden, she says, were influenced by Japanese haiku poetry –works that convey a single idea or image without resorting to metaphors or comparisons.
The label of “cross-over artist” or “multi-media” artist has often been used to describe Anderson’s art practice. I found it gratifying to have these familiar labels taken apart over the course of the evening, to reveal the threads of continuity that linked her chosen mediums: music, theatre, installation and literature. Certain biographical moments in the talk also stood out as highlights—Anderson tracing her love of American history to her childhood hobby of designing her own Colonial newspapers and linking it to her admiration for Herman Melville.
Throughout the talk, Anderson offered guidance and advice to young artists, from the self-actualization variety—“never wait for the perfect offer, go ahead and propose your dream project!”—to the more nuanced teachings she learned from meditation and Zen Buddhism. The evening closed with a lengthy rumination on the importance of idleness, not being seduced by smart phones, and above all how to become attuned to your own internal rhythms. As a struggling artist, Anderson taught a night school course on Egyptology, explaining to the audience that she chose to teach night school because, “I didn’t want to get up in the morning until I had a good idea.” A powerful incentive to take ideas seriously—and at the same time, to have fun with them.
Nora Griffin is a visual arts graduate student at the School of the Arts, Columbia University.