Maintaining a rigor demonstrated by few artists to remain at an avant of the avant-garde over the decades, Laurie Anderson has done so by working across disciplines, discourses and media, even inventing new ones where needed, all while preserving her deeply human perspective.

Seamlessly transitioning through changes in art and culture, her live performance vehicle “Language of the Future” has functioned in the space of a distinctive immediacy of responsiveness to the culture and sociopolitical surround it happens to inhabit. In a recent conversation, we sat down to discuss her current artistic interests and more.

Q: So many of the formative experiences you’ve referred to throughout the years — the correspondence you had with John Fitzgerald Kennedy while you were running for student council and he was running for president, or the accident where you broke your back and were hospitalized — took place during your childhood. And I wonder how much of the avant-garde sensibility that flourished in the Midwest, outside the commercial bubbles of the coasts, has informed your work?

A: I think what did influence it was using everyday stuff. I don’t wear anything different for shows, I don’t particularly talk differently than I would when I’m talking with you right now. It’s not this rarefied thing. When I grew up there was also kind of a lot of weird stuff going on. I went to Bible school as a kid, and adults thought nothing of talking about snakes that could speak, oceans that would become dry in the middle and people coming back from the dead, and I thought “Whoa! Adults are absolutely out of their minds!” Bible stories made a big, big impression on me, and I hadn’t really realized how much until I was finishing this book and looking at how very much I’ve been attracted to how beautiful the language of the Bible is, especially Isaiah. It’s really, really beautiful, wild poetry. I got into it even as a kid, that it was this other world of books. Plus, I really loved books as a kid, and they came into my work in ways that I didn’t even realize at the time that I was making stuff.

Q: I read you recently described your husband’s life as a process of “entering into ancestry.” What does that mean for you, how you see where you and your work are today and the place you’re interested in establishing?

A: I can’t remember saying that. “Entering into ancestry?” What does that mean? I don’t know, really, because I’m so much more interested in the future than the past. So my husband, Lou (Reed), he had so many beautiful songs and did so many amazing things, and I feel like I have a lot of access to all of that. And, also, we’ve been working with this archive a long time, so I feel very, very close to him although he’s been dead almost four years.

Michael Workman is a freelance writer.

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