Born on June 5, 1947, in Wayne, Illinois, the second of eight children, Laurie Anderson began studying classical violin at five years of age and later performed with the Chicago Youth Symphony. In 1966, she moved to New York City, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in the history of art from Barnard College in 1969 and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Columbia University in 1972. For two years, she taught art history at the City University of New York.
Turning to performance art, Anderson in Automotive, 1972, orchestrated car horns at the Town Green in Rochester, Vermont. In Duets on Ice, another early piece performed at various public sites, Anderson appeared in ice skates frozen in blocks of ice; she then proceeded to play a duet with herself on an altered violin that she described as like a ╥ventriloquist╒s dummy╙╤she replaced the bow hair with pre-recorded audio tape and the string with a tape head. Duets on Ice would end once the ice melted.
To support her performance art early in her career, Anderson worked as a freelance interviewer and art critic for Artnews and Artforum. By 1974 she had received several grants that gave her more freedom to pursue her artistic explorations. She came to rely on a driving rock beat as a backdrop to many of her pieces; this led to a musical single, ╥It╒s Not the Bullet that Kills You╤It╒s the Hole,╙ 1977. Another song, the eight-minute-long ╥O Superman,╙ 1981, reached the number two spot on England╒s pop charts.
She was better known as a composer and performer of multimedia exhibits, which combined music, photography, film, drawings, and animation with text. Her most ambitious work, United States I-IV, consists of seventy-eight segments organized into four sections: Transportation, Politics, Money, and Love. First performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983, it ran for over six hours and employed more than 1,200 photos, cartoons and films. Her first record album, Big Science, was composed of excerpts from United States I-IV. She used some of the same material again in writing, directing and performing the film Home of the Brave, 1986. Anderson collaborated on Set and Reset with visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and choreographer Trisha Brown, whose dance company premiered the piece at The Next Wave festival in late 1983. In 1989, she premiered Empty Places: A Performance, at the Spoleto Arts Festival in Charleston, South Carolina.
Stories from the Nerve Bible, 1993, combines music, comedy, illusion, dance, film, songs, and a tornado simulated on stage. In 1994 she began collaborating with rock musicians Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel on an ╥experience park,╙ a project to develop new forms of interactive experience. She created and performed many songs and shows, and regularly toured in the U.S. and abroad. Her numerous honors included a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1977, a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1983, and a Grammy Award nomination, 1991.
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