Over seitan and tofu in New York, the avant-garde performance artist talks about her Buddhism and loss and love – for her mother and her late husband Lou Reed
Long after she’s left, I’ll still be thinking about Laurie Anderson’s pumpkin-coloured jacket. I see it through the window of the restaurant, this big daub of colour amid all the greys and blacks of a New York winter. Then that colour is inside and here, emerging from it, is Laurie Anderson – 69 years old, small, sparkling and wide awake. Her hair, a spiky coronet, stands on end as if permanently electrified by the brain beneath. When she’s smiling, which is most of the time, she looks even more impish. The jacket, this big fat orange thing, puffy to the point of spherical, should be plain absurd, but on her I can’t help seeing it as extension of her own being. For decades, Anderson has been disarming us with searching and playful work that dovetails these same qualities: the spiritual and the silly. In the early 80s she was hailed as one of the most exciting figures in experimental art and she remains our foremost performance artist, inspiring something so often lacking in avant-garde work – humour and affection. That’s certainly the tenor of her most recent work, Heart of a Dog, which the New York Times called a “dreamy, drifty and altogether lovely movie”. Narrated by Anderson and comprising animated drawings and old home video, it’s a roaming, looping consideration of various loves and losses: her dog, her mother, and her husband, the musician Lou Reed, who died in 2013. It opens with Birth of Lola, in which Anderson recounts, in detail, a dream about giving birth to her rat terrier. I imagine many women must feel that intense, bodily love for their pet yet it’s not exactly socially acceptable to admit to it.
“That’s why it’s good to start a film or a book that way,” she whispers. “Just to kind of go right on out there.”
Related: Laurie Anderson: ‘My dog’s character was pure empathy. I tried to express that’
Continue reading...