ARCHIVE
LAURIE ANDERSON
REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS
Distilled from multimedia shows, the performance artist’s influential album resonates anew.
By Laura Barton
Big Science (reissue, 1982)
NONESUCH
"So hold me, Mom, in your long arms/In your automatic arms”
UNITED
States, an eight-hour orchestral and multimedia performance piece by the artist Laurie Anderson, was first performed in its entirety over two nights at Brooklyn Academy Of Music, in the February of 1983. It was an examination of the American Utopia, a collage of spoken word, technology, music and film, divided into four sections: transportation, politics, money and love, and 78 separately titled segments. There were shadow puppets, a miniature speaker she placed in her mouth, a drum solo performed on her own skull; the Statue Of Liberty and the Stars And Stripes.
The show that February was not entirely new material. For some while, Anderson had been performing segments of United States at smaller venues, including at the Nova Convention, held in New York City in 1978, where the audience had included William S Burroughs, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and Frank Zappa.