The Withness of the Body

For the last forty years, Laurie Anderson has been a pioneer at the forefront of technology in the arts through her use of audio video electronics and projection. Trained as a painter and sculptor, she became an early leader in the use of electronics and processing. Anderson as been the artist to consult regarding unique ways of bringing sounds and visuals to audiences.

In the exhibition she has created people in two dimensional, three dimensional and holographic realities ranging from four inches to ten feet high.

Since 2011, following the death of her small dog Lolabelle, Laurie Anderson has made a series of works, both on large canvases and on paper, that portray memories of her pet’s existence, together with fantasies and dreams linked to episodes in its life.

The physical commitment required to make such large paintings enabled the artist to react to the loss of Lolabelle. The experience of Action painting has shown how a large format forces the painter to involve both the mind and the body in the creation of the work.

Anderson lived through this experience of painting with great intensity but also with a sense of discovery as the paintings were done after decades of engaging in conceptual artistic practice. In this sense she found that painting possessed the dynamics of musical improvisation.

As a multimedia artist, Anderson has developed her own poetics and language by using advanced technology. In the painting dedicated to Lolabelle and the Bardo, the contents determinates the narrature of the language whereas in multimedia works language prevails over content. These paintings recount a love story, they speak of faithfulness, they are sentimental works, revealing intimate experiences about life. Obviously the content heavily influences the linguistic frameworks of Anderson’s previous artistic works. The gigantic dimensions of the paintings, for example, bear similarities with theatre set designs, the arrangement of the figures on the canvas recalls notes jotted down in a diary to be transferred to a storyboard.

Except for Red Painting and Dream Drawings, Anderson’s paintings dedeicated to Lolabelle are all done in black and white. In her black and white works, the artist combines the colours of mourning: white for Buddhists and black for westerns.

In the series of fifteen paintins on medium-seized pieces entitled Dream Drawings, Anderson portrays Lolabelle’s experience of the Bardo, through seemingly surreal images, situations and words retrieved from dreams and intended to be pages from a diary.  Here Anderson explicity introduced a dreamlike element.  The decision not to use black and white for these works but to employ purple, the colour of the lotus flower, is yet another reference to Buddhist culture. With its incredibly beautiful flower, the lotus roots sink deep in the mud. Mud is a metaphor for something indistinct and blurry, while the lotus is the metaphor of form.