How to incorporate time, the fourth dimensions of art? Her famous performance on skates frozen into an ice block was a way to answer that. She had that problem because her art was not based on the Western ideal of “a person encounters a problem and they overcome it (or not).” So how do you know when it is over? When the ice melts.
The idea for a singing table came to her when frustrated with writing something on an electric typewriter. She put her head on her hand and her elbow on the table and heard the hum of the typewriter’s motor. She spoke of how the little is the big (and vice versa). A bad day writing can turn into an idea for a singing table, for example.
She recently created some sculptures for a Japanese garden as part of an Expo. The garden led from lush beauty to barren wasteland, like the cycle of life. Breaking the pattern of rhyming. Why, she wondered, in Western art is there always “rhyme,” in the sense of connecting one thing to another. In Japanese haiku, it is connecting a thing only to itself, or evoking one thing, In isolation rather than in contrast.
She designed a sculpture for the Japanese garden in which haiku went downward in a straight line of lights in Japanese characters, and when it hit the water, it circled in letters of light in English or another language. She designed a sculpture of metal strips rattling in the wind in trees. Only when seen from a child’s height on the path at the right angle did they line up to portray a Japanese mythic character. She put speakers under a bridge that “played” sounds when you ran your hand along the bridge railing.
Simple ways of creating beauty and reawakening people to the world. This is why she was awarded the Gish prize for “outstanding contributions to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”
In Australia, she gave a performance for dogs. Because dogs listen. Better than humans. They have better hearing. (They may have better focus, but that’s another essay.)
Instead of being called a “performance artist,” she preferred the term “multimedia artist.” That way, she explained, if you write a book, you’re just changing media and people can’t complain that you are not an artist in that form.
She talked about there being no reality. “We’re not even here is my personal belief,” she said offhandedly.
She is known for her incorporation of technology into art. She was NASA’s first ever art-in-residence (and last she admitted). She said that we need artists in residence in other areas and singled out Congress. That got a big round of applause.
She stated simply what I have been struggling to express about life since 9/11. “Fear can make certain people a lot of money.” But she feels people are finally awaking from their fear and standing up to the institutions put in place by corporations and politicians to take advantage of that fear. She said she feels the world has changed more in the ten years since 9/11 than in any other ten-year span.
She lamented that we are losing the human voice, something I identified in a conversation with Jen Neal over three years ago. I naively thought of filling that void by speaking in podcasts and vlogs. But Laurie noted that that is not the human voice any more than an mp3 is music. An mp3 is the compression of sounds so as to be playable on electric media. She talked of how musicians go out of their way to record in a studio in a spatial way. For example, you might put a guitar at eleven o’clock and another at one o’clock. Compression flattens them; they might both sound like they are coming from twelve o’clock. She said she was invited by early mp3 developers to hear her music in electronic form; they eagerly asked her what she thought. She said, “It’s terrible. It’s not music and it’s not my music.”
My wife and I went to see an exhibit of Soviet posters at Northwestern’s Block Gallery this past weekend, and I noticed the irregular lines of letters where the lithograph, stencil, or silk screen had minutely dribbled, scraped, or otherwise affected the paint line. “No computer logarithm can ever reproduce that,” I thought. And that was Laurie’s point. We need to get back to the human mark.
The girl who asked her the question that led to Laurie being silent for one minute could not help but drum her fingers in the silence. This Internet generation needs to be stimulated 24/7, can’t sit still. You will never hear your inner voice that way, nor the voice of The Other.
My wife and I ran home and watched the Robert Wilson documentary, Absolute Wilson.
A Tree is Best Measured when it is Down (CIVIL WAR$).
