Post by Grubb.
To get to the Moderna Museet this morning, we crossed a bridge to the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm.
The museum was at the top of a hill next to a sculpture park resembling a modernistic playground.
The main exhibit featured Laurie Anderson. In the early 1980s I covered a Laurie Anderson gig for Joseph Papp. Her performance was at a rundown theater in the Bowery. She wasn’t that well known then, so I reported back that Papp and the Public Theater should take an interest in her because she was on the cusp of being very well known. I’ve always liked her understated electric violin accompanied ruminations backgrounded by the black-and-white videos.
She had some great examples in her exhibit, but at one point she had an installation that was inspired by a Japanese painter who, in a pilgrimage of the soul, had “painted himself to the moon.” After waiting fifteen minutes, I was seated on a revolving stool and given a virtual reality headset along with two hand monitors. A trigger on the hand monitors activated flight motion that I could direct by raising or lowering my arms. Laurie’s virtual reality piece started with me drifting over a moonscape while she narrated how she always liked looking at the stars because they were beyond the destructive reach of humans. Then I had to suddenly direct my drift to dodge tiny meteors flying my way. Escaping the meteor storm, I twirled on my stool and watched zodiac star clusters explode and disappear before I ended up riding some animal over the craters of the moon with Laurie wondering what the future had in store for us. “We’re all on a pilgrimage, but where?” Good question, Laurie, but I don’t know if the virtual reality trip to the moon clarified anything in that regard. I sort of preferred George Méliès 1902 version. I might be able to guide my weightless way over the barren rockscape of some moon, but a good director might be able to do the job a little bit better…without the headset.
Laurie Anderson played Albuquerque somewhere around 1980, I was a big fan then. In an interview she talks about an incident where she was walking down the street in New York and two women passed her and one said to the other “another Laurie Anderson clone”.
In her quote it seems like all the meaning of “pilgrimage” has been metaphored out. Something like “journey” or “quest” might be better.
“Language is a virus.”
With her moon journey monologue it seems paradise could be where we aren’t.