Post by Ella
Laurie Anderson is someone who passed me by. I was never a fan, or not a fan. I was aware of her as a unique artist. Would saying “singularly unique” be redundant? At any rate, I simply didn’t pay much attention.
When we found out the Modern Museum in Stockholm was having a Laurie Anderson exhibition, “Looking into a Mirror Sideways”, Grubb said “I gotta go there”. I said, “oh, sure, okay, why not?”.
I was awe-struck by her masterful storytelling. The title of the exhibition said it all for me. Each story I read had an other-world connection and a demand for reflection.
Oddly, a random conversation with new ferry-not-a-cruise friends Anne and Jakob led us to this exhibition. I may have mentioned them in a previous post. Both semi-retired journalists, he Danish, she Swedish. They have a flat in Copenhagen, Denmark but also spend a lot of time in Gothenburg, Sweden. The subject of Laurie Anderson came up because…when Jakob mentioned his speciality is covering rock concerts, Grubb mentioned covering a Laurie Anderson concert as a journalist in a previous life. They said Oh! She’s touring Sweden right now! And in fact, there is an exhibition…
Laurie tells a story about a story. When she was 12, she broke her back. She was laid up in a children’s ward for months. The doctors told her she’d never walk again. She thought they were idiots. The nurses read her children’s books. This was pure torture as she had been reading A Tale of Two Cities before her accident. Having retold this story many times, she says, she had a nagging feeling that a piece of the story was missing.
The real story is the evolution of the original story to something much farther from the reality. She realized, as an adult looking back, that the experience was so horrific for her that she couldn’t cope and each time she retold the story, the story got further from the truth. Details went missing. The reality of being on a children’s ward with seriously burned and terminally ill children, the sounds of crying and screaming, the smell of burnt flesh and medicine had all been subconsciously, little by little, left out of the retelling.
Between stories, there were her holographic installations and VR experience. Turns out she is not only a story-teller and performance artist/musician, she also is involved in exploring the use of machine learning (decades prior to the recent general public’s re-discovery and use, or mis-use in some cases, of AI).
It was not an exhibition that inspired me to take photos. I was too wrapped up in her stories. I tried a couple though. Here is a photo of a holographic video. The man is sitting in this oddly oversized chair telling his story.
