Laurie Anderson is an artist whose work defies any simple detail. She is a pioneer of the avant-garde, but as we learned, she doesn't begin to describe everything she creates.
His work is not sold in galleries. It is experienced by spectators who come to see his performances: singing, telling stories, and playing the violin strangely of his own invention.
She won a Grammy for a chamber music album about Hurricane Sandy and remains one of America's most unusual and visionary artists. A major exhibition of her work is on display at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Ladies and gentlemen, Laurie Anderson.
She plays electronic drums on her body and electric violins that sing and roar. For nearly five decades, she has wowed the beautiful and the quirky, challenging audiences mixed with homey and humour.
She blurs boundaries in music, theatre, dance and film. Laurie Anderson sometimes has difficulty defining her work, not just the audience.
Laurie Anderson: I used to say multimedia artist, and it was ridiculous. multimedia artist. It's very clumsy.
Laurie Anderson: With a gun to my head, I say I tell stories. And they sometimes look like pictures. They look like, you know, songs. They look like movies. They are just stories. What is a story? What is its function? How does this work? Who is saying this? Who?
If you've heard of Laurie Anderson at all, it might be because of the eight-minute-long song she recorded in 1980. It is terrifying and somewhat disturbing and to his surprise, it became a hit.
Laurie Anderson: It was a song about how technology can save you, basically.
Anderson Cooper: I first heard it when I was 14. I'm just like, what is this? And I still listen to it.
Laurie Anderson: It's about a lot of things -- justice, security, power.
He recorded "O Superman" by himself in his apartment in downtown Manhattan.
Laurie Anderson: I had a lot of equipment that would loop things. That's why I was making a lot of vocal loops. Actually, you have to hit it in the right place. So they hawk it and do it.
Anderson Cooper: You say, "Because when love is gone there is always justice."
Laurie Anderson: Here, here you go. You can, you can use a vocoder. here is my. here is my. Move ahead.
Anderson Cooper: "And when the justice is gone, there is always the force. And when the force is gone, there is always the mother. Hello, mother." I like that.
Laurie Anderson: You do it very well.
Anderson Cooper: I'm listening for-
Laurie Anderson: You got the job.
The song marked a phenomenal debut for their debut album, "Big Science".
Anderson Cooper: Pitchfork said, "Listening to Laurie Anderson's debut album is like sitting with a strange form of life that has been studying us for a long time."
Laurie Anderson: I would like to meet that writer. I mean, everything happens when you really break it, bizarre. And not likely. That's my lens, I guess. is unlikely.
Laurie Anderson grew up in Glen Allin, Illinois, where she was one of eight children. Every weekend she played the violin with the Chicago Youth Symphony and then went to The Art Institute across the street to study painting.
Laurie Anderson: And I didn't feel any different going this way or going like this.
Anderson Cooper: It was the same thing.
Laurie Anderson: Same thing. I just, right? Or is he? this is…
Anderson Cooper: Playing the violin or painting...
Laurie Anderson: Colorful enough? Is it cold enough? Is it adventurous enough? Is this correct enough? Is it, is it all, is it the same exact thing. All the same questions. And that was what one hand was doing and what is it, it's making a sound over here. It's building color here.
She came to New York in 1966 and began experimenting with music and short films. But after some time he thought that his work could be better received in Europe.
Anderson Cooper: You wanted to tour Europe.
Laurie Anderson: I did, yes. I wrote about maybe 500, let's say, arts centers, saying, "I'm planning a tour in the fall." I didn't have any visits. and "Would you like to be a part of it?"
With some reactions he took off for Italy. She was in 1975, playing the violin with a tape recorder while playing loops so that she could do a duet with herself.
Laurie Anderson: But then when did the concert end? A loop has no end. So I thought, "I need a timing mechanism." So I wore some ice skates whose blades were frozen in blocks of ice. So I played until the ice started to melt and break. And then when I started to lose my balance, I would just stop. that was it. That was the clock.
Anderson Cooper: And you were doing it on the street?
Laurie Anderson: Yes. The cubes tend to melt, usually in the hottest part of town, as these things can take a long time to put in place.
For years she was a traveling troublemaker, experimenting with sound, light and stories.
After the unexpected success of "O Superman", he received an eight-record deal with Warner Bros. Suddenly, the avant-garde artist was playing on MTV.
Anderson Cooper: That must have been weird. That kind of commercial success hangs in front of you.
Laurie Anderson: I knew so much about the pop world that it was extremely playful. So I said, "Okay, I'm not going to be fooled by that."
A chance meeting with a rock and roll legend changed his life. His name was Lou Reed, and he asked her.
Laurie Anderson: And we went to the AES Convention at the Javitz Center. Super geeky thing to do. We were looking at tube microphones.
Anderson Cooper: So for your first date, you went to the Acoustic Society engineering conference. It doesn't sound very romantic.
Laurie Anderson: I didn't consider it romantic.
Anderson Cooper: You didn't know it was a date?
Laurie Anderson: No, I didn't.
Laurie Anderson: He said, "Let's go, let's have coffee." I said, "Okay." And, and I was like, "I like this guy." We weren't really apart for 21 years after that.
Anderson Cooper: Wow.
Laurie Anderson: Yeah, she's my best friend.
Laurie and Lou sing "Hang On to Your Emotions": "... a thousand times, you better stick to your feelings, hold onto your feelings..."
They shared Buddhism, Tai Chi and boundless creativity - and eventually married in 2008. Lou Reed died five years later after a long battle with liver cancer.
Anderson Cooper: You wrote of his death: "I never saw the expression of astonishment as Lou as he died. He wasn't afraid. I had the chance to walk with him to the end of the world." Life, so beautiful, painful and dazzling - couldn't get better than this."
Laurie Anderson: Yeah, Lou was someone who thought about this and prepared himself for it and, and was 100% there.
Laurie Anderson still lives in the apartment they share in the West Village, and everyday takes her dog, Little Will, to the studio she has owned since the 1970s. When we contacted her, she was rehearsing with cellist Rubin Kodheli. This is an opera she wrote about Amelia Earhart's disastrous attempt to circumnavigate the globe.
Laurie Anderson: He's on this raucous radio. And she's going, "I can see you but I can't hear you." And they're going, "I can hear you, but I can't see you."
She is in perpetual motion, playing with technology and images, fascinated by language and sound.
She is working with an Australian university on an artificial intelligence program that has everything she's ever written, said or sung for. You can ask it a question or give it a picture, and the algorithm creates a basic poem in Laurie Anderson's words and speech patterns.
Laurie Anderson: Half of it is really terrible poetry. A quarter of it is interesting and a quarter of it is really cool.
To see how it worked, we uploaded a photo of our newborn son, Sebastian.
Anderson Cooper: Wow.
Laurie Anderson: "Mouth, eye, hand, face. There's nowhere to go, no place to hide it. It's everywhere now that I'm here. I can't believe it's me. Who did it ? Who are these people? Why are you here?"
Anderson Cooper: I'm like, I'm cringe- kind of crying. I feel…
Laurie Anderson: I know, it's-
Anderson Cooper: ...It's really sentimental.
Laurie Anderson: I know. Look, the thing is, it really shows us more about how much we put ourselves into language.
Anderson Cooper: Yes.
Last year Anderson gave six virtual lectures as the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Following in the footsteps of Robert Frost, Leonard Bernstein and Toni Morrison. Not surprisingly, Anderson's lectures were very different.
Perhaps the closest one can come to Laurie Anderson's mind is the virtual reality world she created with a colleague in Taiwan.
Laurie Anderson: It's a world that looks vast, but it's made up of words and drawings.
Feel as if you are flying inside a work of art.
Anderson Cooper: You've been working with technology for 40 years. Does it still fascinate you?
Laurie Anderson: Yes. It - it does. I'm still an idiot, you know? I like it. I don't think I worship it.
Anderson Cooper: Isn't it the savior that there is some hope?
Laurie Anderson: Oh, no. No. No. And it was told to me by a cryptologist: "If you think technology is going to solve your problems, you don't understand technology and you don't understand your problems." And I love that because, you know, people just go, "Oh yeah. This will fix it." Really?
Laurie Anderson's largest American exhibition of all time, currently on display at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC, is an odyssey through her eccentric creative life.
Anderson Cooper: That sounds very ominous to me.
Laurie Anderson: Okay. There is so much flag waving these days and it has become quite mechanical in some ways and I think I dread the rise of fascism around the world, frankly.
In one room he has painted words and pictures that seem to explode on the walls and the floor. It is a one of a kind multidimensional sketchbook of his thoughts, dreams and stories.
Anderson Cooper: Did you map it out before you did it?
Laurie Anderson: No, I should have.
New ideas are formed on old works. She first came up with the concept in the 1970s.
Laurie Anderson: It's called "Citizens".
Anderson Cooper: I've never seen anything like that.
Miniature clay figures with videos of people projected on them.
Anderson Cooper: And I think they all want to kill me.
Laurie Anderson: This one does.
Anderson Cooper: They're all sharpening knives.
Laurie Anderson: Because I think it's, like, people like elves, well, you know?
Anderson Cooper:: Uh-huh.
Laurie Anderson: And fairies.
Anderson Cooper: Yes.
Laurie Anderson: So I guess that's the attraction for me-
Anderson Cooper: These are some badass fairies.
In another room, another story. This was told by a giant video projection of Mohamed El Gharani, held as a juvenile without charge for seven years in Guantanamo until a judge released him.
Laurie Anderson: To me, I gave this person a megaphone to say, "Now it's your turn. What do you have to say?" It's not about my thoughts as to what happened here. This is the story of Mohamed Al Gharani.
Laurie Anderson is now 74, and is still embracing new stories and new ways of telling them.
Laurie Anderson: I'm not an artist to make the world a better place. That's not my goal, you know, absolutely, except, like, secretly.
Anderson Cooper: Quite simply, that's your goal.
Laurie Anderson: Quietly. 'Cause I really like cute things. Because it's thrilling to put your mind somewhere else and be in a place you would never have imagined. And then all of a sudden you're imagining it. And then there you are. it's magic.