In a murky political present, Laurie Anderson is still finding light in the future

Four decades after performing her live dissection of Reagan’s America, United States, avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson will debut the next instalment in Manchester this month, throwing a typically clarifying light on our uniquely troubled times

On 3 February 1983, Laurie Anderson walked on stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At that time, there had never really been anyone like her: as crafty as Benjamin Franklin; as attuned as David Bowie to how far the strictures of pop music could be stretched; as comfortable in Philip Glass-y “high art” mode as in raucous, provocative, Richard Pryor-style comedy. But Anderson was something of her own invention. Her 1981 single O Superman somehow became a global pop smash, even as its eerie electro and paranoid, sinister humour sounded totally out of it. After making her way through Europe, she had come here, back to New York, to talk about her home, in an eight-hour show spread across four nights, called United States. “A certain American religious sect has been looking at conditions of the world during the flood,” she said directly into the microphone, to open the first night. “According to their calculations… pre-flood civilisation [was] somewhere in the area of upstate New York, and the Garden of Eden in New York City.” The crowd laughed. “There are no traces of biblical history in the upstate New York area,” shrugged Anderson. Her conclusion? “The ark has simply not left yet.”

Forty years later, ARK: United States V picks up where Anderson left off. The stage show, which debuts this month at Manchester’s Factory International, mixes film, AI, live feeds from around the world and performance art, alongside what’s become her signature assemblage of songs for violin, electronics and percussion. It’s all a frame for her inimitable voice, often manipulated through harmonizers to take shape as male authority figures, female mystics and post-gender time travellers. And also for what her voice is trying to say; which might be that if the ark still hasn’t left yet, the flood is here.

On a hot summer afternoon in Brooklyn – as America is roiled by tides of rising fascism, a wild election season and its own complicity in the genocide in Gaza – Anderson sits on a couch and explains why she’s come back to her first monumental work. “It’s largely due to the political situation, yeah,” she sighs. The original four parts of United States made liberal use of Anderson’s own innovations – turns of phrase that twist wry cliches into crystalline insights; violins strung with neon and sunglasses doubling as spotlights; cassettes played by her mouth; and drum solos performed on her skull – to explore the avuncular bloodthirst of Reagan’s America. “I looked at American history to think about what turned this country of farmers into people who are branding themselves, and trying to be famous and get a lot of money,” she tells me. The fifth part imagines what happens next. She floats the idea of Noah giving a TED Talk, and the very reasonable supposition that Elon Musk might play the part of the devil. Her longtime friend and collaborator Anohni appears, as she so often does, as a kind of angel. “I think I am supposed to be some kind of Buddha-like character,” Anohni wrote to me in an email. “I think I am lounging in a cloud, in some abstract way? I am grateful clay in her hands.”

In the show, Trump washes up, too. Like Reagan, she says, “he’s got this storytelling thing that’s like a comic book – the bad guys and the good guys”. But unlike Reagan, Trump doesn’t try to hide his evil beneath a slick veneer of optimism. “It’s verging on violence, so a lot of my motivation is fear. And I hate to admit that. Why does it always turn into hate speech? Why not love speech? What’s that tendency?” In person, Anderson is as quizzical as her records might suggest. Poised but you wouldn’t say polished. Her hands move a lot. “Are we so horrible and dark in our hearts that Trump is showing us who we really are? What grabs our attention is not sunny stories, it’s the dark stuff. The weird stuff. Sex and violence. All those things that say…” And then, on the couch, she lowers her voice into a carnival barker, a smug preacher, a man with a microphone: “Come over here. Let me show you something.” Her voice remodulates. She’s made her own body into a machine for doing this. “That feels very… American.”

Deep inside a former textile factory in the rolling hills of western Massachusetts, a few rooms comprise the closest thing to a public Laurie Anderson archive we may ever have. MASS MoCA shows a version of her 1978 The Handphone Table, in which a kitchen table turns your bones into speakers for a recording of her humming. There is a room for a recent VR project, in which viewers go with her to the moon and navigate its craters on horseback. The effect is vertiginous and melancholy, a reminder of both how the optimism of space travel has curdled into corporate colonisation and of how Anderson was NASA’s first artist in residence for a few years in the early 21st century. “There was a 19th-century Russian philosopher called Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov,” she says, who wrote of “the common task, which was: we have to go to outer space. Why? To bring back the dust of all of our ancestors. They had a very mystical relationship to space exploration, as opposed to ours, which is about speed and the militarisation of space.” Anderson’s album Amelia, released this summer, is a longform audio play about an American who embodied a similar mysticism. “Amelia Earhart was on the cusp of this American fascination with speed and infrastructure, as aeronautics went into military operations,” she says. The album refuses sentimentality, but its beauty goes a distance towards reaffirming the mythic greatness of her subject. “I really like badass women who do things. ‘I think I’ll fly my plane around the world!’ OK. Crazy idea. Good idea.”

Anderson’s rooms at MASS MoCA are stuffed with both crazy and good ideas. She’ll have them for decades, to fill as she pleases, and their contents will change over time. This history of her is hardly definitive, and that’s by design. “I’m not saying I don’t like archives,” she says, noting that she’s been helping keep safe the ample archives of her longtime partner, Lou Reed. “But for me, I don’t care. It’s an amount of work I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It’s also a lot of joy, come to think of it.”

MASS MoCA chief curator Denise Markonish has been deep in the work and the joy for many years of collaboration with her. “We did help digitise a good chunk of her archive,” she says. “But Laurie always exists in the future. What she has done in the past still feels very present, so it’s like she’s always one step ahead of everybody in the way she thinks.” And she’s always making new work, including pieces for ARK, which will soon reside in her rooms here. “Once she makes up her mind, we’re doing it,” Markonish says. “But then she immediately goes back to the future. ‘What’s next? Here is what I’m thinking about now.’ And because she works in a borderless way, time doesn’t matter.” 

What matters is that borderlessness. “Her way of thinking can be quite elliptical. She cares deeply about the progression of the world and about justice,” Anohni wrote, in the same email. “Her curiosity is always exploring progression in her conversations. Maybe she doesn’t spend much time revisiting ground she feels she has already covered.” ARK, then, is likely less a return to Anderson’s early triumphs than an ongoing investigation of the future, as she sees it. 

Which isn’t exactly bright. “When I see the faces and people at Trump rallies, I see this expression of glee on their faces,” Anderson says. “I recognise it because he’s saying, ‘Guess what? You’re free. Things are so messed up, but you are free.’ It’s completely rock ’n’ roll. I recognise that from being a young revolutionary; like, right on, this is broken and we’re going to break it even further.” Anderson cut her teeth in the civil and sexual rights movements of the 1960s; in 1989, she released Beautiful Red Dress, the catchiest song about menstruation and the gender wage gap to ever hit American airwaves. In 2021, she signed an open letter calling for the end of apartheid in Israel and lost a visiting professorship at a university in Essen, Germany, because of it. So she’s seen nihilism before. “My life was built around fear, in many ways,” she says. “I was born in 1947 in Chicago, the same city and month that the Doomsday Clock was set in motion.” Its hands are set by the scientists who originally developed the atomic bomb. At the moment, it’s 90 seconds to midnight. In some ways, we’re all out of time. 

Trump, then, is a storyteller on themes of horror and redemption through violence. “What’s the story that you live by?” Anderson asks. “Mine is that I’m an artist.” She pauses. “I wanted to make art to try to figure out what makes us so cold.” Just as her work refutes the bounds of time, it also refuses the bounty of that glee which Trump and his ilk feed off so ravenously. Anderson’s work counters those tired old tales with new stories – 52 of them fit into her ARK.

More fly around the boundaries of her output, like doves spreading the good news of her discoveries. O Superman, for instance, has stayed in orbit since its debut. With its lyrics “Here come the planes/ They’re American planes. Made in America,” the song found a bone-chilling gravitas when she performed it at New York’s Town Hall during an already scheduled concert on September 19, 2001. It found afterlives when covered by M.A.N.D.Y vs Booka Shade in 2008 and interpolated by Dizzee Rascal in 2013. Today, it’s all the rage on TikTok, as users tell their own stories about identity and history to accompany its refrain, “Well you don’t know me/ but I know you.” Wildest of all, none of these reuses tread on nostalgia for Anderson’s work, but seem to trade on its futurity. It’s not remember this? It’s what IS this? 

“I love it,” she says of the TikTok posts. “It’s about identity and anonymity and all kinds of things in really amazingly effective ways. I was super proud to be part of that world.” Because, she says, “I want to be useful.” Part of this utility is to point out what’s going wrong now – and what’s gone wrong since those first stories on United States. “Trump embodies the worst thing about branding and turning ourselves into saleable items,” she says. “You know, what have you got for sale? What are you worth? That’s soul killing. It’s a cold question.”

Generations of artists have warmed themselves by the fire of her work, though. At ten years old, Anohni recalls, “I had every crevice of the album Big Science memorised. I actually wrote a book report on the album for sixth grade, to the alarm of my classmates, who were all listening to Asia and Journey.” The Australian producer and DJ HAAi first heard her in Sydney. “I remember hearing Four, Three, Two, One for the first time,” she writes. On the Sydney Harbour steps, she watched Anderson perform Music for Dogs, a composition designed to be heard only by canines. “More recently I saw her in London with the Kronos Quartet. I’ll be forever spellbound by her ability to combine humour with classical music, as well as her unique way of combining sonic futurism with storytelling.” And Markonish is in awe of her creations. “Everything is beautifully made,” she says, from her 1970s violin strung with audio tape to the AI work currently being installed in MASS MoCA. Anderson’s place in history is both secure and unstable, in that her work goes on. “She doesn’t exist in any one moment. She’s sort of like atoms scattered across the universe.” 

Or air bubbles in the deluge. “It’s amazing when you think about all the branding and codifying that so many people squeak through, and which is just completely weird and fantastic,” she says. She’s talking of the TikTokers, but the words apply to her as well. “How’d you get through that maze intact, making something very original and beautiful?” she asks. “It can be done, and plenty of people are doing it.” Her own ongoing inspiration, the United States, identifies its evil but also its identity as an engine or craft, its ideas, and its culture. Anderson herself is both utterly foreign to mainstream ideas of Americanness, and also a best-case scenario for those ideals of individualistic prosperity. “I’m absolutely an optimist,” she insists. Then laughs. “But only for super-practical reasons: you have a better life.” If you can’t stop the flood, learn to ride the wave.