The Detroiter: Who Are You People?

Multimedia performance artist Laurie Anderson would like you to know the following three things:

• 1. Sydney’s dog population loves rock music.
• 2. There are no further plans to develop the amusement park she was planning with Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel in Barcelona. Peter Gabriel no longer wants to do it and the saddest thing Ms. Anderson can think of is a modern, high-tech amusement park one year after it’s opened and all the technology has become obsolete.
• 3. If you want to do a fall tour in Europe, and you’ve never done a tour, let alone been to Europe, email 500 performance spaces in Europe and you’re bound to hear back from some of them. You will get your fall European tour.

Laurie Anderson gave a lecture, entitled Spirit and Opportunity (named after the Martian rovers), at the historic Detroit Film Theater as part of its lecture series on space last night and she wanted to talk about two things: Her stint as NASA’s artist-in-residence and how that influence her later project building Japanese sound gardens for Expo 2005.

She received a call one day back in 2003 and the man on the other phone said that he was from NASA and wanted to invite her to be the inaugural member of their artist-in-residence program. She told him he wasn’t from NASA and after a series of assertions that he was, indeed, from NASA she asked him what an artist-in-residence for America’s space agency even does. The answer?

“We don’t know”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Who are you people?” Ms. Anderson replied.

“We’re NASA,” the man replied.

Eager to jump on board with a project that had no definition, something completely new, Anderson started visiting NASA sites and annoying technicians. Artists and scientists, she says, are very similar. They must create an idea and then they must execute said idea, working out the problems as they go along.

She was especially excited by a white board she came across that showed a series of problems the scientists were working on with terraforming Mars. In other words, making Mars look like Earth which caused Ms. Anderson to sarcastically remark that we as a species have done such a fine job perfecting our own planet. She, if you did not know, is against manned space travel. She thinks that it’s a waste of time given the advancement of robotics, a mere propaganda tool to advance nations over their enemies, much like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon was a great victory for America during the Cold War. She does admit, however, that she got very excited about manned space travel during “the Kennedy thing.”

The Terraforming Mars project, by the way? It’s scheduled to be completed in ten thousand years.

Not everyone at NASA was too pleased with her though. Astronauts had no time for the short, androgynous woman with the artist-in-residence namebadge and the people in charge of colorizing the photographs received from the Hubble Telescope (the Hubble does not actually take pictures, it merely sends a series of data that are then organized into pictures) were not so happy when she questioned their heavenly color scheme of pale pinks and pastel blues.

“People like it,” they said. And NASA is an organization that relies heavily on a positive public opinion.

Laurie Anderson would like you to know a fourth thing

• 4. China is currently in international court claiming ownership of the moon. The Russians say they were there first, the Americans say they had the first people there and the Italians? Well, they saw it first.

Laurie Anderson was the first and last artist-in-residence as the people in charge of the budget decided that $20,000 to have an artist look around and be inspired by the program for a year was an outrageous, unnecessary expenditure. Ms. Anderson has campaigned for it’s reinstatement ever since so that other artists may get the opportunity accorded her.

Part of their problem with the program, she thinks, is with the work she decided to produce upon completion of the experience: a long-form poem entitled “The End of the Moon.” She thinks that, as a multimedia artist, they thought that she would do something with bouncing lights off of satellites and onto the moon in a sort of cosmic light show and they were disappointed with her creation. She said in a Q&A portion after the show, that no new work (other than the poem) had come from the experience, but in quoting a selection from her suggestion for Crasstalk’s book club*, she said “Who told you that to be a good person, you had to be a productive person?”

She wasn’t completely unproductive, however. A year later, when working on Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan, she was concerned with gardens, and what they meant. The Japanese don’t think of gardens the way we do and in the Japanese language, the word for garden translates to setting stones. Japanese gardens are stone arrangements and, working with a Japanese architect (the preparation for this exhausted her as the Japanese work ethic was a culture shock to the already hardworking artist), she studied how they work as spaces and how to incorporate sound and visual.

Working in a space about the size of Central Park, Anderson came up with a series of solutions that answer the problem “How do we see?” An aquascope that is basically a tube that lets you see underwater (there are no lenses, it is merely a tube) A box of air that created imagery of moving birds and a series of haiku sticks in different languages.

Ms. Anderson loves haiku because it captures a moment. She came up with one on the spot:

Cold Icy Morning
A Puppeteer Blinks
What am I talking about?

She also incorporated haiku into a fountain that, when water rippled the water, spread various translations of various haiku throughout the water, though it was unclear if this was a visual or a tonal piece.

There was a bridge that, when you held onto the rail while walking across it, caused a unique tune produced by gongs sounding softly against the river and the space as designed by the architect started out very dark, until it turned scary, then awful until, finally your life felt over.

A garden by Xanax.

The piece that captivated me, however, involved mud. She had noticed that the Aichi soil had a remarkable similarity to what we know of Martian soil and designed a piece wherein plasma screen televisions would be set into the ground, their cover appearing to be a thin sheet of water that displayed images captured by the Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. She recalled being in the control room when Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars. All of the engineers who had worked on the project were there, each one of them only designing a small portion of the robot. Nobody knew exactly how they actually worked, and no one knew exactly where they were until the numbers started coming in. Remember, there are no cameras in space, only data and numbers. The numbers showed that the robots had entered the atmosphere. The numbers showed that the robots had released their parachute. The numbers showed that the robots had landed. The numbers showed that the robots had unzipped themselves from their case and started basking in the sun in order to fully power up. And then?

There are no cameras on space, but, thanks to NASA, there are cameras on Mars.

She gave a Q&A and then left after going ten minutes over. In case you were wondering, by the way, she wore a boxy black suit with a white shirt , and red flats with matching red socks.

My friend and I, quite invigorated from the experience but not yet ready to drive home decided to head over to the famed Scarab Club for their poetry series. We were able to catch the last two poems from the mesmerizing William Copeland, though were sad to have missed the previous poets as we thought the event was from 8-930, not 7-830. The Scarab finished their Silver Medal Exhibition earlier in the week and had debuted a new gallery of work, three of which caught our eyes (unfortunately, they only had the listings from the previous show so I currently do not know who created these works).

• A doorway with striations of sticks coated in graphite
• A series of photographs of images from years past (painting, photograph and mural) covered with their modern corollary. An image of Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” mural was covered with a piece of photojournalism, the caption of which announced the opening of a new car plant in Turkey.
• Paintings on wood and a sculpture that told the tale of a claustrophobic animal cracker with a broken leg.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

The Detroit Film Theater is located at the John R entrance of the Detroit Institute of Arts at John R and Farnsworth. They are open Friday through Saturday and are currently showing the Academy Award Nominated Short Films and Lust for Life starring Kirk Douglas. Vision and Sampson & Delilah start next weekend. Tickets are $7.50 and $6.50 for students and members of the DIA. The full lecture calendar, along with further information on the Detroit Institute of Art including current and upcoming exhibitions can be found on www.dia.org

The Scarab Club is located at 217 Farnsworth across the street from the Detroit Film Theater entrance.  Galleries are free and open to the public Wednesday-Sunday from 12p-5p. They also have weekly life drawing sessions on Thursdays and Saturdays that are free to members and $7.00 to non-members. There are also a number of special events including Third Thursdays and Brown Bag along with Costume Balls and Garden Parties that are member exclusive. In conjunction with WRCJ 90.9 FM, The Scarab Club hosts a monthly night** of chamber music that costs $20 at the door, $18 if ordered in advance and $10 with a student identification. More information about The Scarab Club can be found at www.scarabclub.org

*Laurie Anderson’s Book Club selection is How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. It discusses productivity and its meaning in a world where we are experiencing technological burnout.

**The Scarab Club sponsors and runs the night of chamber music. However, the event only takes place at The Scarab Club every other month. The next night will be March 6 and will take place at The Scarab Club

Note: If you’re hungry after a visit to the DIA, The Scarab Club or anywhere in Detroit’s Cultural Center, I suggest a trip to the Cass Cafe for cheap, good food and drinks along with what is always an eclectic sampling of local art. The Cass Cafe is located at 4620 Cass Avenue at the corner of Forest Avenue.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to email 500 European performance spaces about the European tour of my exciting new piece “Gee, I’m Drunk”