- 1 Gordon, 1980, p. 51.
- 2 Mowitt, 1990; Hood, 1994.
- 3 See Montano, 2000; Goldberg, 2001.
- 4 Ibid.
1In an article from 1980 entitled “Laurie Anderson: Performance Artist,” the academic, director and writer Mel Irwin Gordon argues that Anderson “found herself concerned with a basic aesthetic dilemma that has troubled a number of other performance artists: how to create an intensely personal art that is not just simply autobiography.” Later in his article, Gordon asks further: “How can the performer/author bring raw unmediated materials from his/her life and structure them to strike a balance between his/her needs and those of the audience?” He suggested that for Anderson, “the resolution is not only intellectual but technical; it is one that leads to a new performance style.”1 Writing more than forty years after the publication of Gordon’s article, I will argue that through a career that has spanned almost five decades, Laurie Anderson’s work can also help us think about the roles of performance and poetry and the relations between the personal and the political realms in the context of multimedia art. Anderson has often been called a “performance artist,”2 a label that became widely used from the 1970s onwards and that usually refers to artists whose artworks are performed or executed live and created through actions produced by themselves and other artists.3 Although not restricted to fine art, the term is often associated with visual artists, particularly those using interdisciplinary approaches and emphasizing the relation between the artist and the public.4 Laurie Anderson has always been interested in exploring interdisciplinary and intermedial approaches to art and the performative aspect of her work has been a central dynamic of her experimentalism. In this article, I will analyze the relations between performance and poetry in three of her recent works.
- 5 Gorski, 2011; D’Abdon, 2018.
- 6 See Wheeler, 2008; Hoffman, 2011.
- 7 Gräbner & Casas, 2011, p. 12.
- 8 Ibid., p. 12-13.
2I should highlight from the outset that “performance poetry” is not a concept that is often used directly to describe Anderson’s work. The term “performance poetry,” which emerged with particular verve in the eighties and was arguably popularized in the US by Hedwig Gorski,5 is usually attributed to poetry specifically composed for or during a performance before a live audience.6 In their introduction to Performing Poetry: Body, Place and Rhythm in the Poetry Performance, Cornelia Gräbner and Arturo Casas highlight two main strands in the genealogy of performance poetry: “On the one hand, scholars like John Miles Foley or Peter Middleton take the poetry performance as a continuation of oral traditions and as a challenge to academic theory, which needs to change in order to accommodate it; on the other hand, the inheritors of counterculture and the proponents of slam poetry argue that the performance of poetry is a radical alternative to poetry as endorsed by academic theory.”7 The relations between performance and poetry in Anderson’s work may be best understood in relation to this second point of origin, namely in relation to ideas of poetry performance deriving from U.S. American counterculture, where we inescapably find “references to Charles Olson, the Beat poets, and the countercultural movements of the 1960s.”8 Anderson’s exploration of performance both in art and poetry is however too eclectic to be merely associated with those movements. This article is thus less interested in tracing the direct filiations of Anderson’s performative work or in discussing on the origins of poetry performance than in highlighting the relations between the performative and poetic elements of Anderson’s later works where the personal and political intersect. In order to do so, I will start by addressing Anderson’s show, Dirtday! (2012), a multimedia performance entailing a strong spoken-word component. I will then examine in greater detail some of the tracks of Anderson’s album Homeland (2010), where early versions of some of the themes performed in Dirtday! were already explored. The examination of Homeland after that of Dirtday! will demonstrate how Anderson’s recorded albums cannot be disconnected from the author's live shows and from her experimental compositional praxis. I will conclude by examining her film Heart of a Dog (2015) where her performative poetics are translated into moving images and where the artist is able to add the possibilities of cinematic narrative to the already complex dynamics of her multimedia live shows.
- 9 My translation of Rui Torrinha’s following words: “Uma artista que olha o mundo de uma forma muito (...)
3In 2012, Laurie Anderson staged a number of performances in Europe touring her multimedia show Dirtday!. The tour in Portugal started in the North of the country, in Centro Cultural Vila Flôr in Guimarães, and she moved south making performances in Coimbra, Aveiro and Torres Vedras before arriving in Torres Novas, in Central Portugal. Anticipating the show in Guimarães, Rui Torrinha, a local organizer, explained that Laurie Anderson arrived at each concert hall with enough time before the performance to wrap up its final details, bearing the specific context in mind. Torrinha presented Anderson as “an artist that looks at the world in a very peculiar way, placing things as if part of a whole, a holistic vision more than a musical idea.”9
4It was at the Teatro Virginia in Torres Novas that I was able to view and experience her multimedia performance. The show included spoken-word, music, and projected image in a textual assemblage that connected contemporary issues, family memories, anecdotes, and parodic revisions of political messages. The performance was structured around a number of monologues in Anderson’s smooth and rather hypnotic voice. These mixed personal histories with social and political comments interspersed by musical moments. The sound of Anderson’s striking and rather elegiac violin often contrasted with pre-recorded sounds, grounding and interacting with the stories and poetic narratives told by her spellbinding voice.
5Dirtday!, preceded by Happiness in 2002, and The End of the Moon in 2004, was part of a trilogy of shows concerned with politically murky moments in US history. Dirtday! examined the repercussions of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, exploring how more than ten years after these events, the political mobilization of security still sustained a nation “hypnotised by fear.”10 In the same interview, Anderson adds that this show had been initially imagined as a musical concept that was progressively dominated by words, stories, and poetry:
Every show has a different starting point that may have nothing to do with the endpoint. When I started Dirtday! I thought ‘I am going to do all music!’ And because Dirtday! came from how to define where you live where your home is, stories started generating and then there was more and more words, and more and more words, until it became a dreamscape of words.11
- 12 See Public Law 107–56, 2001.
6The result was a creative haven where words, music, and visual slides intersected in a performance engaged in generating imaginative and reflective responses from the audience. The fact that the reaction from the audience was meant to be active and critical can be seen in the way Anderson’s domestic anecdotes and familial images were often followed and haunted by narratives of danger drawing from the securitarian rhetoric that first emerged in the US, and then all over the world, after the terrorist attacks to the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11th. By repeating and rephrasing messages such as “We might be the enemy ourselves,” Anderson invited the audience to reflect upon the paradoxes of the rhetoric of security which, with the publication of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001, expanded the surveillance capacities of law enforcement. These included tapping domestic and international phones and – among other things – increased the list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges, turning regular citizens into potential suspects by the US government.12
7In this intersection of domestic and foreign anecdotes, familiar and threatening messages, Anderson was also underlining the uncanny nuances conjured up by the word “Homeland” as it was resurrected by US officials with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the US in 2002. The show invited us to reflect upon contemporary politics in the US, and by extension in the rest of the world, addressing not only security measures imposed upon citizens in the US as part of surveillance policies, but also by directly addressing issues such as the invasion of Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq by US troops and their allies from 2003 to 2011. Dirtday! was, thus, Anderson’s way of putting her hands in the “dirt” of the increasingly secured and militarised “days” that followed the 09/11 terrorist attacks.
- 13 O’Mahony, 2008.
- 14 Cited in ibid.
8Anderson’s use of words has always been sharp, and even though she is now a recognised and highly celebrated artist, her work has not become more conservative, nor has she come to accommodate less controversial topics in her shows. The polemic character of her performances is confirmed, for instance, by the response she received from the audience of a show in Boston in 2008. Journalist John O’Mahony tells us that halfway through her performance of a text that explored the issue of recruitment practises of the US army and their gruesome consequences on the battlefields of the Middle East, “protests began to ring out across the auditorium, then a conspicuous and well-heeled contingent made a dash for the exits.”13 Anderson argued that “With everything that's been going on, it has been impossible to avoid putting politics in this work (…) I was pleased I was provoking a response.”14
- 15 Cited in Anderson, Dirtday!, 2012.
9Anderson’s aim, however, was neither to impose a political message upon her audience nor to create an ideological manifesto about these events. Her shows invite us to think, instead, about these issues through unexpected forms of interplay between words, sounds and images: the aim was to explore how narrative, itself, should be reclaimed by artists at a time when public narratives were dominated by the politics of fear. The point was also to uncover and illuminate events, facts, ideas which politicians have attempted to exploit and narrativize for their own purposes. As Anderson has stated: “Politicians are essentially storytellers. They describe the world as it is and also as they think it should be. As a fellow storyteller, it seems like a really good time to think about how words can literally create a world.”15
- 16 Anderson, 2010b, p. 5.
- 17 Ibid.
10Some of the ideas developed in Dirtday! had already been explored in Anderson’s album Homeland. Completed in 2010, Homeland was Anderson’s first studio album in ten years. Yet it did not start as a studio album: it was written on the road and its songs were road-tested for two years before the album was recorded. In the booklet that accompanies the CDs, Anderson explains that she “wanted the fun and spontaneity of doing live shows and it had gotten so lonely making records just sitting in the studio staring at Pro Tools files.”16 The artist explains that she “began Homeland by making an ever-changing series of stories and songs about America. Without worrying about finishing the songs I just went out and started to play them.”17
- 18 Shulman, 2010.
- 19 Ibid.
- 20 Freud, 1919.
- 21 For an analysis of the ways in which the word “Homeland” was resurrected with the creation of the “ (...)
- 22 Shulman, 2010.
11The title of the album clearly highlights the overlap between political and personal issues explored in her recent work. In this album, Anderson wanted to explore how ideas of home and homeliness had been transformed after 9/11 and the Creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the US. As the critic and reviewer Alan Shulman suggests, sounds and sentences intersect in this album to convey “how it feels to live in a place that refers to itself as the Homeland. Home is where you belong and others don’t, but it leaves the question hanging in the air – is this your home? Or are you just a visitor, or worse, an interloper?”18 The reviewers suggest that this album conveys how, within these new security narratives, “you’ll feel like a stranger in your own home and (…) completely out of control.”19 By conveying the idea of home as an uncanny dwelling, Anderson explores the political reverberations of the unheimlich in the Freudian sense of the word: a place that is both familiar and strange.20 The United States, which for security purposes presents itself as the Home(land) to its citizens,21 is a place that is ultimately and increasingly estranged from and for many of them. In this sense, it is also interesting to consider how Middle Eastern instrumentation and vocals emerge in the album. Rather than being mere musical embellishments or exotic accompaniments, they play an important role in the revision of Home and Homeland that is being proposed by Anderson. By signalling their cultural difference, they respond to the culture of fear, to the politics of surveillance and of racial discrimination exacerbated by the Department of Homeland Security in the US. According to Shulman, “they exist to imagine an alternate reality; one of coexistence and cooperation (…) They are also there to charm you, because this record is expansive in its own way. The melodic fragments and the underpinning harmonies are conventional and attractive.”22
12In some of the tracks of Homeland, Laurie Anderson adopts a specific performance persona which continues to be present in many of her live shows. She deepens her voice by means of an octaver, an electronic voice-bending tool. This lower voice may remind her listeners of what she called the “voice of Authority,” which emerged in some of her earlier performances such as the famous 1981 “O Superman” song. However, in the 2010 album, the audio-drag helps Anderson create a more fully fleshed character that not only conjures up an authoritarian discourse, but that also provides more complex socio-political comments and reactions. Indeed, this male alter-ego – which Anderson’s husband, Lou Reed, named “Fenway Bergamot” – conveys a collective conscience which conforms to, but also puzzles over, national references and clichés. This voice is so important in Anderson’s exploration of the intricacies of the US psyche that “his” burlesque figure appears on the cover of Homeland:
Fig 1. Laurie Anderson as Fenway Bergamot on the cover of Homeland (Nonesuch Records)
13In Bergamot’s voice, the US psyche is both a sinister and eerily dreamy landscape that is at times forceful and at other times innocently attracted to myths of US exceptionality. It is his voice that narrates the performatic poem “Another day in America.” Ten years after “9/11,” Bergamot wonders about the possibility of a new age: “And so finally, here we are at the beginning of a whole new era. / The start of a brand new world. And now what? How do we start? / How do we begin again?” This new beginning moves from familiar clichés towards an impasse; from repetition towards disorientation and lack of direction, as Bergamot hopes that this prophetic time (new beginning) will merge with a novel form of space (a new kind of north): “And then again today is the day and those were the days and now these are the days. / And now the clock points histrionically to noon. Some new kind of north. / And so, which way do we go?” The exploration of time as an artifice, or of the artificial relation between time and discourse, is amusingly conveyed by Bergamot’s curious theory of punctuation: “at the end of each sentence there should be a tiny clock that shows you how long it took you to write that sentence.” The translation of time into days may also elicit more profound questions about the relation between time and change: “What are days for? To wake us up / To put between the endless nights.” This sombre dimension of time is mentioned again later in the text, this time in a parodic manner:
And another way to look at time is this: There was an old married couple and they had always hated each other. Never been able to stand the sight of each other really.
And when they were in their nineties they finally got divorced and people said: Why did
you wait so long? Why didn't you do this a whole lot earlier?
And they said: Well, we wanted to wait until the children died.
14Here, time becomes a parody of conservative policies and discourse. In the new world, in the land of opportunities, in a country characterised by dreams of achievement and myths of individual success, the possibility of change and effective social transformation turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Almost innocently, Bergamot continues to draw on clichés about the United States of America in order to show that the country’s politics tend to reiterate the same old social system, with new commodities only leading to old realities: “Ah America! And yes that will be America. A whole new place just waiting to happen. / Broken up parking lots, rotten dumps, speedballs, accidents and hesitations, things left/behind, Styrofoam, computer chips.” This replication of the system reveals another important chronological marker in the recent history of the United States, reminding us that the album was launched (some of its tracks having been tested and performed live) in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis:
And meanwhile all over town, checks are bouncing and accounts are being automatically closed.
Passwords are expiring. And everyone’s counting and comparing and predicting.
Will it be the best of times, will it be the worst of times, or will it just be another one of those times?
Show of hands, please!
15The “bouncing” of checks and “automatically closed” accounts translate questions about time that are clearly connected to the future of the United States as the frontrunner of financial capitalism. These questions are not answered with economical treatises or political manifestos but with other questions, highlighting not only the philosophical impulse of the poem but its performative style, the fact that it generates and performs “time” while questioning its multiple dimensions. Philosophical questioning is always amusingly interrupted by random doubts, such as uncertainties about one’s own origins or material desires: “ah this world which like Kierkegaard said can only be understood when lived / backwards which would entail an incredible amount of planning and confusion. / And then there are those big questions always at the back of your mind. Things like: Are / those two people over there actually my real parents? Should I get a second Prius?” Humorously, the long and verbose list of questions finishes with accusations about silence: “you, you who can be silent in four languages. / Your silence will be considered your consent.” The political implications of silence become clearer as the text comes closer to the end:
And you know the reason I really love the stars is that we cannot hurt them.
We can't burn them or melt them or make them overflow.
We can't flood them or burn them up or turn them out.
But we are reaching for them. We are reaching for them.
Some say our empire is passing. As all empires do.
And others haven't a clue what time it is or where it goes or even where the clock is.
16The text finishes with a haunting evocation of the United States’ imperial urges as they are reinvigorated by the “War on Terror.” By mentioning the stars without ignoring the exploitation of space by imperial powers, the above lines suggest that the ongoing desire for expansion and neo-colonial power takes America back to its own beginnings. Time (another day) and money (another dime) shape “another day America” and its fantasy of a fresh start: “Oh, another day, another dime. Another day in America. / Another day, another dollar. Another day in America. / And oh my brothers and oh my long lost sisters. / How do we begin again? How do we begin?”
17“Only an Expert” serves as another example of how Anderson explores and transforms her poetic performances when addressing the personal and social repercussions of contemporary politics in the US. In the album, this track is announced by Lou Reed’s trademark guitar assuming a surprisingly funky beat as it develops. The dancing rhythm may seem deceiving at first, given the critique disclosed by the lyrics, but soon its effusive pace starts to make sense. In this text, Anderson draws on the idea of “expert culture” to explore larger dynamics of American life. The first lines are repeated as a chorus, reiterating the world “problem” over and over again: “Now only an expert can deal with the problem / Cause half the problem is seeing the problem / Only an expert can deal with the problem / Only an expert can deal with the problem.” These reiterations highlight the recurrence of expert advice in the media and how audiences are bombarded with repetitive, often contradictory messages. The insistent techno beat also discloses the entrancing effect and spellbinding resonance of these expert voices. Alienating common people from their own opinion- and decision-making abilities, expert culture fits well into the spirit of Anglo-American pragmatism – as expertise is good for business:
In America we like solutions. We like solutions to problems.
And there are so many companies that offer solutions
Companies with names like: The Pet Solution, The Hair Solution
The Debt Solution, The World Solution, The Sushi Solution.
Companies with experts ready to solve these problems.
18The following lines highlight the role of the media in this dynamic, by stating that in TV shows like Oprah’s “the big question is always: How can I get control? How can I take control?” Yet the regular viewer of these shows is the person who is “barely getting by,” that is, “the person who is one of the sixty percent/ Of the U.S. population 1.3 weeks away, 1.3 paychecks away, from a shelter.” The advice offered by the experts thus obfuscates the fact that “the problem” is often not only an individual problem but a wider social one. “When experts say let's get to the root of the problem” their advice is spurious; it “doesn't work at all because the situation is/ Completely out of control.”
- 23 Anderson Laurie, 2007.
19This text also reveals how the specific context of Anderson’s performance will shape and transform the very text performed. We can attest to this by viewing and listening to one of the early versions of “Only an Expert,” whose performance was recorded at the Lincoln Centre in New York in 2007.23 This early version included powerful sections which were changed in later versions. It includes, for instance, the following lines that explored the mobilization of expert culture by military discourse:
Now sometimes experts look for weapons.
And sometimes they look everywhere for weapons.
And sometimes when they don't find any weapons
Sometimes other experts say, If you haven't found any weapons
It doesn't mean there are no weapons.
And other experts looking for weapons find things like cleaning fluids.
And refrigerator rods. And small magnets.
And they say:
These things may look like common objects to you
But in our opinion, they could be weapons.
Or they could be used to make weapons.
Or they could be used to ship weapons.
Or to store weapons.
Cause only an expert can see they might be weapons
And only an expert can see they might be problems.
Cause only an expert can deal with the problem
20Performed in the first years of the US invasion of Iraq, the above lines denounce how experts were called to (initially) claim and (later on) deny the existence of “weapons of mass destruction,” used as the main justification for the military operation. To be clear, references to the invasion are still present in the later version of the text that is included in the album, as it re-emerges with a poignant political critique in the final lines before the chorus. However, when Anderson was preparing the album, she chose to remove the above lines and rewrite the middle section of the text, allowing it to respond to its new historical context. In the later version, Anderson replaced the previously quoted section with the following words dedicated to the 2008 economic crisis, the impact of which had not been yet experienced when they were first performed:
Now sometimes experts lend you money
And sometimes they lend you lots of money
And sometimes when the subprime mortgages collapse
And banks close and businesses fail
And the crisis spreads around the world–
Sometimes other experts say:
Just because all the markets crashed
Doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad thing.
And other experts say: Just because all your friends were fired
And your family's broke and we didn't see it coming
Doesn't mean that we were wrong.
And just because you lost your job and your house
And all your savings doesn't mean you don't have to pay for the bailouts
For the traders and the bankers and the speculators.
Cause only an expert can design a bailout
And only an expert can expect a bailout
21Here, Anderson denounces how contradictory financial expertise also underpinned the dynamics of the subprime mortgage crisis, which was itself the result of an unreliable and inconsistent economy. Traders, bankers, and speculators are thus the experts she puts on the spot. They become the actual owners of the “Homeland” to the detriment of all the people who failed to pay their mortgages and lost their homes because they were suddenly unemployed, due to the crisis – a vicious circle whose perversity mirrors the roulettes of a casino economy.
22The addition of these lines in later versions of the text not only shows how Anderson revises and updates her work according to the context of its performance, but it also reveals how her approach to politics is part of a wider, consciously holistic conception of art. Anderson’s work is continually evolving, remaining incisive and precisely critical, never intellectually vague or unfocused. With irony and astuteness, Anderson carefully displays the cultural and political logic that connects apparently different issues, tying together (as can be seen in the above example) the US invasion of Iraq with the subprime mortgage crisis, through such symptomatic cultural formations as the culture of expertise, the all-embracing logic of which is supposed to justify geo-political as well as economic (mis)ventures. Anderson’s work exposes the narratives and the overall rhetoric that allows these different “problems” and “crises” to re-emerge, again and again, not only in the US but also in many parts of the world. The poetic collages that ground Anderson’s Homeland are the result of this ongoing and comprehensive exposition. In this album as well as in the live performances that derived from it, Anderson dares to interrogate the notions of “Home” and “Land” in their current political configurations. The philosophical and poetic insights that emerge from that defiance are, as we have seen, contextual and related to a specific time and a specific audience: they are always performative at heart.
23The film Heart of a Dog (2015) adds to the above examples by offering valuable insights to our understanding of Laurie Anderson’s approach to poetry, politics, and performance in the larger context of her multimedia work. Heart of a Dog marks Anderson’s return to the medium of film. This is particularly significant because Anderson had not directed a movie since her 1986 concert-film Home of the Brave. What explains her return to this medium? Anderson has never been a stranger to visual culture: many of her live performances attempt to bring together music and poetry with visual elements. Her recent multimedia shows – such as those described above – were already punctured by slides and brief visual effects which helped to interconnect her personal anecdotes with public references and philosophical comments. Heart of a Dog allows Anderson to explore some of the potentialities of her intermedial work by incorporating the narrative dynamics of film. The film allows Anderson to interweave spoken-word and music with a wide range of visual elements, from her own animated drawings, well known-paintings (such as Goya’s “The Dog”), old family photographs, surveillance camera shots to moving images of different kinds.
- 24 Kramer & Anderson, 2015.
24The film is both a poetic collage and a philosophical essay about narrative itself. As Anderson suggests in an interview: “the film is about language, stories, and how you tell stories more than anything else. Heart of a Dog is disguised as a story about love, death, and dogs.24 The film assumes a more clearly autobiographical perspective than the previously mentioned works. Much has been written about the way the film addresses ideas of mourning and loss. While the fragmented narrative is triggered by the recent death of Anderson’s dog, it refers to other losses. The film is indeed dedicated to “the spirit” of Lou Reed whose death was very recent and whose presence is poignantly conveyed throughout the movie through direct and indirect references. It also recalls the death of Anderson’s mother, with the memory of her deathbed speech highlighting the ways we attempt to control language and our own narratives even when our mind begins to fail us. More than a film about the loss of a dog, of a lover, and of a mother; more than a film about mourning a loss, the movie is about language and narrativity – about the ways we remember, construct and tell our own stories. In fact, beyond these touching moments of personal loss, the film invites us to reflect upon other kinds of losses, such as social and political forms of destitution. Despite her own personal pain, Anderson is well aware of what we have to lose if we allow official and corporate narratives to control our lives. It is this concern about the narrativization of our stories – the power of language in its most performative dimension – that the film ultimately emphasizes.
25Lolabelle’s wondering presence throughout the film illustrates the essayistic and experimental nature of the work: we follow the dog as she explores her neighbourhood and discovers the dangers of natural and not so natural settings; and in some of the lighter, more humorous scenes of the film, we are even invited to witness how Lolabelle – with the help of her dog trainer – has experimented with musical as well as verbal language. The dog’s wondering presence ties together the different fragments that constitute the film, humorously replicating Anderson’s inquisitive approach to the world. In this film, language and narrative are tested with a dogged curiosity. Like Anderson’s other works, this film is very much a product of its time: some of the stories that capture Anderson’s attention are thus tied up with the larger narratives that came to be associated with post-9/11 culture. She starts by setting up the scene, moving away from personal references in order to depict the wider climate of fear created by the attacks:
I live in downtown Manhattan
next to the West Side Highway.
In September 2001,
after the Trade Center fell,
everything was covered with white ash.
For months, lines of trucks
moved up the highway,
carrying the twisted metal debris
from the towers.
Out at the end of the pier,
there's a strange,
Assyrian-looking building.
And during this time,
FBI speedboats began to dock out there.
It was the beginning of the time
when cameras began to appear everywhere.
And everything was so loud
and such a mess.
26Anderson narrates an episode that happened after the attacks, when she decided to leave New York for a few days and go to California with Lolabelle. As they are exploring the mountains, they see several hawks in the sky, some of which attempt to grab Lolabelle with their claws. Anderson notices that Lolabelle has a brand-new expression: “First was the realization / that she was prey / and that these birds had come to kill her.” Anderson realizes that she had seen the same look elsewhere: “on the faces of my neighbors in New York / in the days right after 9/11, / when they suddenly realized, / first, that they could come / from the air. And, second, that it would / be that way from now on.” The impending sense of threat seems to dominate the narrative at this point.
27However, rather than dwelling on these ideas of fear or linking 9/11 to the loss of a “way of life” (as the attacks were again and again translated in the media), Anderson goes on to observe the repercussions of the security culture that the attacks exacerbated. She describes how, suddenly, it became normal to see soldiers “everywhere in the city” walking around “with machine guns and riot gear.” Tying up these images with the themes of the film, she also states that the Department of Homeland Security began to breed dogs: “When the puppies were 13 weeks old, / they were sent to prisons / to be trained by prisoners. / The smartest dogs were / drafted to work with police / on patrols and on bomb-sniffing squads.” The idea was to use those animals to sniff around danger and to pre-empt future attacks. Illustrating these pre-emptive strategies, Anderson suggests that the Department of Homeland Security’s famous slogan “If you see something, say something” sounds like something written by Ludwig Wittgenstein, since his works are full of “cryptic sentences” about how language has the power to create worlds. She amusingly adds that the PR staff of the Department of Homeland Security were forced to change – i.e. edit – their public service announcement, given the performative power of language:
After the “see something,
say something” slogan
had been around for a while,
someone from Homeland Security
must have had second thoughts
about asking people to report
on each other all the time.
I would have loved to have been
at that Homeland Security
PR brainstorming session
when they decided to add
this phrase to their slogan
Fig. 2. Still from Heart of a Dog (19:53)
28The slogan is never voiced by Anderson but the above image (fig. 2) emerges at this point in the film. The narrative thus moves to the topic of surveillance and data storage after the terrorist attacks in 2001. After mentioning that many trucks in her neighbourhood were carrying information and data to “secure storage areas,” Anderson gives an account of the history of Iron Mountain, the famous American enterprise dedicated to information management services. Our narratives are being carefully stored and curated not only by official authorities but by private entrepreneurs because – as the film suggests – security is good for business. Anderson quite poignantly wonders about the impact of surveillance culture on our lives:
Massive amounts of data
are being collected and stored.
And what kind of information is this?
Fragmented conversations
full of jump cuts and distortions.
And what kind of information is this?
Fragmented conversations
full of jump cuts and distortions.
And what are the stories that emerge
from these fragments?
And why are they being collected?
And it's only when you commit a crime
that the data is put together
and your story is reconstructed,
backwards.
A portrait of you made up of data trails...
the places you went,
the things you bought,
the pictures you took,
the e-mails you sent.
And like Kierkegaard said,
“Life can only be understood backwards;
but it must be lived forwards.”
29If Anderson’s film is (as she herself suggested) about narratives – about the stories we tell ourselves and the challenges of remembrance – then the fact that surveillance has become ubiquitous raises questions about the authorities’ power to put together, edit, and organize segments of surveyed materials, revising, or rewriting our personal narratives. Anderson is keen to suggest in this film that much of the information collected by the Department for Homeland Security is stored in the “cloud.” Quite relevantly, she suggests that “the likelihood that your story / is going to get mixed up / with someone else’s story / is extremely high.”
Fig. 3. Still from Heart of a Dog (28:13)
Fig. 4. Still from Heart of a Dog (28:31)
30As can be seen from figures 3 and 4, poetic figuration is achieved not only through words but through striking visual juxtapositions. Images of clouds in the sky are slowly impregnated with coded data, and soon the image completely dissolves into another image where data codes give form to new clouds – that is, information-clouds. As the images change, so does the music: from the smooth melody that accompanies the white clouds in the blue sky, we move to the hectic beat that accompanies the darker visions of digital clouds, suggesting the anxiety-inducing fact that information is getting out of control. Anderson carefully depicts the headquarters of the National Security Agency in Utah, a facility which collects information, “has clearance to bug the systems / of individual citizens” and can “engage in sabotage / using subversive software.” Provocatively, Anderson juxtaposes images of this large data centre located in the deserted lands of Camp Williams in Utah with the pyramids of pharaohs “who also stored their records / in massive desert complexes.”
Fig. 5. Still from Heart of a Dog (27:46)
Fig. 6. Still from Heart of a Dog (27:52)
31The comparison unveils the links between death and data which are also at the heart of the film, in which mourning and remembrance are closely intertwined. Anderson’s reflections about death and mourning allow her to weave stories about personal remembrance with philosophical questions tied to pressing social and political issues. What is remarkable is how, at a time when Anderson is grieving the loss of her husband and of her beloved dog, the personal and the political keep intersecting so organically in her work. Anderson’s movie leaves us with provocative questions as well as challenging images that resonate beyond the viewing of the film.
32As I hope to have demonstrated through the analysis of these three examples, the power of Anderson’s multimedia art lies in her ability to carefully arrange and combine words with specific sounds and images, reinforcing their performative and political potential. All three works – Dirtday!, Homeland and Heart of a Dog – complement and strengthen each other, stretching the boundaries of Anderson’s performative poetry.
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