The Ticking Clock Is...

Laurie Anderson, Loops and Performance and When Does it End?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Laurie Anderson lately, maybe always. This week more than ever though because I had a chance to see her, for the third time in as many decades. There’s something she said in interviews, that has always stayed with me…

Her work often focuses on sound loops and sentences, and once she started to perform, she asked herself, “…when is the concert over?”

In writing, sometimes we talk about a “ticking clock”— a countdown, a thing characters might want or need or need to run from, that brings a sense of pressure to time passing. In thrillers, sometimes it’s actually a clock, tied to impending disaster as time marches steadily forward—a bomb, a deadline, a murder plot, a thing that will happen in a certain place on a specific date…

In the abstract work of Laurie Anderson, who was doing her own thing from the start, that clock took on this shape:

…she took off for Italy…in 1975, playing a violin with a tape recorder inside playing loops so she could duet with herself.

Laurie Anderson: But then when is the concert over? There's no end to a loop. So I thought, "I need a timing mechanism." So I wore some ice skates with their blades frozen into blocks of ice. So when I'd play until the ice started melting and cracking. And then when I began to lose my balance, I would just stop. That was it. That was the clock.

Anderson Cooper: And you were doing this on the street?

Laurie Anderson: Yeah. Usually in the hottest part of town, because it could take a long time to have these things, the cubes melt.

From an Interview with Anderson Cooper

I love it!

Of course, ice is physical, material and real. It can also be metaphoric, and meaningful.

More soon, probably more about Laurie Anderson, and all else.

xo