New Laurie Anderson Title Revisits Greatest Hits from the Last 50 Years
The glossy volume offers a uniquely characteristic, intimate reflection on on the artist’s longstanding defiance of boundaries
Laurie Anderson: The Weather and Other Stories, freshly released by Rizzoli, offers a 320-page path through some of the artist/musician’s best-loved work of the past 50 years. It revisits some of her seminal works and her thought processes around them, and goes back to her first self-portrait from 1975. The title is partially inspired by Anderson’s 2021–2022 exhibition The Weather at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The Weather and Other Stories has over 150 color photos from the full span of Anderson’s oeuvre.
Her life and career have included a stint as the first Artist in Residence at NASA from 2002 to 2004 , the unexpected avant-garde hit song “O Superman,” and marriage to rock and roll icon Lou Reed. That is in addition to Anderson’s multimedia works being shown at the MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Centre Pompidou, and the Park Avenue Armory. Never especially interested in the borders between disciplines, she has worked in sculpture, filmmaking, performance, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, words, and music. She reflects this in the book by eschewing linear retrospective treatment for a flexible narration through interviews, lyrics, writings, memories, and reaching for the dreamscape.
“I’m a musician and my work is made of stories,” says Anderson. “Whether it’s music, film, performance, or virtual reality, there’s usually a story somewhere, a story from my own life, history, or the great shifting panorama of American culture.”
