Laurie Anderson and the state of American culture
I was struck by the quote that opens ReDef today.
“When I became an artist, I thought it would be one of the few things that you can do in which you’re free. But people keep saying, ‘Nail down what you’re doing!’ — they want it to fit into their museum, or not. Or fit into their record collection, or not.”
I dug down into the account of the interview from which this comes. And Anderson does it again.
We learn that she created her Concert For Dogs, debuted at Sydney Art Live Festival in 2010, because her audience reminded her of dogs.
“The dogs have been so polite, because they don’t know what it is — most people don’t know why they’re at concerts.”
What’s my problem?
This sounds to me like a standard issue avant-garde complaint. There are three points in particular:
* people don’t get me
* I scorn them for their difficulty
* I produce art that defies and escapes the expectations of my fans and concert goers.
The complaint once common, indeed the very trope by which artists defined themselves is now out of step.
So says the anthropology (or at least the anthropologist).
We have changed as a culture. The avant-garde impulse has been disrupted.
Anderson’s view of the world was once true. Most everyone in the mainstream struggled to understand cultural productions that did not come from conventional categories. If music, movies, or TV shows did not come from genre (of some kind), we were a lost, a little like Anderson’s dogs, attentive, struggling, but lost.
Unless of course we were the avant garde, in which case the farther something was from the usual genre, the happier we were. Working against genre was, for a lot of artists, the secret of their art. It was the way they knew they were daring and revolutionary.
But eventually most of us got the hang of post-genre culture.
And we were as Muslims relocating all of a sudden and en masse to Pakistan.
We have moved from the “scaredy cat; keep it simple, stupid; box it and brand it with genre” approach to a new world in which we routinely “field” acts of music or story telling that depart from the conventional categories. (See Judy Berman’s superb piece on Pitchfork yesterday that shows how Wes Anderson makes culture of just this kind. We so forgive Wes Anderson that Berman feels a little embarrassed by liking him as much as she does. He’s that mainstream. See Berman’s tweet stream for her confession of nervousness.)
Here’s one way to think about how our culture has changed. (I call this the Kauffman continuum. See my Flock and Flow for the details.)
As a culture we used to sit in the middle of this continuum, hovering, as it were, over the formed part of the continuum.
But in the last 15 years, we have shifted, as a group, to the left, to the “underformed” preference. (This is largely because American culture got better, and it’s worth pointing out that Laurie Anderson deserves some of the credit here.) We could manage things that were post-genre. From TV, we now demand this.
The key point here is that our culture has shifted it’s tolerances.
In effect we are all avant-garde now.
Of course there will always be people who are comfortable at the far extreme, at the place where culture is over formed, where creativity is packaged by convention.
And there will always be people who are way out on the under-formed (or chaos) side of things where creativity is unshaped by any conventional notions. (And bless them for living and working there. This is where really new things come from. I am not avant-garde. I am merely saying that this idea is vastly more distributed than it used to be and now includes many people who used to be called mainstream. Again: Laurie Anderson helped inspire this migration and the cultural change it represents.)
As to Laurie Anderson, we are left three questions.
- Is she right? As an artist, she must battle the witlessness of the mainstream. We did not move to Pakistan. We are still the captives of convention.
- Laurie Anderson is merely still singing from the avant-garde hymn book. This despite the fact that this article calls her “the original radical American.”
- There’s a third possibility. As we slept, ever more comfortable with Pakistan, a mainstream culture has shifted back in the direction of the formed.
There’s a last and scary possibility.
4. We are living with a mutually exclusive America, the oppositional nature of which comes partly but precisely from this forming issue. One contingent of Americans looked at the new “unformed” culture and read it as moral decline. They tried the “underformed” version of American culture, lost their nerve, and retreated back up the Kauffman continuum.
In this event, Laurie Anderson’s work begins again.
