On a splendid summer’s night in the shadow of Rodin’s greatest work, Laurie Anderson sat with her electric CR violin before a laptop before two invited audiences of a couple dozen each last week to tell some stories that cast their usual spell. Live performance in any form is still a rarity as the COVID-19 pandemic subsides; the joy of gathering as we once did to share in artistic expression is something that felt as rare and lovely as the summer night’s breeze.
Anderson’s own plans were altered during the lockdowns as well; a major exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum was bumped now until September 24. The museum itself, closed for 15 months, won’t reopen until August 20. Anderson’s appearance in the splendor of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden beneath the famous curved Brutalist building, now covered with scaffolding, was being filmed for its use in conjunction with the upcoming “The Weather,” billed as the largest ever U.S. exhibition of her artwork.
Anderson was there now, she said, to share some of her stories, inspired by the stories of Balzac, whom she credited with piercing observation and powers of description of ordinary events made extraordinary. She told one of his stories, or what she could recall of it, of a wind that blows into a town, under its door jambs and under dresses.
This connected with her own aim for the exhibit, inspired by John Cage’s famous “Lecture on the Weather,” commissioned in Canada and read by US war resisters there. With her own work on “Weather “devised in the Trump years,” the pandemic-caused delay means “some of the imagery has different meanings to it, to say the least.” But her tales, so strange but not entirely unbelievable, touched on the oddity of modern life with the artist as a kind of sociological spy into different corners of American life.
