Laurie Anderson: Speaking, Screening, Performing
Laurie Anderson, the musician and visual and performance artist, will make a whirlwind tour of East Hampton next week. On Wednesday at 6 p.m., she will speak at the Art Barge on Napeague in the final installment of its 2016 “Artists Speak” series. Andrea Grover, curator of special projects at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill and incoming executive director of Guild Hall in East Hampton, will moderate the discussion.
The following evening at 8, “Heart of a Dog,” Ms. Anderson’s deeply personal and moving film released last year, will be screened at Guild Hall. And on Aug. 13 at 5:30 p.m., she will perform a concert for dogs and their people at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, the proceeds of which will be shared with the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons.
“Heart of a Dog,” which was shown in January at the Parrish, explores love, loss, and death from a Buddhist perspective, focusing on Lolabelle, Ms. Anderson’s rat terrier, who died in 2011. The 75-minute film, a collage of media spanning the artist’s childhood through recent years, includes both aging celluloid depicting her early life in the Midwest and more recent iPhone, drone, and GoPro video, as well as her own animation.
With the 2013 death of her husband, the musician Lou Reed, as an unspoken yet present backdrop, Ms. Anderson weaves disparate events into a meditation on impermanence. She connects the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York City and the subsequent rise of surveillance and data-mining by the National Security Agency, to her exploration.
“The thing about being an artist and a Buddhist is they’re pretty much the same,” Ms. Anderson, who has a house in Springs, said. “There is just one thing: Pay attention, be aware. There are no rules, no one is in charge. It’s fantastic.”
“Heart of a Dog,” she said, “is, essentially, what are stories? I tried to look at it from a bunch of angles: Who’s narrating what story, and how you tell stories, and your own story. And what it means when the N.S.A. tells your story for you, how it gets stored forever, supposedly. I tried to pull threads together. I tried to make a film that wasn’t stuck on a theme, but ranges over ideas.”
Late in life, Lolabelle went blind, and Ms. Anderson arranged for music and painting lessons for her terrier. Upon Lolabelle’s death, in the middle of the film, Ms. Anderson explores the bardo, the transitional state of existence between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism.
Many viewers will recognize local settings, including Louse Point in Springs and Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett. “It really is an East Hampton film,” Ms. Anderson said. “I tried to make it part of the film, especially the center part, the bardo section. Louse Point was and is one of my favorite places in the world. Atlantic Beach — that’s why we came out there. We love the trees and water, it’s so incredibly beautiful. It’s so magic that a place so beautiful could be so close to such a big city.”
A friend introduced her to Buddhism in the 1970s. “He said he had been having trouble concentrating, and went to a Vipassana meditation, a 10-day silent course, and came out with his mind like a beam. All the chatter had stopped and he could focus. I thought, ‘I want a mind like a beam.’ I went, and the first thing they said was, ‘You’re in pain.’ ‘No, I’m not, I want a mind like a beam.’ Gradually, I realized that I actually had a very elaborate system, like most people, for holding pain. Every time something happens and you don’t scream, you put that somewhere . . . I was excited to find out how the body does that, and how the mind goes with it.”
Of the Art Barge event on Wednesday, Ms. Anderson said she enjoys the interaction. “I love public conversations, they’re really nice. It’s not just a lecture or a show, but people get to ask, ‘Why do you think that?’ ”
She has performed concerts for dogs in Times Square and in Sydney, Australia. At LongHouse Reserve, she will perform with the cellist Rubin Kodheli. “Rubin is just a wonderful musician,” Ms. Anderson said. “The concert is really going to be fun. I have to say, it is really fun playing for dogs.”
Tickets for Ms. Anderson’s appearance at the Art Barge cost $20 and can be purchased at theartbarge.org/programs-workshops-alt/events-winter. Tickets for “Heart of a Dog,” next Thursday at Guild Hall, cost $14, $12 for members, and are available at the box office, at guildhall.org, or by calling 631-324-4050 or 866-811-4111. For Ms. Anderson’s concert for dogs on Aug. 13, tickets cost $100, $150, and $250, for one person and one dog.