Laurie Anderson’s Latest
The artist contemplates love and loss
Laurie Anderson has been an experimental artist since the early 1970s when she debuted Automotive, a symphony she composed specifically for car horns. Since then she’s worked as a visual artist, an illustrator, a filmmaker and a musician. On April 25, HBO is airing the TV debut of the 2015 documentary Anderson directed titled Heart of a Dog, which is a reflection on life and death in the wake of the passing of her husband Lou Reed as well as her beloved dog Lolabelle. Part of the film focuses on a concept from the Tibetan Book of the Dead known as “the bardo”— a forty-nine day period between death and rebirth. This is a concept that has inspired Anderson’s work before. In 2011, at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Anderson debuted a multi-media exhibit titled “Forty-Nine Days in the Bardo,” which showcases both her Buddhist studies and her fascination with dogs. In this video, Anderson herself gives you a guided tour of that exhibit.