Multi-media artist Laurie Anderson gets a grip on Happiness by hanging out at McDonald’s.
By: Susan Van Dongen
Perhaps there really is something in those McDonald’s "Happy Meals" that gladdens the heart. Performance artist Laurie Anderson found a certain kind of bliss beneath the Golden Arches.
A two-week assignment behind the Mickey D’s counter saying "Hello, welcome to McDonald’s" was part of Ms. Anderson’s research for Happiness, her latest performance piece, which she brings to McCarter Theatre in Princeton March 15. Stepping back from the huge scale and technical wizardry of her previous work, Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, Ms. Anderson has fashioned an eloquent mix of storytelling and minimalist music. The tale of her two weeks at McDonald’s is just one piece of the puzzle.
A longtime fan might chuckle to think of Ms. Anderson applying for a job at a fast-food restaurant, listing her companion and former Velvet Underground member Lou Reed or experimental musician Brian Eno as references.
"Sure, just called Brian, it’s only an international call," she says jokingly. Reached by phone during a tour stop in Seattle, Ms. Anderson speaks cheerfully about filling in the half-page employment application for McDonald’s, being interviewed by a young assistant manager.
"I was a little vague about what I had been doing with my life," she says. "I only worked there for two weeks so I knew I was pretending, but I worked very hard and had a great time, actually. They were great people with a wonderful work atmosphere. It was really the opposite of what I had expected."
The McDonald’s that temporarily employed the visual and musical artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, ventriloquist and electronics whiz is located on Canal Street in Manhattan, near Ms. Anderson’s Tribeca home and studio. She even waited on some of her friends, but they didn’t recognize her.
"I wasn’t in disguise or anything," she says. "I just had on a baseball cap and a uniform. I wasn’t supposed to be there so, to them, I wasn’t there. But McDonald’s is also a fast-food place, so people are in a hurry. They’re trying to decide ‘Do I want the Number 7 with a biscuit or without?’ I didn’t take it personally."
Stepping outside of her comfort zone and discovering how expectations can taint reality was part of the background work for Happiness. Ms. Anderson, 54, also was doing a little existential experimentation, perhaps thinking about how to reinvigorate her own viewpoint.
"I was disappointed in a lot of things I had done and thought ‘Well, what did you expect? Maybe I’m not really opening my eyes here.’ I wanted to do something where I didn’t know how to act, I didn’t know what to predict, I didn’t know what to say."
Putting together Happiness was like an independent course in social anthropology, with Ms. Anderson making a casual study of McDonald’s employees. She inadvertently discovered the folks behind the French-fry machine were essentially happier than some of her acquaintances in the art world.
"You can walk into an office and find out quickly whether people really hate their jobs and can’t wait to leave, or whether people like what they’re doing and they’re doing it well," she says. "When you’re working with people who are super-driven and worried, it’s not as much fun. It’s the process that interests me, even more than what you’re making."
Ms. Anderson says failure is just as much part of the artistic process as success, if not more. For many artists and indeed, what separates the amateurs from the professionals is the ability to learn from failure.
"I value the idea of things that fail," she says. "Not that I look forward to failure, but most of the important things I’ve learned have been because I’ve failed at something. I’ve been trying to look at that more and more. The idea of completing something and when it comes out you say, ‘Whoa, that’s not what was trying to make at all.’ But then, is it wrong, or is it something else? It can be a bit of a balancing act. Someone who is really good at looking at (creativity) this way is Brian Eno. He’d say ‘Well, let’s look at what it is instead of what you wanted it to be.’ "
British-born composer Eno, who some consider the godfather of ambient/techno music, is just one of scores of creative minds who have collaborated with Ms. Anderson. Since she began performing in museums and art festivals in the mid-1970s, Ms. Anderson has worked with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Beat writer William Burroughs, filmmaker Jonathan Demme, monologist Spalding Gray, as well as mainstream recording artists Peter Gabriel and Phoebe Snow. A native of Chicago, with a bachelor’s degree from Barnard and a master’s in sculpture from Columbia, Ms. Anderson’s works incorporate graphics, film, slides, lighting, music, mime, spoken language and sculpture.
Her breakthrough as a recording artist came in 1981 with the self-produced single "O Superman." Ms. Anderson helped introduce electronic music to the pop audience with her poignant, electronically modified vocals layered over a repeated pre-recorded snippet of tape, backed by a simple home synthesizer. "O Superman" reached number two on the British pop charts and subsequently appeared on Big Science, the first of Ms. Anderson’s seven albums for Warner Brothers.
Her most recent CD, Life on a String (Nonesuch), was released in fall 2001. She has published six books and created numerous films, videos, theatrical and cinematic scores. Her orchestra work, Songs for A.E., premiered at Carnegie Hall in February 2000. For more than 20 years, Ms. Anderson has toured nationally and internationally, with shows ranging from sparse spoken word to elaborate multimedia events. Happiness falls in the former category and is quite a bit more portable than 1999’s Moby Dick.
"It’s a typical pattern for me to alternate between big and small projects, because, on a very practical level, I just can’t afford to do big projects all the time," Ms. Anderson says. "It also allows me to improvise more and, on a more important level, I feel that a smaller (project) becomes more of a collaborative work with the people who are there."
In her artist’s statement, Ms. Anderson writes, " ‘Happiness’ is my way of looking at some of the things that both interest and trouble me: the evolution of behavior, how we learn and what we remember, expectations, the meaning of justice and the effects of increasing speed, colored by the darker elements of doubt and fear.
"It’s also a reaction to what’s going on with our (American) culture right now, especially the globalization," she says. "I found it very scary that after Sept. 11 we had a president who told us three things. First pray, then travel and then shop. Of course, we want (and need) to jump-start the economy. But it was quite disturbing to me.
"Then I thought ‘Now I’m going to listen for that big reaction to this’ and there was no reaction."
Coming of age in the ’60s and ’70s, Ms. Anderson wondered where the questioning voices of protest were. "Not that the economy isn’t important, but I wanted to know how we got into this situation in the first place," she says.
"When I was on tour in Europe in October, the only information we could get about what was happening in the U.S. was from ‘Moneyline,’ and it looked like we only cared about the effects of terrorism on our investments. Journalists would ask me this and I’d say, no, this is not all we’re thinking about. There were other ways that people reacted to the situation, and a lot of positive things came out of it," she says.
"I know there’s a certain European (mentality) that Americans are basically salesmen with no taste, in some ways the cliché is very powerful. The way we’re perceived is quite scary. It’s radically different from what we think we’re doing."
Other important lines of commentary in Happiness touch upon our obsession with high technology as well as the acquisition of material things. It is ironic that Ms. Anderson should be distressed by technology, since some of her most astonishing large-scale works employed truckloads of it. She is recognized as a pioneer in the use of technology in the arts and has recently been invited to be the first artist-in-residence at NASA.
Not that she is abandoning her role as a tech goddess, but there is a clue to her shift in sensibility in her artist’s statement. "My biggest problem with technology is that it promises all these things and it’s not delivering them," Ms. Anderson says. "It’s making people’s lives more complex. You feel like you’re always at your desk. There’s less time to be physical, in fact (technology) limits your activities to typing."
Ms. Anderson seems to agree with what the consciousness-raising gurus have said all along that expensive toys and material things only distract us from the present moment.
After a year of scrubbing floors on an Amish farmstead, rafting through Utah with Buddhist monks and, of course, hanging out in the land of Mayor McCheese all preparations for her latest project you’d think Ms. Anderson would have a slightly better handle on the nature of happiness.
"I really don’t know what it is," she says. "That’s one of the reasons I called (the show) ‘Happiness.’ I tried to look at it from different angles because it’s a complex thing.
"If I really had to define happiness, though, I would say it’s the ability to see things the way they are. It’s a very complicated and gorgeous world."
Laurie Anderson performs Happiness at McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, March 15, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $29-$37. For information, call (609) 258-2787. On the Web: www.mccarter.org