Laurie Anderson

On Saturday, I went to see Laurie Anderson, an apparently pretty famous performance artist (I know nothing about art!), give a lecture about Andy Warhol's Electric Chair at the National Portrait Gallery.

It was... I don't really know what it was. I ended up talking about it afterwards with a bunch of different people who ended up at a series of gallery openings on 14th st afterwards. (Including this opening, at which I felt completely awkward and out of place, because Washington is not a fashionable place, but I'm pretty sure every single person in the tiny minority of Washingtonians who *do* pay attention to fashion was in that room. With me and my frayed jeans and t-shirt.)

She'd obviously prepared ahead of time. She had a whole outline worked out, an interesting powerpoint presentation, and even a working audio element (a really cool excerpt from a talk by William S Burroughs). But it seemed like nerves just took her over. As an ex- occasional debater, I sympathized completely. It was like being a novice debater getting up with just a vague outline of a speech to give a rebuttal to the team with the biggest reputation on the circuit. You just blank. On one level, you know you have interesting things to say, but on another, why are you even pretending to be on par with [former Nats finalists OR PhD Art Historians]. So you stumble through, trying to just hit all the points on the outline, and hoping it isn't going as badly as you think it is. But as you look down at that outline, you think "Why did I even write that? What does that word even say?" Your outline was supposed to be a series of guideposts to jog your memory of the larger speeech you had planned in your head, but all of a sudden, the larger speech is gone, and you're trying to madly reconstruct it from scribbled shorthand.

The result was flashes of what could have been a really great speech by a clearly smart, interesting woman. But the tangents never led anywhere, and they'd just sort of fizzle out instead of getting back to the main point. There were a ton of nervous verbal tics (like, um, so...). The whole thing took an incredibly long time--she ended up throwing out the second half of her speech because 45 minutes through her 1 hour time slot, it was clear she wouldn't have time for it. The kiss of death was when, at one point, she apologized for how badly the speech was going. You never do that. I didn't get a lot out of my limited debate experience, but that's one thing I picked up right away. Never do anything to draw attention away from the points you're trying to make. Yeah, your poor speaking skills might be the elephant in the middle of the room, but if you want to have any chance at all of people remembering anything except that elephant, you. cannot. acknowledge. it.

I'm glad I went, and she definitely got me thinking, but I can't say it was good. Not bad, necessarily, just... screw it. I still have no idea.