Exposed Ventriloquism: Performance, Voice, and the Rupture of the Visible

In the performance segment “Talk Normal,” one of the final scenes of Home of the Brave (a 1986 feature length film directed and produced by Laurie Anderson of her own stage performance Mister Heartbreak), a video projection of Anderson’s head—as a talking head—appears on a monstrous screen positioned above the performance stage. The image of her face gazes down on the on-stage musicians and out to the audience, its alternating expressions ranging from smiles to furrowed brows. Because Anderson herself is not on stage, one might assume this talking head—or what I will call the screened disembodied head—is a live-stream video that positions the off-stage artist as the center of the on-stage performance. After all, throughout Home of the Brave Anderson has filled the role of the conductor who directs both the musicians and the multimedia technological displays. It would not be a large leap, then, for an audience to assume that she could serve this role mediatized. To emphasize the connection between the screened disembodied head and the off-stage artist further, the screened head speaks to the audience in Anderson’s unprocessed (i.e. “natural,” albeit amplified) voice. She declares: “You know, when I talk to people I try to look more intelligent than I actually am. It seems to work” (Anderson 1986, my emphasis). With a tinge of humor, the talking head calls attention to its own visual representation: it reveals others’ belief in, if not reliance on, the dominance of the image but understands it in relation to voice. If we take Anderson’s statement as ironic, as playing on the audience’s belief in the dominance of images and the illusions of sight, Anderson suggests that voice enables the screened image not just to look, but also to be authentic. The screened disembodied head may reference Anderson the artist; however, the projected voice operates as an utterance and constitutes the illusion of sight.

Regardless if one buys into the image or its speech, when Anderson as a corporeal body emerges from a trap door on the stage floor and looks up at her screened image, we realize that the screened image is not a computer generated live-stream video projection, but a pre-recorded one, and as such, is not the “true” conductor of the performance. This unveiling, of sorts, of Anderson from below, reveals her corporeal body as the “true” self. It is at this moment that the audience comes to realize that the screened disembodied head’s speech exposes the very illusion it enacts: it’s merely a screened image that appears to be something it is not. The corporeal body reemerges as the original, authentic body that seemingly aligns itself with stage presence. Any prior interactions between that screened image and the musicians on stage or the screened image and the audience, we come to learn, were merely tricks of the eye and of the mind. One could assume that the moment Anderson enters the stage her live body trumps the screened body; when the corporeal body materializes from the trap door, it establishes Anderson as the referent for the screened image. That is, until Anderson begins to speak in a digitally processed voice that is incomprehensible. Rather than reestablish order, the corporeal body and its gibberish voice (in contrast to the screened head and its unprocessed voice) call into question any assumed authenticity of the corporeal and contribute to the pending chaos on the stage.

The brilliance of Anderson’s stage performances is that they posit voice as central to the question of just how “real” the corporeal is in relation to the screened. Years before performance theory emerged as an epistemological category, Anderson’s work engaged pertinent inquires: How are we to interpret moments in which both visual and vocal stage theatrics meet visual and vocal mechanical reproduction and/or digital production; moments that reveal and disrupt an uncritical belief in dramatic presence, the dominance of the visible, and the limits of the corporeal body as a site of authenticity? Anderson’s mismatching of bodies and voices—the screened body with an unprocessed voice and the corporeal body with a processed voice—jumbles original and copy in such a way that the corporeal and screened bodies and voices become linked.

To a certain extent, this paper responds to an observation from the late Lynda Hart, who aptly points out that despite the advances made by poststructuralism, there is “still an overwhelming urge [in contemporary drama] to mark a stationary place, to appeal to a referent, to have recourse to a/the ‘real thing’” (Hart 1998, 136). [1] Feminist performers of the late 1960s and early 1970s aimed to accomplish just that: they provided spaces to aestheticize political discourse, to bring corporeal identity to the foreground, and to challenge patriarchal and otherwise dominantrepresentations. In these instances, the theatre and performance art became mediums for aestheticizing women’s visibility, which in turn, led to equating visibility with the political. There was a presiding assumption that one could easily transform the “invisible” into the visible by putting it, or whatever constitutes it, on a stage or in a performance space. For this early work, visibility served as an issue of representation as epistemology: we know and are informed by something when it’s placed on a stage or in some other representational space. The theory of visibility as a theory of enstagement acknowledges the potential power of artistic production and the production of visibility as a political strategy. However uncritical, such a theory is attractive, if not alluring. It assumes a binary between the visible and the invisible and offers the illusion that the maneuver of making the invisible visible can and will be politically efficacious. Moreover, it suggests that identity can be embodied or enacted, that such embodiment or enactment can serve epistemological ends, and that such representation as epistemology results in political change.

I agree with Hart, and extend her statement to suggest that despite advances in technology and the blurring of lines between stage theatrics and mechanical reproduction or digital production, more often than not contemporary drama uncritically locates the corporeal body as the referent for any metaphorical or mediatized representations and hence, perpetuates the trope of visibility. To intervene in the “urges” that Hart details, this paper shifts its lens of analysis from the visual to include the aural. This paper asks how voice—as a real production and critical concept—might offer an alternative model to visuality as a means to understanding and interpreting dramatic presence and spectacle. Central to my analysis is the notion of ventriloquism as a means to read performance that deploys sound, image, and text as not correlative; to read performance in which the body or voice of the performer undermines rather than guarantees or validates identity and presence. As the scene “Talk Normal” demonstrates, Anderson’s work is fraught with what I’m calling exposed ventriloquism: she employs projective technology to disrupt the relationship between corporeal and screened, voice and image, and original and copy. Rather than conceal the mechanisms of operation, she exposes them: she moves between her roles as operator and her various personae not only to produce sounds and actions that seem to originate elsewhere, but also to enable the art-creator to become the art-object. While Walter Benjamin has asserted “there is no greater contrast than that of the stage play to the work of art that is completely subject to or, like film, founded in, mechanical reproduction,” I argue that in and through live performance and mechanical reproduction or digital production, Anderson gives us moments that expose the ventriloquism at play (234). It is my hypothesis that manipulation of voice in relation to expectations of embodiment shapes if not intervenes in spectacles of visuality, and in a digital age, we can no longer have or believe in a visibility politics. [2]

Sighting Anderson in a History of Critique

My analysis of Anderson’s theatrics and aesthetics engage several critical threads regarding Anderson’s work in particular and feminist performance in general. [3] Phil Auslander’s notion of the mediatized, which he presents in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2000), a text that clearly draws on the work of Jean Baudrillard, reveals that the live is actually an effect of the mediatized. [4] Extending his analysis, one might read Anderson’s use of video imagery, electric amplification, and the distortion of voice and instrument as constituting the live event as “a product of media technologies” (Auslander 2000, 24). Yet the live event of Anderson’s performances is not necessarily, as Auslander might contend, “compensated for by making the perceptual experience of the live as much as possible like that of the mediatized” (Auslander 2000, 36). The live and mediatized in Anderson’s work are not replications of one another; the two exist simultaneously. We can perceive this best in the segment “Talk Normal” I detail above. The video representation of Anderson acquires its authority from its reference to the live or the “real” Anderson, that is, until she appears on the stage and speaks. And the corporeal Anderson gains authority from its relationship to the video image: the “copy” as an assumed copy validates the authenticity of the corporeal body. The relationship is reciprocal in that each and both gain authority from the other. [5]

Anderson as a solo performer, too, establishes the problem of representational presence. The notion of the solo performer who assumes the roles of art-creator and art-object have continued to perplex critics and theorists alike, especially feminist performance theorists. [6] In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), Peggy Phelan suggests that subjectivity and identity are not located in audiences’ identification with the physicality of the body but in the absences for which the body stands in or designates. While in performance the body is “metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of ‘presence,’” the apparent visibility of the literal, physical body contributes to creating the theatrical illusion that “the performer actually disappears and represents something else – dance, movement, sound, character, ‘art’” (Phelan 1993, 150). According to Phelan, performance employs the performer’s body “to pose a question about the inability to secure the relation between subjectivity and the body per se; performance uses the body to frame the lack of Being promised by and through the body – which cannot appear without a supplement” (Phelan 1993, 151). Phelan engages the Derridean idea of a supplement (the actions, objects or methods a performance artist employs) as that which positions the physical body of the performer as ‘real’ despite its aesthetic representation. In terms of Anderson’s work, this kind of reading focuses on the body in relation to technology, where various stage props/devices/apparatus (which I discuss in the latter half of this essay) alienate, transgress, or emphasize boundaries of “the body.”

Taking a slightly different approach, Rebecca Schneider’s The Explicit Body in Performance (1997) focuses on the literality that is at the heart of much feminist performance art and performative acts. Schneider uses the term “explicit body” to address the ways in which such performances explicate bodies in social relations, and examines how the markings of “woman” precede feminist performance artists and are inevitably components of their performances: feminist performance artists consciously strip the layers of signification that surround their bodies. [7] In particular, explicit body performers collapse sign and signified “onto the literal space of the body” and employ a binary terrorism (collapsing binaries such as male/female, black/white, art/pornography, civilized/primitive) that “similarly makes evident and interrogates the social ramifications of the gap” between the two (Schneider 1997, 23). By reading performance artists as consciously stripping and reworking the layers of signification that surround their bodies, Schneider presents the idea of feminist performance artists and the “bodies beside themselves” or “the woman standing beside herself,” two concept phrases she uses repeatedly throughout her book, as a way to understand the relationship between the female body as a sign and its corporeal existence. Ultimately, she reads contemporary feminist body artists as deploying or re-playing primitivization back across the performer’s body as a double take – hence the phrase bodies beside their selves. Schneider asserts that contemporary feminist performance artists consciously “present their own bodies beside or relative to the history of reading the body marked female, the body rendered consumptive in representation” (Schneider 1997, 52).

Phelan and Schneider engage in similar projects to the extent that they examine and try to understand the relationship between the physicality of both the artist (art-creator) and the body in performance (art-object) as implicated in the body of the artist’s work, and their cultural and psychic signification. In this regard, they reflect the on-going discussion in feminist performance theory that negotiates the role of corporeality and embodied identity in a representational space. As Schneider states, “The agency of the body displayed, the author-ity of the agent” has been the “problem” with women’s art (Schneider 1997, 35). Even though Phelan and Schneider take different paths, their goal is similar: to identify the means by which female performance artists position and incorporate their bodies in performance despite (or maybe, in spite of) the fact that the body of the female or feminist performance artist is already implicated in the body of the artist’s work. Ultimately, their goal is to find an aesthetic mode that is also political. Is it possible in performance, however, to express subjectivity in which neither corporeality nor its cultural and psychic signification is assumed authentic? In other words, can one perform subjectivity without relying on visibility and/or a mode of embodiment that refers or returns to an authentic self? Anderson, I argue, offers a slightly different model than those discussed by Phelan and Schneider. She manipulates voice in order to posit the role of art-creator as a persona just as she does with the role of art-object. In other words, voice works to constitute the art-creator as character in as much as it accomplishes the same with the art-object. This enables us to consider both art-creator and art-object as equal entities, and exam ine voice as that which blurs the boundary between the two.

Of course, shift to a focus on voice runs the risk of supplanting one model or theory with another. In fact, a focus on voice primarily, revealed in Craig Owens’ early analysis of Anderson’s work, is too narrow. In “Amplification” (1981), Owens clearly positions the relationship between monologic voice and multiple personae as that which allows Anderson-as-corporeal-body to exert authenticity. Owens’ anaylsis, which emerges from work on monologues and the monologic voice in relation to the solo-performer, aligns originality with presence to argue that Anderson’s manipulation of the relationship between voice and visual iconography is precisely what blurs her stage and enacted personae: “Because the activities we witnessed referred to nothing anterior or exterior to their execution, our experience of the work was concentrated as an experience of pure presence” (123). I do not agree with this perspective because it relocates the referent onto the sign that, arguably, Anderson’s performances accomplish. However, Owens identifies a key component to Anderson’s work: he assumes we can “identify an artist’s voice as his or her presence in the work” if we “conventionally [interpret] an author’s character as his spokesperson and [attempt] to locate the author’s voice behind his characters” (122, 123). Owens posits voice and body as correlating within the visual or linguistic field rather than as working in opposition with one another (i.e. as in ventriloquism), and provides a point of departure—the terms of a potential model—to consider how Anderson’s work manipulates this very relationship. [8]

Locating Anderson in a History of Performance

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Anderson’s large-scale performance pieces, often equated with the elaborate productions of rock stars such as U2 and Pink Floyd, incorporate music, dance, technology, and storytelling. Best known for her multimedia performances that include film loops, slide projections, collage, photo-texts, and electronically produced sounds, Anderson’s stage productions combine visual and aural spectacle and are comprised of the languages of cultural politics, mass media, literature and literary theory. The term performance art, however, does not adequately describe her work, which to a certain degree defies genre categorization. At once performance, music, theatre, and video/film/image/sound spectacle, she merges and blurs the boundaries between otherwise distinct media and modes of representation. The one consistent element of Anderson’s installations and performance productions is that they continually negotiate the relationship between image, sound, body, and text.

Even though she received her training in sculpture and, since the 1970s, has produced visual and performance art installations in art galleries, theaters, urban parks and other performance spaces, Anderson is known most widely among commercial audiences for her music and theatrical performances. After “O Superman,” a segment from her performance United States unexpectedly hit the top of the British pop charts in 1981 (ranking number two), she signed a recording contract with Warner Brothers and produced a series of albums that received large distribution across the U.S. and Europe. Anderson suddenly became known as a musical icon: her otherwise “downtown” art went mainstream and her music, which evolved from her performances, became readily available to consumers. Under the Warner Bros. label, Anderson recorded Big Science, Mister Heartbreak, United States Live, Strange Angels, Bright Red, and the feature film and soundtrack Home of the Brave (which was not successful in theaters). Later, Nonesuch Records released Songs and Stories from Moby Dick and Voyager released Anderson’s award-winning CD-ROM Puppet Motel. [9]

As her performance record reveals, Anderson moves fluidly between her roles as actor, musician, lecturer, dancer, facilitator, interlocutor, and conductor, and it is this movement that constitutes her work. In live productions she is the “Captain” who “attempts a crash landing” in a performance vignette that operates as “the record of the time,” and simultaneously remains an obsolete gear in the mechanisms of performance. [10] She both commands the stage and effaces her presence. Electronic filters, props, and theatrical lighting techniques—multi-technological sights and sounds, gestures, projections, and instruments—amplify, distort, and multiply the “I” that links her sequences of monologues. Moreover, she often uses technological gadgets as either forms of prosthetics or puppets, strategies that seemingly employ multimedia technology as an embellishment or extension of the body. Anderson’s performances neither locate an original voice or body that is constitutive of identity or subjectivity, nor employ the body as an authentic site to validate or grant authority to the text and/or performance. Instead, Anderson’s video and technologically enhanced “masks,” her projective technology force us to acknowledge that the space between sign and referent is much greater than we realized: the referent is always somewhere else.

Anderson’s work emerges from a large history of performance. As a student of art in the 1970s, her work most explicitly develops from the evolving art movements of the last half of the twentieth century—body art, theatre of images, feminist art, Happenings—which each developed a slightly different perspective on an early century notion of the body in performance. While Anderson’s work is neither body art nor performance art associated with what Moira Roth (1983) calls “The Amazing Decade,” these developments inform her work. In particular, we can perceive this in how Anderson negotiates the relationship between her roles as art-creator and art-object: she assumes personae that construct and invoke the present-ness of the body. By positioning herself as both the art-creator and art-object, of course, Anderson runs the risk of engaging visibility as a means to authenticate her performances by employing an interlocutor who assumes a stage personal to tell or speak the stories and experiences of others. She moves in and out of these roles within the representation space of the theatre, and the body or presence of Anderson-the-performer (i.e. art-creator) potentially provides a referent to Anderson-the-personae (i.e. art-object).

However, Anderson’s work explicitly negotiates the role of the female artist/performer as both art-creator and art-object, and challenges any assumed relationship between sound, image, and text as well as voice, identity, and embodiment. Quite possibly, Anderson’s work has more of a lineage to that of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who in the late 60s and early 70s, along with the artists involved with Happenings and the international Fluxus movement, strove to find an alternative mode in which to represent the body, music, language, and image in performance. Anderson’s connection to these movements is most apparent in regards to her manipulation of voice in an attempt to emphasize simultaneously activities of the body and diminish its centrality on stage (i.e. invoking the persona of art-creator to manipulate the body into an art-object and change and affect its use-value).

At times, too, she seems like a student of Antonin Artaud because her theatre is one that works to challenge and disrupt theatrical presence by disassociating voice from language and speech. In Theatre and its Double (1964) Artaud inquires, “Whoever said theatre was made to define a character, to resolve conflicts of a human, emotional order, or a present-day, psychological nature such as those which monopolise current theatre?” (Artaud 1964, 30). While Anderson employs language and words as signifiers, she does move away from what Artaud calls “the exclusive dictatorship of words” and toward a language dominated by symbols and gestures; she represents language as sound that simultaneously is entangled and severed from visual images, symbols, and gestures (Artaud 1964, 29). She appeals to the senses beyond language’s signifying capacity because her dramatic stage is a landscape of technological wizardry, that, borrowing Artaud’s words, is “constantly immersing [the audience] in light, imagery movements and sounds” to disrupt perceptions of the body and the relationship between sign and referent in performance (Artaud 1964, 84).

More possibly, the roots of Anderson’s performance tactics and aesthetics evolve from the early twentieth-century avant-garde that incorporated “new” media and dramatic performance to negotiate the role of the artist as both art-creator and art-object, and to disrupt the assumed presence of character. For the Italian Futurists, for example, disrupting conventional modes of theatrical representation became a way to express one’s politics: artists had the license “to be both ‘creators’ in developing a new form of artists’ theatre, and ‘art objects’ in that they made no separation between their art as poets, as painters or as performers” (Goldberg 1979, 10). As a mixture of film, acrobatics, song, dance, and clowning, the variety theater became, according to F.T. Marinetti, that which “destroys the Solemn, the Sacred, the Serious, and the Sublime in Art with a capital A” (Marinetti 1913, 129). Appearing in the Parisian daily Le Figaro, Marinetti’s Variety Theatre Manifesto (1913) expanded upon his earlier futurist manifesto by declaring a twentieth-century mode of reinventing life: refiguring formal artistic devices and conventions. While futurist performance existed more in manifesto than actual practice, it expressed a reaction to both the “cult of tradition” and the commercialization of art, which implies that refiguring form can affect the text-spectator relationship.

In building upon Marinetti’s assertions, Enrico Prampolini’s The Futurist Stage (1915) detailed the multi-media variety theatrical environment as a “new” stage environment that enabled the art-creator to appear as an art-object equal to other theatrical devices. Components such as “a colourless electromechanical architectural structure, enlivened by chromatic emanations from a source of light, produced by electric reflectors with coloured filters arranged and coordinated in accordance with the spirit of the action on stage” redistributed the emphasis of the theatrical stage from the performer-as-character to the performer as theatrical device equal to mechanical objects (Prampolini 1915, 201). Elements such as light shows, visual projections, music, paintings suspended from the ceiling, paper costumes, homemade noise instruments, body gestures that mimicked the staccato movements of machines, and spoken word in free-verse (or what Marinetti called words-in-freedom) created an alternative performance space that continued the separation from nineteenth century realist theatre. As Marinetti claims in his 1913 Variety Theatre Manifesto, “the use of cinema” has a way of “[enriching the theatre] with an incalculable number of visions and otherwise unrealizable spectacles” by incorporating the body on stage and on the screen (Marinetti 1913, 26). This placing of the body on the stage, particularly in relation to the images on the screen, positions both body and image as potentially equal objects within the representational space. In these terms, the body is not the authentic site or referent for the images, but an equal entity within the representational space.

By 1917, live performance became more and more mechanical, and extended the attention to the body as an object of performance. Marinetti’s Futurist Dance (1917) outlines how performers should use gestures to mimic modern machines and to create a synchronism between sound and scene. In a similar move, Oskar Schlemmer, director of the Bauhaus Stage, developed various costumes from slat boards attached to dancers’ limbs to down-filled jumpsuits, to transform traditional dance movements and perceptions of the body in performance. Bauhaus attempted to transform the human body into a mechanical object. the German Bauhaus “mechanical” ballets posit dancers as performing objects that operate like puppets; this strategy aims to enable the body to become an object rather than distinguish the body from that object or perceive the corporeal body as the original and “true” body.

Rupturing Screens of Corporeality

We can see the influence of these early century performance developments in Anderson’s early works. “Dearreader” (1974), a film directed by Anderson and Bob George featuring Geraldine Pontius, involves nine autobiographical stories read in a voiceover by a female narrator. During the presentation of the film, Anderson plays her violin as a live soundtrack and uses her own voice to speak out loud the dialogue of the film. Voice is both a mediatized representation (the instrumental soundtrack) severed from its source (the film), a representational extension (musical sound) that emerges from the actions of an identified source (the violin playing) and a real albeit amplified production (dialogue) that emerges from an identified source (Anderson’s corporeal body) but does not necessarily correspond with the visual display of the filmic projection. Anderson’s dialogue severs the body of the voice from the image of the voice. Anderson’s performance “As:If” (1974) continues such exploration by combining visual projections, audiotape, autobiographical storytelling, and the playing of a water-filled violin. Anderson, dressed in white and wearing ice skates embedded in blocks of ice and a sponge cross around her neck, sits in front of a large slide projection screen onto which images of sets of words appear. Speaking of family, religion, memory, and language, Anderson’s monologue accompanies slide images of words, sounds of phrases from a prerecorded tape and of her altered violin. “In the Nick of Time” (1974) posits Anderson’s physical body as that which directly interferes with and constitutes spectacle: Anderson moves in and out of the light of a projector and traces an outline of the projected image on the wall that served as the screen. When the film ends, the red traced object remains on the bare wall and silence engulfs the room.

Such performances evolved into “Songs and Stories for the Insomniac” (1975), during which Anderson wears a white “screen dress” that serves as the screen for the projection of twelve “film/songs,” and “At the Shrink’s” (1975), which involves a recorded story and a projection of Anderson as a form of hologram. In this latter performance, Anderson positions an eight-inch tall clay figurine in the corner of a gallery and projected onto it a Super-8 film of herself sitting in a chair (giving a two-dimensional image and three-dimensional form). An audio recording of a story about a psychiatry session accompanies the projection, and the video-projection figurine looks as if it is talking. This installation, which seems to offer an alternative to Anderson-the-live performer, later informs Anderson’s development of “Dal Vivo” (1998). Here, the intersection of body, projection, and no voice (or body, projection, and voice as in “At the Shrink’s” where voice constitutes subjectivity), foregrounds the constructedness of the body and voice as temporal, ephemeral, and surface entities. As projected, flickering images and sounds that exist only as long as the mechanics of the projector and the duration of the films continue, the body and/or its voice are fragile entities that only gain a sense of substance and depth via the sustained illusion of the visible.

The consistent component of these works is the manipulation of image, body, voice, and source. Using the body to intersect projection as a site of suture or rupture continues with “For Instants: Part 3, Refried Beans” (1976), a project that incorporates film, the playing of a violin, recorded stories, and live stories. The most noted element of this piece, though, involves a corridor of projections from three projectors in which Anderson moves her body inside, outside, and through. Her body becomes a part of either the film projection or the space between the screen and the projector. Depending on her position, the image on the screen changes. By interrupting the film and creating shadows among the projected display of images, or continuously walking in and out of shadows and spotlights and creating both positive and negative images against the video screen backdrop, Anderson uses her body to interrupt and intercept filmic and projected images so as to affect how and what one can see in the performance environment. In what seems to be a shift to performances that focus more on the physical body, projected images, and light rather than the voice, the recorded and live voice as well as the playing and sound of the violin (a representation or extension of body and voice) provide constant variables that alter and affect the visual.

While one could read Anderson’s body-as-screen as an interruption of the performance, one could also perceive the body as completing that performance and the sound as interrupting the performance. In traditional spectacle and dramatic presence, sight is a dominant sense. In Anderson’s “For Instants,” the performance seemingly relies upon the body that moves in, out, and between the projections. In these terms, the body of the artist both controls the performance and becomes a part of it. Anderson not only authors the construction and sequence of film and slide projections, but also controls how we see them and how we see her. The deployment of sound—voice and instrumental—by the body that is wearing a white, a-lined dress as the very screen onto which she projects and intercepts the images we see, Anderson becomes both the screen and projector (with audio) that destabilizes the trope of visibility. The ideology of the visible in performance, which positions women as passive spectators because it does not challenge them to deem the female body on stage as anything but a spectacles and/or site of authenticity, is called further into question by the voices of the stories (recorded, live, and instrumental) as well as the stories themselves, which challenge notions of control, originary source, and action associated with the body and dramatic presence.

In her later work, this approach becomes more technologically sophisticated in order to collapse aurality and visuality onto one source and to disrupt the relationship between source/original and copy. In “Reverb” from United States, Part II, Anderson embeds a microphone in the bridge of a pair of glasses that, when worn, pick up vibrations from knocking knuckles against her skull and clicking her teeth together. By amplifying and processing vibrations with heavy reverberation, Anderson creates the effect of her body as a percussive instrument that she plays. These audio glasses, which Anderson designed and engineer Bob Bielecki built, have in other performances evolved into “Headlight Glasses” (which also are worn in United States), and “Video Glasses,” used in Stories from the Nerve Bible, a later performance piece.

By replacing lens with flashlights, the Headlight Glasses make Anderson appear to have light beams shining from her eyes, and create the illusion that Anderson’s head is an electrical source (Anderson also has modified the headlight glasses by using other devices to make her body appear as an electrical source). [11] Most frequently, she employs miniature light bulbs to illuminate her hands, teeth, or lips – individual body parts appear as if they glow and exist separate from the whole. Such devices make the body appear to be an object that Anderson, as art-creator, controls. The video glasses accomplish a similar feat: in turning to the audience and projecting the image of the audience onto a large screen above the performance space, Anderson incorporates into the object of her performance her vision as a spectator of the spectators of her spectacle. She simultaneously projects and challenges the location of spectacle and the role if not limits of visuality by becoming both a spectacle and active spectator simultaneously. In this manner, Anderson establishes a relationship between the art-creator and art-object as one that intervenes in the ideology of the visible.

Anderson’s notorious “Drum Dance” in Home of the Brave, which she has incorporated into many performances, also demonstrates this. Wearing a jumpsuit with triggers attached to an electric drum set, Anderson taps different parts of her body to activate a sequence of beats and rhythms: her left upper chest produces a bass drum sound; her right knee causes a snare drum noise, etc. In what appears to be a gesture dance that lasts for several minutes, Anderson playfully makes music on and through her body. In this scene and others, Anderson’s body appears as the source of amplification because the electronic mechanisms are somewhat hidden – one would not necessarily know that the glasses, her mouth, or the jumpsuit are rigged. We have the potential to buy into the illusion that her head and various body parts and movements create those sounds (i.e. operates as a form of ventriloquism). Moreover, this “playing” of one’s head or body—amplifying or activating it as an instrument—affects how we perceive that body as an art-object redefined by the art-creator. The audio and video amplification of objects otherwise not amplified, of course, has direct lineage to the work of John Cage and his then-innovative amplified cactus, among other amplified items. While Cage recognized every object’s potential for music, his various “amplification” performances worked to change our perception of objects, particularly of their meaning and use value. Anderson’s performances, too, affect our perception of an object: the body. Anderson’s “playing” of her body, like the playing of her head or the illuminating of her mouth, affects how we perceive that body and its presence in performance, and changes its role as a signifier.

Anderson’s other technological gadgets achieve the same effect as “Reverb” and Headlight glasses. Her performances are notorious for their on-stage custom-built microphones, a voice-activated synthesizer, various forms of video imaging, and multiple electronic violins and bows. In the segment entitled “Steven Weed” from United States, for example, Anderson stands on stage between two speakers that are positioned several meters away from her on both sides. As she speaks, she splits her voice between two microphones that each distorts and amplifies her voice differently. The effect of channelings her speech into two voices makes it seem as if there are two performers, not one, on stage who are in “dialogue” with each other. She creates the effect of two people conversing from opposite sides of the stage even though it is her single body that is the source of the voices and stands between the locations from which the voices are amplified. She employs a similar “trick” when she evokes the Voice of Authority, the name Anderson has given to the result of a processed microphone that lowers the pitch of her voice one octave and makes her sound like a computer-esque , monotone, “corporate man’s voice.” In the segment “Difficult Listening Hour,” Anderson employs the Voice of Authority to alter her voice and create a disjuncture between sound and image. The image of Anderson, with her slight frame and feminine features, does not “fit” the Voice of Authority. If one focuses on her facial articulations, then it’s obvious that she is the one who is speaking; however, the sound seems to come from elsewhere even as it emanates from her body.

This segment, which is strategically placed in the middle of the performance, relies on the audience’s awareness of Anderson as a female performer with a different speaking voice. In previous segments we hear her speak in her own voice, which affects this scene by drawing attention to the disjuncture between sound and image associated with the Voice of Authority. In contrast, when Home of the Brave opens with the segment “0-1,” the audience has no reference of Anderson as the art-creator instigating the Voice of Authority. In this sense, in addition to voice, costuming disguises her presence as the source of voice: Anderson, dresses in a white suit and wears a white “sock” mask (making her resemble a rag doll) with holes cut out for her eyes and mouth. The content of her speech is a lecture about the numbers “0” and “1” that serve as the building blocks for computers, national identity, and human existence in the modernized First World. The lecturer’s costume makes the performer appear genderless; however, Anderson relies on an assumption that the content/topic of the lecture and the sound of the speaker’s voice mark the speaker as male. Anderson forces the viewers to examine their assumptions, too, and, as such, begins to redefine the text-spectator relationship. The use of a mask (which hides the lecturer’s facial features and mouth), in congruence with the Voice of Authority, further alters the relationship between sound and image. Neither the image of the body nor the sound of the voice provides a referent for the other; the body does not serve as a referent to the signifying voice.

Finally, Anderson’s violins and bows, which have become the trademark of her performances, offer similar disruptions that necessitate the audience to examine its assumptions about the relationship between signifiers and referents a well as the role of performing objects as extensions of the performer or as separate entities all together. As early as 1975 in Duets on Ice, a piece in which Anderson performed on the Self-Playing Violin, a violin with a cassette player installed in its body that accompanies her playing, the violin has been integral to her performances. [12] Over the years she developed many violins. The Tape Bow Violin is rigged with an audio playback head and played with a bow in which the horsehair has been replaced by a prerecorded tape. The Tape Bows for Tape Bow Violin, for example, have sounds and words (sayings and proverbs, usually) recorded on the tape of each bow. Depending on the speed of Anderson’s bowing, she can make the violin “talk.” Other creations include the Viophonograph, which has a battery-powered turntable mounted on the body of the violin that is played with a bow with an attached needle; and the digital violin, interfaced with an electronic keyboard instrument, which appeared in Mister Heartbreak and Home of the Brave. Versions of the digital violin have appeared in all of Anderson’s performances. In Stories from the Nerve Bible, for example, Anderson incorporates a dummy size ventriloquist puppet with its own Suzuki violin that produces a processed symphonic sound. Anderson has also used a Zeta MIDI Violin that is linked to an audio system to retrieve sound samples, and a Clevinger Bass. These instruments enable Anderson not only to manipulate music and sound—incorporating alternative sounds and voices into her performances—but also to play further with the relationship between image and sound, body and voice: the violin, the body, and the voice are different from what they appear to be.

Anderson’s Way of Seeing

Anderson’s use of projective technology, of course, is something more than employing mere props to aid in performance. Stephen Kaplin (1999) has explained that, in relation to puppetry, performing objects can operate as extensions of a performer’s body or as a separate entity from the performer:

At some point, the increasing distance from the performing object means that the actor’s own body can no longer physically accommodate the role. Makeup and costume, prosthetic devices, wigs and body extensions help to a degree, but eventually the performing object reaches the limits of the human body’s anatomy and must begin to emerge with a physical presence of its own. (Kaplan 1999, 32-33)

The performing object has the potential to not only become its own entity, but also function as an original that maintains its own sense of presence that does not rely on a prior body, thus disrupting any assumed relationship between art-creator and art-object. In order for the performing object to be effective, it must “appear to be articulated from within the actor’s own impulses. It doesn’t alter the actor’s center of gravity, but it re-contours her surface, while remaining in intimate contact with the flesh beneath its shell” (Kaplan 1999, 33). In these terms, the performing object is linked to the actor even as it becomes separate from her.

Anderson’s use of a vocoder (that produces the Voice of Authority) and electronic violins all operate as forms of technological “masks” that, as performing objects, operate externally from the performer yet remain somewhat attached. In the case of the dummy in Stories from the Nerve Bible or the floating head in Home of the Brave that I detail at the beginning of this article, the mini-Anderson or the body-less Anderson illustrate how masks can detach from the performer’s body and develop their own presence on the stage. While Anderson controls the objects initially, they eventually exist on their own, and that existence is made apparent through each of the object’s individual voices (of the various violins, drum suit, etc.) that sever sound from source. While the semiotic definition of voice, according to C.B. Davis, is the signification of identity through linguistic, paralinguistic, and spatial difference, the ventriloquism at play in Anderson’s performance disrupts such signification. In severing sound from image (the voice from the body as its source), Anderson foregrounds the problem of presence because voice does not signify the identity of the original body.

The effect of this is that Anderson, like a ventriloquist who produces sounds and voices that appear to originate somewhere other than the body of the performer, simultaneously effaces and reveals herself as the source of those multiple voices. Various electronic technologies including the drum dance suit, headlight glasses, split microphones, Voice of Authority, and multiple violins and bows each undermine the trope of visibility because they sever sound from image and voice from body explicitly. The relationship between an authentic original presentation and ‘voice,’ Anderson’s performance suggests, is arbitrary. What you may see or hear do not correlate with each another. Nor do either reveal an authentic self.

In this form of exposed ventriloquism, the technological projection incorporates and reinterprets the relationship between the live and mediatized performing bodies. On the one hand, Anderson is like a ventriloquist who “sits back” and lets the performing object interact and communicate with others. As the art-creator, she diminishes her own identity and role, which has the effect, to borrow Davis’ words, of “simultaneously effacing herself as the [artist] behind” her performing object and “diminishing one of the major signs of difference” between the performing object’s voice and the performer’s voice (Davis 1998, 135-6). On the other, she becomes the art-object and, as occupying both positions of art-creator and art-object, calls attention to the mechanics of ventriloquism at play within her work. Here it might be useful to think of the corporeal body as interchangeable with the art-creator, and the screened/digital body with that of the art-object. Anderson represents herself as the corporeal body that becomes the screened body, which, in turn, calls into questions the status of the corporeal. Her use of various electronic technologies diminishes the corporeal body’s presence on stage but also calls attention to the constructed nature of both the corporeal and screened bodies. One is not the original and the other a copy; rather, in a digital age, both become originals in their own right.

Neither the corporeal nor the screened are originals or copy versions of “the real” Anderson. Throughout this essay I have stressed the distinction between Anderson-the-performer and the stage personae she enacts (art-creator and art-object). Nor are corporeal or screened bodies “somehow artificial reproductions of the real” based on the assumption, according to Philip Auslander, that “the live event is ‘real’ and that mediatized events are secondary (Auslander 2000, 3). As such, Anderson manipulates the expectations involved with viewing ventriloquism: she realigns the signifier—the voice—with the referent—the body—it performs. We see this in the scene “Talk Normal” where the screened body speaks in an unprocessed voice and the corporeal body talks in an incomprehensible, digitally processed voice. Ultimately, in positioning the material (what I’ve been calling the corporeal) and the symbolic (the screened) in contest with one another, Anderson exposes the failure of both to signify.

Like her precursors, Anderson strives to find an alternative mode to represent the body in performance; she links early and late century art movements by employing her body to interrupt and intercept filmic and projected images and intervene in the performance environment. Yet unlike the predominant artists of the Futurist, Dada, Bauhaus, and Fluxus movements, constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality mark Anderson’s work: her performances figure the female artist at the center of the multimedia display, and manipulate voice to challenge the dominance of the ideology of the visible. [13] To claim that Anderson’s performances free the body from its overdetermination, to suggest that Anderson’s work takes the avant-garde one step further, though, is to make a big leap. Yet her early performance installations seem to strive to do just that by using voice to challenge perceptions of the body.

In this manner, she not only inherits the performance strategies her precursors, but also expands upon them by resisting an appeal to a referent or recourse in the body as a “real” thing. The screened body does not necessarily “repeat” the “real” body, but operates as a form of mimicry: it points to the citational, ironic status of the corporeal and the screened. [14] By engaging in the problem of citation, in which there is no original source when meaning resides in repetition and reproduction, Anderson performs the relationship between sound and image as a disruption of the notions of origin, original, and authenticity. [15] Anderson finds a way to use voice to employ the body as performative and, in doing so, disrupts the ideology of the visible. Moreover, because voice, body, and identity are performed (as well as are performative), Anderson’s work expresses a shift from epistemology to that of ontology (from the theory of knowledge to the theory of being). As such, Anderson’s performances offer an alternative to the assumption that visibility can provide direct access to authenticity.

For Anderson, the goal is not to locate identity on or through the body or to manipulate technology to challenge notions of identity or the body. Instead, it is to change our understanding of visibility by focusing on the interaction or interplay between the corporeal and screened bodies. Anderson’s work, to borrow the words of Teresa de Lauretis, uses voice redefine “the conditions of vision, as well as the modes of representing” without predicating them on “a single, undivided identity of performer and audience” (de Lauretis 1985, 33). She accomplishes this by presenting the art-creator whose point of reference is the non-referential performance of voices and sounds rather than the presence of the body as an authentic site. Her representations of representation are, as Anderson exclaims in Home of the Brave, without referents: “I see two tiny pictures and one in each of your eyes and they’re doing everything I do.” By expressing the space between the corporeal and the screened bodies as the site of endless deferral, Anderson undermines the trope of visibility as that which otherwise guarantees the authority of the corporeal body within a representational space. And it is precisely in this way that Anderson expresses a feminist aesthetics and politics: she neither substitutes aesthetics for politics nor collapses one into the other.

Anderson has shown us, as de Lauretis has expressed, that identification, self-definition, and the modes of envisaging oneself as subject are not just questions for the male avant-gardists, but are accomplishments that are entirely attainable for feminists alike. Of course, the relationship between Anderson’s work and the projects of the early avant-garde may beg further analysis, especially considering that those earlier artists were working with film (not to mention its incorporation of sound) that, at the time, was a new media. Moreover, the nuances of the relationship between visibility and presence also may need further examination. However, considering how voice may become the entity that makes the perception of the invisible possible, we expose new means for evaluating the political engagement and aesthetic considerations of feminist art. While Walter Benjamin was correct in asserting there is a contrast between that of the stage play and art subject to or founded in mechanical reproduction (or, I might supplant “mechanical” with “digital”), it is what one does with that contrast in terms of how one challenges notions of both mechanical reproduction and digital performance, how one employs such difference, that offers possibilities for a radical politics. Whether one achieves this through engaging and manipulating formal devices of representation or altering the content of representation, the possibilities are limitless when one is willing to let go of the body, presence, and embodiment as sites of authority and authenticity, and embrace multivocality and multiplicity as well as the gaps and fissures they reveal.

Notes

1. See Hart’s Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (1998). Hart’s study explores the implications of the need for a referent in relation to queer performing bodies, and she contends that any appeal or recourse in a referent reveals the dominance of a publicly conservative narrative. Steven Dubin’s Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions (1992) traces in detail the kinds of cultural, socio-political history that Hart’s book builds upon.

2. Visibility is a slippery term, but one that holds a privileged site in Western culture. While the dominant visual model of the twentieth century still retains an essence of Renaissance notions of perspective and Cartesian ideas of subjective rationality, both mechanical and electronic developments (the shift from analogue to digital, for example) have affected perspectival relations dramatically. For a more in-depth discussion of the history and implications of the analogue to the digital and its effects on representation, see Judith Roof’s, Reproductions of Reproduction (1996) and W.J.T. Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (1994).

3. Sam McBride’s “Documenting a Performance Artist: A Laurie Anderson Bibliography” (1996) provides an extensive bibliographic resource of Anderson’s career and work through 1995.

4. For additional studies that focus on Anderson’s “mediatized” performance, see Sam McBride’s “Unsplitting the Subject/Object: Laurie Anderson’s Phenomenology of Perception” (2000); Jon McKenzie’s “Laurie Anderson for Dummies” (1997); and Susan McClary “This Is Not a Story My People Tell” (2001).

5. Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1991) also supports this perspective and links it to notions of visibility. See When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (192). See also Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” (1976), which addresses problems of visibility by critiquing video installation practices in the 1970s that cut off the body and psyche of the video and its spectators from anything external.

6. I derive the terms “art-object” and “art-creator” from Carolee Schneemann who refers to herself as both “image” and “image-maker.” In Cezanne, She was a Great Painter (1975) Schneemann explains why the use of her own body is integral to her work but confusing to many viewers, Schneemann states, “I WAS PERMITTED TO BE AN IMAGE/BUT NOT AN IMAGE-MAKER CREATING HER OWN SELF-IMAGE. If I had only been dancing, acting, I would have maintained forms of feminine expression acceptable to the culture: ‘be the image we want’” (24).

7. Schneider sets-up a reading of the explicit body artist to address modernist avant-garde “primitivism” as a “nostalgic site of loss and confrontational site of scandal” and examine how primitivism appears in postmodernism (5).

8. The role of monologues—particularly in women’s performance—is also central to this understanding of how Anderson employs and exposes ventriloquism as a means to sever voice from body that is at play in her work. As Deborah Geis asserts in her study of the monologue in contemporary drama, monologue provides the solo performer with a means to engage in subversive performance because, despite the possible realism of monologic discourse, a monologue “renders [one] paradoxically a fictionalizer or a ‘work of fiction’ [oneself]” (156). Anderson self-consciously embraces this form. The monologic voice allows Anderson, as a solo performer, the opportunity to assume “multiple and sometimes conflicting subject positions,” which, in turn, enables her as a feminist performer to manipulate positions assigned to the voice/body (166).

9. For an excellent catalog documentation of Anderson’s work, including her earlier pieces, see RoseLee Goldberg’s Laurie Anderson (2000).

10. See Laurie Anderson, “From the Air,” Big Science (New York: Warner Bros., 1982).

11. The Video Glasses enable Anderson to incorporate her audience into the performance: during a segment of Stories from the Nerve Bible, Anderson, who wears a pair of sunglasses with a tiny, attached video camera, turned toward the audience and captures images of her spectators that she then projects onto the on-stage screen and video monitors.

12. Anderson performed this outdoor work in various New York City locations as well as in Genoa, Italy.

13. For an excellent discussion of the avant-garde in relation to women and the politics of gender, see Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Subversive Intent (1990).

14. Suggesting that this blurring between original and copy is an issue of mimesis versus mimicry, Lynda Hart has said, “Mimicry repeats, rather than represents; it is a repetition that is nonreproductive. Mimesis operates in the order of the model/copy. Mimicry performs its operation in the realm of simulacrum” (Hart 1998, 86).

15. Rosalind Krauss’s The Originality of the Avant-Garde (1986) presents an excellent reading on the avant-gardists’ and modernists’ perception of originality despite their awareness of the copy as the underlying condition of the original.

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