Eine Kulturikone in Krems

A short reportage about / interview with Laurie Anderson in Krems an der Donau, Austria (attention: it's overdubbed in German):

Hänsel und Gretel in Krems

'Transitory Life' in Krems, Austria, May 2011

photo by Florian Schulte

Hänsel und Gretel gibt es wirklich
Und sie leben in Berlin
Sie arbeitet als Cocktailbedienung
Er hatte eine Rolle in einem Fassbinder-Film
Und nachts sitzen sie da, trinken Schnaps und Gin
Und sie sagt: Hänsel, du ziehst mich echt runter.
Und er sagt: Gretel, du kannst wirklich ein Miststück sein.
Er sagt: ich habe mein Leben mit unserem dummen Märchen vergeudet,
während meine Liebe immer nur der bösen Hexe galt.

Sie sagt: Was ist Geschichte?
Und er sagt: Geschichte ist ein Engel, der rückwärts in die Zukunft geweht wird.
Er sagt: Geschichte ist ein Trümmerhaufen,
Und der Engel will zurückgehen, um die Dinge wieder in Ordnung bringen,
Dinge reparieren, die zerbrochen sind.
Aber da kommt ein Sturm aus dem Paradies,
Und der Sturm weht den Engel zurück in die Zukunft.
Und dieser Sturm, dieser Sturm heißt Fortschritt.

German translation of Laurie Anderson's 'The Dream before'

- as heard in Krems, Austria in May 2011

Thanks, Angelika, for the help!

UPDATED: More from Krems

Two Four more excerpts of 'Transitory Life' in Krems an der Donau, Austria:

First, the frantic instrumental ending of the concert:

And 'Flow', the mesmerizing reprise violin solo:

Fenway Bergamot's first section: a specialized German-Austrian version ("should I buy a second BMW?") of 'Mambo and Bling' - you'll appreciate it especially if you're interested in the German translation of the piece since the video features mostly the subtitles on the background screen:

'Hey Ah', the story of the old Cree Indian, plus Loscha, the 'Ugly One with the Jewels':

UPDATE#2: Here's Donaufestival's official press photo album of the 5th of May - click below for more photos of Laurie's performance:

Laurie Anderson performing 'Transitory Life'

Krems an der Donau, Austria, May 2011

photo by Florian Schulte

Loscha in Krems

May 2011: Laurie Anderson tells the story of the Ugly One with the Jewels in Krems an der Donau, Austria. Along with German translation in the background:

From Krems with Luv

Donaufestival, May 2011

Krems an der Donau, Austria

photos by Mnemosyne

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Current State of Mind of an Universalkünstlerin*

"Today I'm working on a short little poem that I've been thinking about, I have a drawing to finish, and I have a little projection work. This is the kind of hell my life is: doesn't one piece relate to the other one that much. I mean maybe that's great but sometimes it feels little disconnecting. On the other hand, that's just the way things are."


"Do I think art can change the world? I don't have any idea. Politicians can change politics - so can artists? I don't know. I'm a little bit pessimistic at the moment, to tell you the truth."


"[...] "The triumph of capitalism, here it is. Okay. One thing to do: get famous, get rich. That's the game. Good luck and see you later." - That's really harsh, and it's in every field in many ways. Artists are the same thing: we are encouraged to compete rather than to cooperate. And that's not a kind of world I dream of living in."


"I'm a journalist at heart. I like to try to see how things really work-- not make it up, not fantasize. That's a very hard thing to tell a story that is true. It's easy to find a good punchline. But everybody knows that most punchlines smell a little bad... they're clever, okay, but if you really try to tell a story: our lives are so messy. They don't have good punchlines, they don't have ways that they end very neatly. I think a lot of people, myself included, would like to find a way to see the world really clearly, not to somebody's punchline or somebody's story but really how do other people do it."

(Four examples of Laurie Anderson's current state of mind, mid April 2011)

Laurie Anderson @ Canal Street, April 2011

Photo by Christian Lehner

Austrian radio FM4 has recently aired Christian Lehner's interview with Laurie Anderson on the occasion of Laurie's upcoming live appearance at the Donaufestival in Krems-an-der-Donau, Austria: on the 5th of May 2011 she will perform 'Transitory Life', a retrospective collection of her past stories.

The conversation touched on subjects like New York City in the 1970s vs. 2010s, record charts, art and politics, the making process of the 'Homeland' album, the linguistics behind its title, the current state of mind of New York City, last year's concert for dogs in Sydney and the origins of 'O Superman' and 'Another Day in America'.

The Laurie Anderson Spezialstunde** was part of 'New York State of Mind', FM4's interview series "on individuals who set up the Big Apple a little crown". More info on the conversation with the Universalkünstlerin (basically the German translation of the interview) and some photos of the session can be found here.

You can listen to the whole programme in FM4's online archive until the 4th of May:

• New York State of Mind, Issue #3: Laurie Anderson (audio length: 54 mins 8 secs, file size: 49.5 MB)

(FYI: don't worry if you missed the programme in the online archive: stay tuned for a stripped-down-and-cut-and-edited version of the interview here.)




* universal artist
** special hour

More on Krems, Austria

"[...] I was asked by an art museum in Austria to do an installation project. The museum was in this really little town called Krems, about an hour from Vienna. And so I went to check it out. Krems is this sort of a perfect little Austrian town on the Danube filled with medieval churches and these elegant onion-domed towers and spires. The Kunsthalle there is connected to a twelfth century church where they do a lot of their larger exhibitions now. This building was a church for about six hundred years and since then it's been used for like a variety of different things like a kind of a flop house for pilgrims and indigents, and then a convent and then it was an all purpose kind of cultural institution - it's this huge structure and very resonant acoustics with really really long delays. The museum wanted me to design something, some sort of sound installation, whatever I wanted, especially for this particular space with its resonance.

At first I was trying to figure out how to get the church to talk, to make something about language, about language that was going up... [...]

Every day I would walk around this little town, and the weird thing about this place was that right in the middle of town there was this huge maximum security prison - tall gray walls and these enormous guard towers... And it was really strange because mostly prisons are built out on heaths or in some uninhabited wild faraway area. So, I'm looking around the town and thinking about what to do and I climbed to the top of the belltower of this church to try to get a better view of the way the town was laid out, just a bigger picture. I was up there in the belfry and I suddenly realized that I could look directly over at the guy with a machine gun in the guardtower and then directly down into the prison yard from the belltower.

So, I proposed making this thing for the church - for the cultural institution - called Life. It would work like this: we'd make a three dimensional life-size cast of one of the prisoners and place it in the apse in this church. And then using a live video feed, the image of the prisoner would be projected from the prison to the church. So the video signal would travel in a straight line from the prison, up the guard tower, across the street to the church, down the bell tower into the apse, and finally mapping onto this three dimensional cast. So you could walk up to this three dimensional image and touch it and would be something that was kind of there and not there. (I suppose a one way system from that point of view.)

I wrote some things for the curators about why I wanted to do this, about my interest in telepresence and how cameras are changing different attitudes towards particularly the human body - incarceration vs. incarnation - and distinguish the prison and the church. And I said I thought it would raise some interesting questions about time, icons and cameras and the function of institutions. Now of course I was also pretty nervous about this idea as well. I mean it's one thing for a priest to deliver a sermon about evil incarnate in a church and it's really another thing to actually come in as a foreigner and teleport a prisoner into the apse.

Anyway, the curators at the Kunsthalle were enthusiastic about doing the project but a couple of weeks later they discovered that Austrian law forbids the representation of the prisoner's face, so once they're in prison they're like erased and that's part - a big part - of the punishment. I decided that without the face, the projection would be pointless, I mean, Life from the Collar down is just not that gripping. I mean, humans have (to have) eyes or, in a way, they aren't really there. So I dropped this idea. [...]"

(excerpt from a lecture given by Laurie Anderson at New School in 2005,
as heard in this video)

(FYI: this project was the predecessor of Laurie Anderson's Dal Vivo (Life) project)

Laurie in Austria!

Laurie Anderson will perform 'Transitory Life' on the weekend of May 5th-7th, 2011 as part of Donaufestival in Krems, Austria. For the time being, only early bird tickets are available for the whole weekend. Single tickets will be on sale after the 10th of March.

FM4 interview

I managed to record Austrian FM4 Radio's programme Heartbeat with Robert Rotifer, featuring songs by and a phone interview with Laurie Anderson. (Broadcasted on 28 June, 2010, 10PM CEST)

You can listen to the whole programme (songs edited out), the narration is in German, total playing time is 6 mins 33 secs. File size: 9 MB

... Or you can listen to the phone interview parts only (file sizes are about 1 MB each):

• ghosts of the Bush era (1:20)
• being avant-garde (or not) (1:15)
• the character of Fenway Bergamot (1:12)