Though identified as an autobiographical artist early in her career, performance artist Laurie Anderson ostensibly turned during the later 1970s from stories about herself to narratives acquired through reading and conversation. Yet Anderson often continued to speak autobiographically after this supposed transformation, both in performance and during interviews, particularly those conducted for pop music and pop culture publications following her commercial success in the early 1980s. Anderson's self-presentation emphasizes the constructed nature of autobiography; she uses stories about past experience, not to clarify and reveal herself in the past, but to create herself in the present. For Anderson, personal history does not reveal an authentic self; it creates the appearance of a self, and one which is fragmented and contradictory. I propose to examine Anderson's use of childhood stories and travel narratives as constructions of a personal history.
Anderson has not presented a detailed, sequentially organized, coherent portrait of her childhood. Instead, Anderson has referenced childhood within interviews as a mechanism for supporting an aspect of the persona she presents at the time of the interview. Anderson refers to family activities, particularly performance activities such as story telling and music making, to provide a sense of authenticity for her present multi-disciplinary presentations. Similarly Anderson has mentioned specific family members (her father and younger twin brothers) to suggest an origination point for her interest in language and voice manipulation. Anderson tells and retells these stories in interviews such that over time they form a personal mythology. Yet she scrupulously avoids discussing certain aspects of her childhood (her family's financial status, for example); Anderson's avoidance of some narratives and the repetition of others indicates the extent of her involvement in producing a persona in the present moment, rather than laying bare a past self.
First-person travel narratives, calling on a more recent past than her childhood narratives, are a trademark element of Anderson's presentations. These "adventure" stories are often repeated, almost verbatim, in both performances and interviews. These works also contribute toward an Anderson persona in the present moment, but one which is even less authentic and coherent than the persona derived from narratives of childhood. The stories from an underlying contradiction: that Anderson is sophisticated enough to encounter, recognize and analyze other cultures, yet simultaneously and continuously naive enough to misinterpret what she finds. Furthermore, because Anderson's travel narratives conflate performances and interviews, they serve to disauthenticate the "present moments" of both interviews and the performances.
Anderson's use of personal history suggests one crucial aspect of her creative work is the construction of a persona through narrative strategies traditionally viewed as self-authenticating and self-revealing. To contextualize my analysis I will refer briefly to several contemporary scholars specializing in autobiography, including Timothy Dow Adams and Leigh Gilmore.
Référence: http://minerva.pom.devry.edu/~smcbride/abstract/and-auto.htm