Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.
Anderson in 2020
Photograph of Anderson in the Library of Congress
Anderson at De Vereeniging in Nijmegen, 1986
Anderson at a 2007 benefit concert
In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.
Avant-garde cinema: The Love of Zero (1928), a short film directed by the artist Robert Florey.
Political revolution has influenced both the topic and form in The Overthrow of the Autocracy, a Soviet avant-garde painting.
The cultural provocation of avant-garde art: Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp. (Alfred Stieglitz)
In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), Walter Benjamin addresses the artistic and cultural, social, economic, and political functions of art in a capitalist society.
