ARTIFACTS

Artists have it rough in Tokyo. Finding affordable gallery space—let alone profiting from your work—is nearly impossible. Enter The Artists Web, a simple and affordable way to publicize and sell paintings, digital art, ceramics or other products from the right side of your brain. The website was founded three years ago in the UK by Chris Kirkland, who has now relocated to Tokyo and launched a Japanese version. It takes just 5-10 minutes to sign up, pick a design template and upload your first images. “Most people find the website editor easy to use and addictive,” Kirkland warns, “and tend to spend a few hours tweaking things to their hearts content.” Take advantage of a free two-week trial, and if you enjoy having your own site, sign up for the Starter (¥12,000 per year) or the Value (¥18,000 per year) packages. The site currently helps approximately 750 artists around the world promote some 30,000 works, which are searchable by size, price, keyword and even color scheme. See www.theartistsweb.co.uk (English) or www.theartistsweb.jp (Japanese) for more information. BJM

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By Jeff Michael Hammond

Laurie Anderson: The Record of the Time

The NTT/ICC Gallery celebrates an Avant-pop artist's decades-long career

Word Fall, 2005 Courtesy of Conversation & Co., Ltd.

Institutional Dream Series, 1972-3 Geraldine Pontius

Duets On Ice, 1975 Bob Bedeck

The Clone, 1986

For those not so familiar with contemporary art,
Laurie Anderson is most likely known for her unexpected hit record of 1981, O Superman, which features her voice synthesized and processed. This interaction with technology is one of the themes that has recurred in various forms throughout Anderson’s 30-year career as a multimedia artist—a career that NTT’s Intercommunication Center (ICC) is currently celebrating.

Through video works, sound installations, sketches and photographs, the exhibition looks at the full range of her production, not exclusively sound works (as the title might imply)—even though they do play a major role. The exhibition opens with a single telephone dangling from the ceiling. Greeting the listener is the unmistakable voice of William Burroughs, from Anderson’s 1986 performance Voice of Authority. It’s a telling reference, as Burroughs’s ideas on communication—its potential and its limits—is another key aspect of much of Anderson’s work, most directly in her appropriation of Burroughs’s dictum, “Language is a virus.”

While many conceptual artists can be infuriatingly obscure, Anderson, who originally trained as a sculptor, says she prefers direct communication with her audience. This often involves her engaging in music and performance—perhaps the most direct of the arts.

In the video of the live performance Heartbeat, Anderson plays the digital violin, which she invented herself. There are a number of such innovations throughout the exhibition, including a rod-like contraption that similarly triggers electronic sounds. These devices may be primitive compared to samplers and computers, but the performer can dance and move with such instruments in a way that a computer alone wouldn’t allow.

Anderson has even managed to do away with holding any instrument at all. In Drum Dance, the audience is confronted with the performer hitting various parts of her body to electronically trigger different drum sounds. Depending on how you look at it, Anderson has transformed her body into a musical instrument or an inanimate drum kit into a living body—or perhaps both. In this way, the idea of transformation runs through much of her work, whether applied to images, sound, technology or her own body.

In the video piece, The Clone, the artist, too busy with PR and publicity shoots to create any new work, makes a “clone” of herself through digital technology. The “clone,” however, is an imperfect, male and nervous copy of herself. Here, as in many of her works, Anderson sugars serious themes with a dose of humor.

In fact, the artist mostly dresses in the typically male clothes of jacket and tie to deliberately create an androgynous image. That she does this even in the arena of pop music and (M)TV is a neat negation of the commodification of sexuality these formats tend to enforce.

Several music videos, including O Superman, are included here, reminding us that Anderson is happy on both sides of the art/pop divide—or, more to the point, that she refuses to accept that there is any such divide. In other words, she is the kind of artist in the often over-serious world of contemporary art that we could do with more of.

NTT/ICC Gallery, until Oct 2. See Shinjuku exhibition listings for details.

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