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In 1982, Laurie Anderson embarked on an artistic voyage surveying America. United States Part 1-4 clocked in at eight hours and 78 scenes touching on subjects ranging from money to politics. Four decades later, a storm has arrived. This three-hour fifth and final part lands with the word “ARK” bolted portentously on to the title.
But the show’s 50 discursive scenes — arising from a belief that the world is spiralling into destruction — turn out to be biblical in register rather than symbolism. Anderson intones with the gravitas of an exaggerated trailer voiceover, liberally inserting dramatic pauses, as if she takes pleasure in doomy prophesying: “Only three years until climate change will be . . . irreversible.”
Despite opening with a parable about our future departure from Earth — with a god played by her longtime collaborator Ai Weiwei, and Elon Musk filling in for the Devil — there’s little narrative throughline or frame. She recalls a childhood scored with memories of the Doomsday Clock, the Cuban missile crisis and the nightly screams of her father who suffered from PTSD after serving in the second world war. But these are only brief pockets of storytelling.
Mostly, it meanders. Anderson mutters darkly into a microphone — sometimes applying a gimmicky effect that distorts her voice in the style of Saw’s Jigsaw — only raising her head to fix us with a look of wide-eyed alarm. Ponderous open-ended questions about where we’re heading as a civilisation are interspersed with more specific personal disclosure: “When my father died, it felt like a whole library burnt down.” The combination makes for a choppy first half that gives way to a rudderless second as abstract musings take over.
Artistic forms and media collide and wash over each other like waves. Anderson is flanked by live musicians and three screens that resemble the sails of a ship. Projected on to them are backdrops that begin serenely, then curdle, such as missiles slowly arching across a blue sky. A benign cloud hovers over one side of the stage; another shaped like a mushroom balloons opposite.
Frustratingly, however, Anderson squanders opportunities to drill down into present anxieties. AI, for example, is used to create ironic images such as a café meeting with Freud, who has cigar smoke pouring out of his jacket — ridiculing the technology’s flaws but swerving the debate on whether it represents an existential threat. If it didn’t state the country in the title, you’d struggle to identify the unifying subject.
When songs occasionally surface, it is easier to forgive Anderson the scattershot style. Some are operatic and elemental. A swelling elegiac anthem closes the first half, her late husband Lou Reed’s projected face glimpsed through droplets that trickle like tears. And the cumulative effect of the show is of a singular artist now totally adrift, observing a country and a world she no longer fully recognises.
As she takes her bow with an ever so slightly weary smile, she’s visibly been on a journey. Whether she has taken us with her is another matter.
★★☆☆☆
To November 24, factoryinternational.org
This post was originally published on here
