In 1987, E. Ann Kaplan said MTV is a postmodernist phenomenon that’s here to stay. After ten years, MTV is still indeed going strong. From Kaplan’s perspective, however, this might not be a good thing. MTV was born in Reagan’s America, amidst materialism, racism and sexism, with women as the target of objectification and commodification. In its celebration of “the look, the surfaces, the self-as-commodity,” MTV has reduced the female body to an objectified image right from the start (Kaplan, 151). Because videos themselves were nothing but commercials for albums and artists, MTV seemed to be about nothing but consumption.
I will examine how scholars like E. Ann Kaplan conceptualize MTV as a postmodernist phenomenon, and the “dangers” it brings upon society in terms of sexist oppression and the suppression of oppositional artistic expression. I will give some examples of MTV videos which attempt to reappropriate the postmodern video for feminist expression, and how they rarely go beyond issue of sexuality. I offer Laurie Anderson as an artist who attempts to bridge more radical, avant-garde forms of expression to popular music. In examining her postmodernist performance art, I find both liberatory and deabilitating aspects in reaching toward a mass audience while attempting to remain oppositional. While future of such a bridge is uncertain, it holds some promise if the trend towards including increasing numbers of marginalized artists in the mainstream continues. THE “SCHIZOPHRENIC STATE”
If MTV is about nothing but consumption, it has accomplished more for consumerism in four years than commercials have done in forty years. Instead of advertising products as a way to enhance one’s life, MTV made videos themselves a way of life. Videos became an experience to be shared, part of what Pat Aufderheide calls “a wondrous leisure world.” Videos gave products “a new location on the consumer’s landscape, not as messengers of a potential purchase or experience, but as an experience in themselves, a part of living” (Aufderheide, 117).
Many agree with Kaplan that the process people, or spectators go through in entering an MTV way of life, can be dangerous. It evokes an insatiable desire of plenitude that is coaxed with MTV’s coming-up-next mechanism. A literally endless (24 hour a day) flow of short segments keeps us in an excited state of expectation, promising that the next segment will fulfill our desires. The infinite flow is separated only by different kinds of advertisements and images. Recent scholarship on MTV is concerned with the social and psychological effects these images have on a consumer/spectator enveloped in an “MTV way of life.”
The “MTV way of life” implies a hopeless condition of spiraling into what Fredric Jameson calls the “schizophrenic state.” People will change the way they think and use language in a way that the flow of words and images in texts like MTV are such that the reader/spectator cannot associate any meaning or recognize boundaries and differences, past and present. The schizophrenic state is to be fixated on a detached signifier like MTV, isolated in a present from which there is no escape. Videos on MTV create a grab-bag out of western cultural history to dip into at will, obliterating historical specificity. Kids will grow up with the “televisual apparatus” with a consciousness that no longer thinks in terms of a historical frame, or a cultural context. This tendency disturbs people like Lucy Lippard, who believes, in borrowing from other cultures, “a certain humility, an awareness of other cultures’ boundaries and contexts, wouldn’t hurt” (Lippard, 9).
MTV kids will instead only have desire as their frame of reference – desire for a kind of plenitude that will never be reached. In their unfulfilled, schizophrenic state, they will be vulnerable to MTV’s dominant codes and messages that tap into their need with their complicit ideologies. In addition, the conceived differences between reality and representations would collapse in a way that would render concepts like parody obsolete. The postmodernist practice of the random borrowing or simulation of motifs from other artists and texts is a form of pastiche that could signify a lack of orienting boundaries. MTV videos could be seen as parodies without a sense of humor.
When the past becomes pastiche, no critical distance is possible. As a result, music video’s occasional attempts at satire prove feeble.
(Aufderheide, 129)
Videos like Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money” and David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” try to raise social issues only to lose any message in the disjunctive images of pastiche and fantasy.
Humor plays a much smaller role in art when an artist cannot take a critical position from which to speak. If the youth culture of the future is in danger because it does not take a critical stance toward on-going events, then the loss of mechanisms for critical evaluation of social structures and ideologies is indeed something to worry about (Kaplan, 152). This could mean the end of oppositional discourses. Attempts at opposition will always be lost to the glamour of “media events,” and to mere surfaces/textures/images rather than real threats to the status quo. Kaplan believes that in anything that seems like dissent on MTV, there turns out to be nothing behind the representations/images (Kaplan, 54). Any chance of artists representing ideas on videos other than MTV’s commercial objectives, appeared to be doomed.
Yet one cannot rest on the assumption that MTV has total power over the spectator. Shifting political climates reflect changing consumer tastes, influencing the material shown on MTV. The relationship between MTV and consumers is dialectical. It is a discursive exchange between viewers who demand to see certain things, and MTV whose interests are to reflect the viewers’ interests while at the same time trying to influence and manipulate the viewers’ interests in subscribing to materialist lifestyles and ideologies. MTV taps into the collective memory of American consumer values embedded, encoded, and enshrined by the history of advertising.
When this relationship is analyzed with elements of literary criticism, film studies, post-structuralism, cultural anthropology, and psychoanalytic theory, it appears to be much more complex than the process of MTV transforming the viewer’s experience into a decentered, schizophrenic, and ultimately empty experience, as suggested by Kaplan’s structuralist analysis. Because MTV is such a postmodern art form, its seemingly meaningless fragments are rich with connotations, and viewers are free to play a far more active role than that described by Kaplan. Viewers can decode meanings in the fragmented text “according to their own set of values and perceptions, as opposed to accepting passively the `messages’ intended by the industry’s writers, directors, and producers” (Harvey, 40).
For example, one analysis argues that “those who allow themselves to be seduced by advertising are getting something out of the exchange as well,” no matter how superficial the gains may seem to be (Harvey, 59). Even though the “real thing” is held just out of reach, music video provides us “with a momentary rupture in the seamless flow of everyday life . . . to the overall maintenance of the social order, as do all good ritual devices.” Such ritual devices include the masked ball in Jacobean drama, the quest searches in Christian mythology, or the predictable pranks that characterize modern, secular celebrations of Halloween. Videos give viewers/consumers “a safe place to scream when the frustration of always falling short of institutionalized illusion becomes too much to handle” (Harvey, 60).
IS OPPOSITIONAL MTV A PARADOX?
MTV is a controlled environment with well-defined parameters of time and place in which extreme deviance and indulgence can occur. MTV can serve as a form of safety valve for society in which viewers wallow in cultural taboos until they become sick of it. The re-imposition of taboo in the “real world” becomes not only bearable, but a welcome relief (Harvey, 45). Instead of warping viewers, sex and violence in videos could actually be therapeutic, or at least self-reflective. The dreamlike qualities of MTV allow for the indulgence of otherwise unapproachable impulses and desires as an escape valve for cultural tensions. With its “frantic, fragmented messages,” MTV can tell us much about our “most deeply buried fears and our most profoundly felt desires. It is so easy to lie to ourselves when we use full sentences” (Harvey, 61).
But studies of these fragmented desires seem to spell out a society slanted toward escapism and sexism. Sexism in videos has been shown to effectively transmit negative attitudes about women, and cannot be justified as merely harmless indulgence. There is a need for competition with the misogynistic, male-addressed discourse that has dominated MTV. A recent rise in feminist videos is presenting some possibilities for balancing out the male/female perspectives. Much to the surprise of many MTV scholars, feminist art has come out of the margins and proved the postmodernist format of MTV to be susceptible to feminist appropriation.
The objectification and subordination of women is currently being challenged by creative performers and directors who are using postmodernist techniques to manipulate, deconstruct, and reconstruct prevailing constructions of female sexuality. At least within the boundaries of female sexuality, feminist videos fit into a sort of mainstream counterhegemony. With more women and blacks watching more music videos than any other group of teenagers, these formerly marginalized viewpoints can have a powerful influence on the entertainment industry (Roberts, 5).
Increasing numbers of African-American women doing rap and dance music are continuing the feminist approach set by the precedent-setting performers like Pat Benetar, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Eurythmics, and Janet Jackson. These artists show an ability not only to use pastiche to some extent in drawing attention to the exploitative traditions of videos, but contrary to Kaplan’s theories, actually dismantle the male gaze through humor. By ridiculing the male gaze and male behavior, women liberate themselves from the male constructions of female as object.
Sexism in advertising is scrutinized in Pat Benetar’s “Sex As A Weapon.” Benetar criticizes the negative images of women used from the 1950s to the present in advertising with a pastiche of images and Benetar dressed in a variety of historical frames. Muscle-bound men are portrayed as ridiculous and ineffectual, and Benetar even destroys a James Bond figure by taking away his gun and blowing away his machismo image. Like Turner, Benetar also ridicules the use of phallus’, with lipsticks, guns and hot dogs. Her direct references to advertising even includes the music industry, criticizing MTV itself. She even criticizes one of her own album covers for its sexism. Referring to one’s own experience to validate a critique of exploitation of women’s bodies is becoming more popular among feminists. By employing “the postmodernist techniques of fragmentation, self-reflexiveness, pastiche, and the combination of popular culture and the avant- garde,” Benetar puts the use of women’s bodies to sell products into a feminist context (Roberts, 9). However, while “Sex As A Weapon” was one of the few most political videos to survive on MTV, it is not a guarantee that there are more to come.
Much more common, however, are videos of women asserting their sexuality any way they please, such as most of Madonna’s videos, Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” and “What Have You Done for Me Lately,” and the previously mentioned Tina Turner videos. These videos do not directly criticize the music industry as overtly “Sex As A Weapon” does. In fact, they often validate the industry in showing that involvement in the process of capitalism and production need not equal passivity (Roberts, 12). In “Nasty,” Jackson pays to get into a theater, but goes on to take over the screen. The openings for sharp feminist criticism on MTV are very narrow.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF OPPOSITIONAL PERFORMANCE ART
It is nearly impossible to find a mainstream artist who takes a position as critical as someone like Adrian Piper, a performance artist whose art is often confrontational but rarely compromised (Lippard, 43-4). Ironically, while marginalized artists are best able to regain the critical position and sense of humor in music and performance, it is often only the most privileged audiences who get to see and hear the work. Nevertheless, such performance best exemplifies the capacity to articulate alternative or plural identities of groups belonging to the margins of national or dominant cultures, and to celebrate the principles of parody, pastiche, stylistic multiplicity and generic mobility (Connor, 186). It is performance with a counterhegemonic agenda against practices associated with the increased power of advertising and the electronic media, the advent of universal standardization, neocolonialism, institutional xenophobia, racism, sexism and homophobia.
Paradoxically, the artists best known for such postmodernist styles are the ones relatively close to the mainstream, including musicians Captain Beefheart, Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, John Zorn, Negativland, and a plethora of rap/hip-hop groups. Among artists like Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Wallace Shawn, Joahn Leguizamo, Ann Magnuson, Karen Finley, John O’Keefe and David Cale, Laurie Anderson is one of the most prolific, producing multimedia arrangements of text, image, movement and musical sound. The music, photography, film, poetry, fantasy, dance and stand-up comedy all have subversive elements of social criticism. As a white woman artist with an art history degree at Barnard College and a master’s degree in sculpture at Columbia, Anderson is hardly marginalized in the sense that Lucy Lippard deems significant in Mixed Blessings.
Irony, humor, and subversion are the most common guises and disguises of those artists leaping out of the melting pot into the fire. They hold mirrors up to the dominant culture, slyly infiltrating mainstream art with alternative experiences — inverse, reverse, perverse.
(Lippard, 199)
Lippard also, however, mentioned Anderson’s series of texts and photographs in 1973, in which she took photographs of men in her neighborhood as they accosted her or commented on her appearance (Lippard (1976), 102-3). Instead of a mirror, Anderson held up a camera-eye to men, giving them a sense of what it means to be subjected to the male gaze. Such “decentering,” which was the focus of antiracist and antisexist cultural tactics in ’70s activist art, was Anderson’s first experience with getting first-hand “reactions” to her art. Her work became increasingly complex throughout the seventies, as she began to examine the slipperiness of language. Her invention of the tape bow violin, an instrument whose strings have been replaced with an audio head from a tape recorder and whose horsehair on the bow has been replaced with recording tape, enabled her to create a sound-speech that never existed before. The sound-speech consisted of a totally reversible music-language: as the bow is passed across the audio bridge, “no” on the up-bow becomes “one,” on the down-bow, “yes” becomes “say.” Anderson uses it to great effect on “Late Show” in the movie Home of the Brave, a documentary of the same tour in 1985-6. One only hears fragments of a phrase throughout the piece, as it begins as a strange noise and gradually develops a human-voice, and finally says “listen to my heartbeat.”
Turning around accepted images and meanings is a reoccurring theme in Anderson’s work. In the video “O Superman,” which was occasionally shown on MTV, along with being performed live on the United States Live, Parts I-IV tour in 1979-83, Anderson’s waving hand refers to the image of a hand raised in greeting on the Pioneer spacecraft. Anderson uses this image to signify ambiguity of communication–“in our country, good-bye looks just like hello,” similar to the way the Cheyenne Contraries–warriors who rode backwards, said “hello” for “goodbye” (Lippard, 201). In using paradox, collage and reflexiveness, she explores her obsessive fascination with language and its failure to communicate our most basic fears, longings, and sensory impressions. Much of Anderson’s work suggests William S. Burrough’s cut-up methods. Cut-ups in literature is a notion in which the work of randomly selected writers can be cut up, juxtaposed, and “sampled” in a form of collage writing. Burrough’s influence was consummated in collaboration when he provided the lyric for her song “Language is a Virus,” and making a cameo appearance/tango in Home of the Brave.
Just as she shows how complex and contradictory language can be, Anderson does the same with gender. Her androgynous stage persona serves well to confound sexist stereotypes of what should be expected of women performers. Her standard dress consists of suits, ties, and technology. While not necessarily condemning sexuality in other women performers, Anderson chooses to manipulate her body technologically rather than sexually. Her body becomes a screen in its own right when she places a light in her mouth to silhouette her face in “O Superman,” a reflection on communications technology and consumer capitalism. When even transforms her body electronically into a Buddha and then an abstract shape, literally embodying the electronic technology she is critiquing. In “Drum Dance,” she becomes Andy Warhol’s [wo]man-as-machine when she wires herself up for sound and plays her body as an amplified percussion instrument. Not even her voice escapes transformation, as she electronically alters it to become a “voice of authority”–a voice of a man, or rather, a shoe salesman, or “a guy who’s selling you an insurance policy you don’t really want,” said Anderson in her “Home Tour” segment of Collected Videos. She even goes as far as to produce an electronically altered image of herself as a four-foot tall male clone of herself. “He” is not a mirror image. The clone is a much less intelligent, “cheesy,” inferior copy. While Anderson’s humor may at times seem cooly detached, dry, or even boring, the subtext of it has a vicious bite. The cute, seemingly benign portrayal of the clone could very well signify a not-so- benign attitude about men and their misogynist practices in the entertainment and artworld.
Anderson goes even further to play upon the traditional “T&A” expectations for women in performance by often revealing nothing of herself. In the beginning of Home of the Brave, Anderson appears with a mask and a body suit, with the tape bow violin as the only way to reveal Anderson’s identity. Women walk past Anderson, wearing elegant gowns, as Anderson’s tape bow makes sounds comparable to cat-calls one might hear from men harassing women. Yet the women are also wearing masks, leaving only their bodies exposed, with Anderson secure in her anonymity. The mask has played an important role in gender and racial politics in feminist and bicultural art.
In art, as in society, there is a subtle and ceaseless donning and doffing of masks. Disguise has been employed as weapon and as shield, allowing the artist a chance to “make her/himself up.” Ritual masks from traditional cultures often have their eyes closed, presumably so they can see inside, where it matters.
(Lippard, 231-2)
The multiplicity of images with which Anderson presents herself speak with a “polyphonic voice characterized by ambiguity and paradox,” similar to the way Lippard’s Tricksters recognize that speaking from within contradiction is truer to one’s local, specific, and personal lived experience than attempting to resolve the contradictions of life into idealized abstractions (Lippard, 206). Anderson gains freedom and ambiguity which allows her to be many things in many places. It is in this sense that she “deconstructs the border between identity and difference, that she appears as something at once determinate and indeterminate” (Mitchell, 285).
Anderson exerts full creative control over her videos and films, giving her an artistic authority which is rare in the world of performance. The characters presented in pieces like “Stephen Weed,” “Hey Ah,” and “Talk Normal” are presented to the spectator in a fragmented, alienated process of “showing,” which enables the performer to mediate between characterization and narration. The decentered, postmodern form of presentation bridges performance art to pop, especially in “O Superman,” the most spectacular example yet of crossover from performance into pop, reaching No. 2 in the British pop charts in 1982 and subsequently shown on MTV.
Anderson herself has legitimized the judgements on her work as postmodernist, as acknowledging the postmodern condition as one of the motivations behindHome of the Brave:
It’s not a mistake to call something postmodern now, because there actually is no present . . . It becomes very difficult to produce something which doesn’t immediately become grist to the media mill . . . That’s one of the reasons I did the movie, because I work in such a transitory medium, the minute I do something it all disappears.
(Mitchell, 284)
But unlike the humorless, positionless pastiche of most postmodernist video, Anderson does relentless political critiques of the American democratic circus (“The Big Top”), suburban alienation (“Talk Normal”), the exploitation of Native American folklore (“Hey Ah”), sexual violence (“The Hollywood Strangler”), property development (“Big Science”), the FBI (“Stephen Weed”), and examines issues central to postmodernism; “the slipperiness of language, the way that our alienation and confusion are produced by Big Science and the media, how words and images are created in today’s world–and how we are inundated and affected by them” (McCaffery, 27). She also illustrates a postmodern concern with undoing the problematics of surfaces, of flatness, and of appearance. Her performances, as Dick Hebdige has said of pop art, “remind us that which is obvious matters, that surfaces matter, that the surface is matter” (Mitchell, 286).
Anderson will never be the sole patron-saint of crossover performance-pop. While her work as recently become less inspired, even at her best, Anderson is problematic. African-American theologian and political theorist Cornel West demands more than Anderson could hope to produce:
a new historiography, a structural analysis beyond the postmodernist base . . . There are still homogenous representations of our communities, and we must go beyond that to their diversity and heterogeneity. But we also need to get beyond that–beyond mainstream and malestream, even beyond the “positive images”–to undermine binary oppositions of positive and negative: male/female, Black/white, straight/gay, etc. .
(Lippard, 12)
Yet Anderson’s early style was made up of a “system of pairing,” of placing polar opposites side-by-side or before one another, revolving around a network of dualities: artist as person/character, language/sound, private/public activity, memory/fantasy, audio/visual space, male/female, nineteenth/twentieth century musical instrumentation, history/prophecy, filmic/live presentation (Gordon, 51). While Anderson’s work has gradually become more complex, it does not consistently keep up with her ambitions or pretensions. In her attempts to be inclusive, she features African and Asian performers in Home of the Brave. Yet it is always Anderson who is in control. She is the star, the master, the focus of the show, leaving her guests as merely peripheral attractions, without a chance to speak for themselves in their own chosen context. This sort of appropriation of other cultures should be done carefully, if at all, because of the danger of “visual plagiarism” in which borrowed culture has no frame of reference . . . “Appropriation may be, when all is said and done, voyeurism at its most blatant” (Lippard, 25).
Anderson finds herself in the precarious position of not being marginalized enough, but too inaccessible for mass culture. Her bleak explorations of a “technology-ridden world that ultimately imply the inability of modern society to control that technology” may simply not be in demand (Holden, C1). In her last major piece, “Empty Places,” Anderson used images and sounds to evoke a global, post-industrial landscape so homogenized and degraded by technology that a feeling of community has been sacrificed. Anderson explains her fears:
I am terrified of being dogmatic and didactic, because the ideas I am working with are hot and heavy social and political and economic issues. I want to leave it loose. I try to leave the exit signs on, and well lighted too, because it isn’t everybody’s idea of a fun night out.
(Wood, 102)
While many people may choose to take the exit rather than stay, others may see that boundaries are made to be broken, that women need not restrict themselves to one-dimensional sexual imagery to make a living in performance and be relatively successful. Anderson has played an important role in breaking stereotypes, turning them around, and laughing at them. Her work shows that “the options for breaking patterns, reversing stigmas, and conceiving a new and more just world-picture are many and multifaceted” (Lippard, 241). No matter how many complications and contradictions may develop, turning around is a valuable goal to achieve.
Transformation of self and society is finally the aim of all this mobile work that spins the status quo around. While irony, with its tinge of bitterness as well as humor, is the prevalent instrument, another is healing, in which the artist, as neo-shaman, heals her or himself, as a microcosm of the society.
(Lippard, 241)
Yet the avant-garde of subcultures will always be subordinant- -maggots trying to scale the garbage heap of mainstream commercial culture. Jean Baudrillard said a minority will never be able to take over the form of the mass media and change the content to any good purpose, since what is oppressive about the media is precisely the “code” which in their very form they embody. Mass media like MTV talks to its audience while never allowing the audience to respond, and confirms it audience’s muteness by simulating audience response, via phone-ins, studio audiences, viewer’s polls and other forms of bogus “interaction.” The mass media fabricates non- communication, making it impossible for any significant populist takeover. And whenever a marginalized artist scores a “coup,” the postmodern music industry quickly stretches its boundaries to include the eruption of cultural difference, actually reinforcing its own stability. Counterhegemonic commentary becomes a quasi- commodity, a “part of a ritualized exchange in an institutional and commercial economy of ideas and intellectual styles” (Connor, 189). The ethical awareness of marginal groups in mass culture, in their recognition of an important diversity of voices and interests [are] in danger of being smashed into a flat, commodified pancake.
CONCLUSION
If marginalized subcultures can only continue to express themselves sufficiently outside of the mainstream, what is the mainstream to do? What are people like Hard Harry in the movie Pump Up the Volume to do after they’ve been arrested by the FCC for their underground pirate radio stations? According to leading theoreticians like Lawrence Grossberg, Stephen Connor and Kaplan, they must adapt and survive. Or perhaps the answer to the question of what exactly will happen to oppositional discourses, subcultures, and even postmodernist culture in a stage of capitalism that is advancing to the point where nearly all communication will be allowed to happen only to benefit corporate and institutional profit and nothing else, is anyone’s guess.
But if such oppositional culture can never take over the mainstream, what can be expected from an oppositional avant-garde practice? According to Susan Suleiman, “quite possibly, not much– or not more than for previous avant-gardes . . . But that does not mean that the attempt is not worth making” (Suleiman, 199). Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock suggest that “feminism explores the pleasures of resistance, of deconstruction, of discovery, of defining, of fragmenting, of redefining” (Parker, 54). Many women besides Laurie Anderson have found some unexpected ways to use technologies associated with the culture industry. Jenny Holzer’s use of electronic signs in airports and other public places–such as the Spectacolor Board in Times Square, which flashed her message in huge letters: “PRIVATE PROPERTY CREATED CRIME” –is one well-known example. Barbara Kruger, who has used billboards to display (and occasionally to transform into political posters) some of her photographs, usually shown in galleries and museums, has also used the Spectacolor Board, to display the message: “I AM NOT TRYING TO SELL YOU ANYTHING” (Suleiman, 199). Kruger even buys thirty second spots during television shows, the very site of the stereotype, in order to change the rules of the game so that subtle reformations can be enacted.
The hope expressed in such statements is that it is possible to find openings even in the monolithic mechanism of the culture industry; that it is possible for innovative, critical work to reach a large audience. The future holds the possibility that many substantial changes could result from the complex relationship between the avant-garde, television, the popular culture industry and the consumer/viewers. While chances are that the changes will not be “radical” and “good” enough for many feminists, we can only get a sense of what these changes could be through studying the complex relationship through a variety of disciplines.
. . . we need to redefine what our texts and subjects should be; we must analyze the complex interplay of subject and object, pleasure and danger, power and powerlessness that constitutes gender relations in popular culture.
(Roberts, 15)
Only through combinations of critical theory’s deconstructionism of audience consumption as it occurs within the production process, symbolic anthropology’s use of ritual mechanisms, psychoanalytical theory’s examination of individual internalizations and culturally- generated myths, and critical techniques of film studies and literary criticism, can one fully get a sense of MTV’s function as a postmodernist phenomenon in contemporary and future mass-mediated society, and the possibilities of oppositional cultures appropriating their own spaces in the mainstream
SOURCES
Aufderheide, Pat. “Music Videos: The Look of the Sound.” In Gitlin, Todd, ed.Watching Television: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture. Pantheon Books, New York; 1986.
Burkett, Kathy. “To See, Or Not To See: Is Anderson to the ’80s what Warhol was to the ’60s?” Ms. July 1986.
Connor, Stephen. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Basil Blackwell, Oxford; 1989.
Gordon, Mel. “Laurie Anderson: Performance Artist,” The Drama Review, June 1980.
Harvey, Lisa St. Clair. “Temporary Insanity: Fun, Games, and Transformational Ritual In American Music Video.” Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 24, No. 1, Summer 1990.
Holden, Stephen. “All Alone, Peering Into the Abyss.” New York Times, Dec. 14, 1990.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, & Consumer Culture. Methuen, London; 1987.
Lippard, Lucy R. From the Center: feminist essays on women’s art. E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.; New York; 1976.
Lippard, Lucy R. Mixed Blessings. 1990.
McCaffery, Larry. “White Noise, White Heat: The Postmodern Turn in Punk Rock.”American Book Review. March/April, 1990.
Mitchell, Tony. “Performance and the Postmodern in Pop Music.” Theatre Journal. October, 1989.
Parker, Rozsika and Griselda Pollock, “Fifteen Years of Feminist Action: From Practical Strategies to Strategic Practices.” Framing Feminism.
Roberts, Robin. “`Sex as a Weapon’: Feminist Rock Music Videos.” NWSA Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1990.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Harvard University Press, Cambridge; 1990.
Weber, Bruce. “Projecting her voice.” New York Times Magazine, June 4, 1989.
Wood, Elizabeth. “Laurie Anderson,” Ms. February, 1983.
OTHER SOURCES
Anderson, Laurie. Home of the Brave [videotape]. 1986.
Anderson, Laurie. Collected Videos [videotape]. 1991.
Anderson, Laurie. United States Live, Vols. I-IV [album]. 1984.
April 12, 2024
The School of Post-Punk – Class of ’83
March 29, 2024
Fester’s Lucky 13: 1994
February 29, 2024
Best of 1984
