Laurie Anderson: Attention as Material
Priya N. Chen on 6th Nov 2026
Laurie Anderson: Attention as Material
Press play on the video below, because this story starts where the song does. O Superman was pressed in a small run in 1980 by B. George's One Ten Records, then Britain got hold of it. BBC Radio 1 put it on the playlist, orders came pouring in from the UK, and in 1981 it landed at number two on the singles chart. Warner Bros. answered with a seven-album contract. The woman behind it calls herself a casual Buddhist, and says that being an artist and being a Buddhist ask the same thing of her: pay attention.
A violin, a sculpture studio, a suburb
Laura Phillips Anderson was born in Chicago in 1947 and grew up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, one of eight children. Weekends meant painting at the Art Institute of Chicago; the rest of the week she played violin with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras. She moved to New York in 1966, graduated from Barnard in 1969 in art history, and took an M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia in 1972. Her first performance piece, the year she graduated, was a symphony played on automobile horns.
Then came Duets on Ice: Anderson playing the violin along with a recording, ice skates on her feet, the blades frozen into a block of ice. The performance ended only when the ice had melted away. A concert with a clock built into the floor. Keep that clock in your head.
A colleague, ten days, no beam
In a 2022 interview with Scott Snibbe, she said her interest in Buddhism was “originally about attention, paying attention, and being able to focus.” The spark was a colleague she knew as Bob, a man of quiet concentration. She asked how he did it. In 1977 she went to the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, for a ten-day silent retreat, hoping, in her words, for “a mind like a beam.”
She did not get the beam. She got pain, and the job of watching it: sitting still and attending to the sensations in her body. Ten days of silence, and a person who ordered a laser pointer and received weather. After the retreat, she said, she noticed a wider sense of space while she was sculpting, which she found exciting as a sculptor. Not a vision. A change in the room.
Casual Buddhist, serious attention
She calls her Buddhism casual. She treats the teachings as proposals to test against her own experience, not beliefs to swallow whole. The sitting she describes belongs to insight meditation, the practice tied to the Pali word vipassana, “insight,” and to the Theravada tradition: noticing the body, feelings and thoughts as they arise, without judging them or clinging to them. Her own account is one person's retreat, not the whole tradition, and she doesn't claim otherwise.
Her later teacher comes from a different house. She is a student of Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, and says she was drawn to his happiness and his frankness. She recalls his advice: “Try to practice how to feel sad without actually being sad.” Her gloss is plain: you can recognize sadness without being consumed by it. She speaks of impermanence, constant change, as something tied to joy and freedom, and to her interest in how time appears in music and images. A Tergar event page describes her looking at the sky as an informal meditation she has practiced throughout her life.
Back to the song
O Superman (For Massenet) arrived on Big Science in 1982 and sat inside the larger stage work United States Live, which she presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984. My reading, and it is only that, is that Anderson built a career out of things that do not hold still: a performance that melts, a sound that moves through time, a body that hurts and then changes, a mind that wanted a beam and learned to watch the weather. Her attention is not a spotlight. It is a willingness to stay in the room while the room changes.
Press play again. Don't hunt for the key to it. Watch it the way she learned to watch a breath: for what is actually there, for as long as it lasts.
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