Chua, Eu Jin. “Laurie Anderson’s Telepresence.” Postmodern Culture. 16.2 (2006). (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/toc/pmc16.2.html).

Anderson herself does not speak as such--rather, she speaks through alter egos, usually technologically generated, who ventriloquize her stories and anecdotes. 1

Anderson, a classically trained violinist, has said that, in her performances, "the violin is the perfect alter ego. It's the instrument closest to the human voice . . . I've spent a lot of time trying to teach the violin to talk" (Stories 33). 1

that the list of Anderson's alter egos could be expanded to include her policy of performing shows in the local native language when touring non-English-speaking countries--even when completely ignorant of the meaning of the words that issue from her mouth, thus effectively ventriloquizing herself through the mediation of a translator. 1

The circuitous route from written words, to translation, to enunciation by a speaker not fluent in the language of the resulting translation, seems to emphasize the constitutive self-estrangement of the speaking subject. Here language speaks the subject rather than the other way around. Anderson's alter egos speak through her uncannily: "She is the medium which so many incorporeal voices require in order to communicate with us, the body they temporarily assume" (Owens 123). 2

--"doing a performance without being there"--meant that a key element of "performance art" as such was attenuated. After all, one of the most important notional definitions of performance is that it is predicated on the presence of both performer and audience in a particular time and particular space, on the embodied immediacy of the performance event, on "live gestures" (Goldberg, Performance Art 7). Peggy Phelan's is perhaps the most sustained and unequivocal articulation of this definition of performance: "Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance" (146). According to such a definition, At the Shrink's can hardly be said to have been a performance. It was simply a played-back recording of a prior event, absorbed already into a system of reproduction, with the would-be singularity and immediacy of the original event mitigated. 4

By projecting the recording onto a three-dimensional form as opposed to a flat screen, it is understood that an effort is made to amplify the ostensibly attenuated "reality" of the film image. Better than a film projection, Anderson's storyteller squarely took up space. The projected figure bulged into three-dimensions--less a projection than a manifestation, more present than a two-dimensional image yet less so than a solid live body. 4

Yet, as we have already seen, the use of technologically or performatively generated alter egos in Anderson's performances undoes any sense that the mode of address in these events is direct, singular and immediate. Anderson's performative surrogates--her synthesized voices, her ventriloquist's dummy, her video clones--insert a gap between the audience and the would-be authenticity and immediacy of the performer's persona. Moreover, many of her songs and anecdotes take this very gap as their subject matter. Thus in the apostrophic device of the song "O Superman," a mother speaks to her absent daughter through an answering machine. 5

Craig Owens noted that although Anderson is physically present on stage in these shows, "she interrupts the fantasy of copresence that links performer and spectator by interposing electronic media between them" (123). 5

but they could also be understood as an effect of the constitutive estrangement that arises out of the subject's dependence on the mechanical, the technological, or (in a word) the symbolic. After all, when the fantasy of singular self-presence is ruptured, what we get is degrees of otherness--doubles and doppelgangers. 6

[on Dal Vivo]: The title, Dal Vivo, Italian for "live" (as in "live telecast"), played on the multiple meanings of the word--life-like, life-size, live. Also "life sentence." For the subject of this "fake hologram" was not Anderson this time but--significantly and extraordinarily--an inmate at a high security prison, convicted of "aggravated homicide," among other crimes, and sentenced to remain there for much of the rest of his life.[4] A camera picked up the image of the man sitting in his cell in the San Vittore prison several miles away and transmitted it into the darkened exhibition space of the Prada Foundation in Milan where the work was installed. The prisoner, one Santino Stefanini, understood his participation in the installation as a "virtual escape" (and indeed he was selected, out of all other candidates for the job, at least partly owing to the fact that this conception of the installation as "virtual escape" was important to Anderson's own conception of her project) (Anderson, "Some Backgrounds" 31). 7

The technological basis of Dal Vivo may be simply that of television, but, in the combination of liveness with material heft, it is an exaggeration of television. It exaggerates the capacity of the televisual image to produce bodies that are, as it were, in two places at the same time. (8)

The transgressing of the rule that circumscribes all bodies--the rule that says that it is physically impossible to be in two places at the same time--would seem to account for much of the uncanniness of the installation. 8

The point of Dal Vivo, then, is to give "a living body to a statue," as Celant claims ("Miracle in Milan" 20), to animate and quicken to life, in the manner of the rabbi and his Golem or Pygmalion and his Galatea, a thing characterized by the opacity and stasis of death. 9

Thus, in Dal Vivo, when such a paradoxically deathly electronic image is projected on a moribund lump of clay that is an ultimately futile simulacrum of life, what we have is absences piled up on absences. 9

At another level however, the reality is that the prisoner doesn't lift a finger to accomplish this jailbreak--it is a completely passive transgression, and its result is simply the lodging of a reproduction of the prisoner's body in yet another claustrophobic and restrictive space, that of the gallery. The statue becomes a live body, but conversely, the live body is petrified into the condition of a statue. The experience for the prisoner of participating in the installation brings out this contradiction--to virtually escape, he has to sit more still than ever. 10

If we were to ignore our reading of Anderson's prisoner as passive and lacking, and instead emphasize his vigour and potential--his technologically-aided liberation from the forces that imprison him--what we might get is a kind of techno-utopianism. Tele-technologies, so used, have the potential to liberate bodies from their messy and undesirable corporeal limitations so that they can accomplish the heretofore physically impossible (so the logic might go). 11

In Anderson's unnerving scenario, tele-technology produces not pure unmediated intimacy, but rather a profound blockage. While Ascott's "telenoic" subject is transcendently disembodied, Anderson's prisoner's body is disabled rather than sublimated (his mobility is severely delimited for the duration of his spectral appearance in the gallery). While Ascott's subject is sensorily and perceptually enhanced, Anderson's prisoner is deprived of sensory power (he can't see or hear the place into which he is projected). While Ascott's subject is supposedly energized by the potential for perfect intersubjective communication, Anderson's prisoner lacks all capacity for speech and communication; in the gallery he is effectively deaf and dumb, a subject turned into a spectacular and impenetrable object, isolated and fetishized as such. 15

then the equation with Dal Vivo suggests that the prisoner exhibited in such a way is also a hapless subject caught in the gaze of scientific--or in this case, penal--power. The situation to which Anderson submits the prisoner reiterates the disciplinary power to which he is already subjected every day through incarceration, surveillance, and regimentation--with the inflection that the institution that now holds him in thrall is not only the penal, but also the aesthetic. Thus, in the companion monograph to Anderson's installation, we find constant references to Foucault's concept of disciplinary power. A quote from Discipline and Punish is spread across two pages in large boldface (Celant, Laurie Anderson 44-5). 19

[Derrida quote] "As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. . . . [B]ecause we know that, once it has been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we are already haunted by this future, which brings our death" (Echographies 117). 21

In addition, owing to the permutation of the tele-technological mechanism, the gallery-goers are always aware of the prisoner's presence (after all, he is right there on display), whereas the prisoner, blind and deaf, cannot know whether he is being observed at any one time--which is of course the very definition of panopticism. 23

Dal Vivo represents the mediatized heteronomy of the modern subject (perhaps the primary theme of Anderson's entire oeuvre) by including in its performance event not just technology or self-reflexive language, but a living being (moreover, a living being who is already in a state of proscription). 32

In the act of opening up for critique a relationship of power and subjecthood, Anderson becomes complicit in that which she would critique. 32