"I'm a real workaholic"
About this Quote
The flat admission lands with Laurie Andersons characteristic deadpan, a mix of candor and sly commentary. As a performer, composer, storyteller, and inventor of instruments, she built a career that demands obsessive, iterative labor. Long before digital ease, she was soldering electronics, fashioning the tape-bow violin, layering vocoders and loops, and stitching together sprawling narrative performances. A line like this reads as simple autobiography: the work never stops because the work is the medium and the method.
It also hints at the culture that shaped her. The downtown New York scene of the 1970s and 80s prized DIY ingenuity. Stages like The Kitchen rewarded artists who engineered their own tools and languages. Projects such as United States I-IV, a marathon mosaic of American myths and media, required not only vision but a warehouse of hours. Later, as NASAs first artist-in-residence, she approached space itself as a studio, turning research and bureaucracy into material. To call oneself a workaholic in that context is to acknowledge that art at this scale is built from long days of tinkering, rehearsing, editing, and starting over.
Yet the phrase carries irony. Across her work, Anderson parses the scripts of technology, institutions, and corporate life; she knows how the term can sound like a badge of productivity culture. She recycles it with a shrug, both owning the compulsion to make and softly skewering the ideology that equates worth with output. For her, relentless activity often reads as relentless curiosity: staying up late to see how a sound changes a story, how a story changes a life. Even grief and memory become laboratories, as in Heart of a Dog, where making becomes a way of attending to loss.
So the remark becomes a self-portrait and a method. Work is not merely busyness; it is sustained attention, a way of listening and building until meaning reveals itself. The drive is fierce, but the outcome is often unexpectedly tender.
It also hints at the culture that shaped her. The downtown New York scene of the 1970s and 80s prized DIY ingenuity. Stages like The Kitchen rewarded artists who engineered their own tools and languages. Projects such as United States I-IV, a marathon mosaic of American myths and media, required not only vision but a warehouse of hours. Later, as NASAs first artist-in-residence, she approached space itself as a studio, turning research and bureaucracy into material. To call oneself a workaholic in that context is to acknowledge that art at this scale is built from long days of tinkering, rehearsing, editing, and starting over.
Yet the phrase carries irony. Across her work, Anderson parses the scripts of technology, institutions, and corporate life; she knows how the term can sound like a badge of productivity culture. She recycles it with a shrug, both owning the compulsion to make and softly skewering the ideology that equates worth with output. For her, relentless activity often reads as relentless curiosity: staying up late to see how a sound changes a story, how a story changes a life. Even grief and memory become laboratories, as in Heart of a Dog, where making becomes a way of attending to loss.
So the remark becomes a self-portrait and a method. Work is not merely busyness; it is sustained attention, a way of listening and building until meaning reveals itself. The drive is fierce, but the outcome is often unexpectedly tender.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work Ethic |
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