Laurie Anderson for Dummies

If language is a virus from outer space, performance is its downlink in the United States-and Laurie Anderson one of its most uncanny transmitters. Since the late I96os, Anderson's homey yet alien work has been short-circuiting the often great divides between street talk and philosophy, popular culture and experimental art, everyday life and its electronic ghost. Her preferred medium: an electric body in which gestures, stories, and songs mix with synthesizers, video projections, printed matter, and, most recently, personal computers. Over the years, this electric body has grown in crystalline fashion, its fractal structure reiterating and recombining simple components into diversifying assemblages. In 1974, Anderson performed Duets on Ice on the streets of New York, standing in skates with blades frozen in ice and playing cowboy songs on the Self-Playing Violin-an instrument whose music unwinds from magnetic tape loops. Twenty years later, this small bit haunts the edges of her latest media blitz, a storm of coordinated releases that include a worldwide tour of The Nerve Bible, two music CDs, a retrospective book, a proposal for a