What do you think?
Rate this book
SIGNED - LAURIE ANDERSON - ALL THE THINGS I LOST IN THE FLOOD 2018 1ST/1ST FINE
An icon of performance art and the indie-music world, this is the first book on the artist’s full career to date, as curated by the artist herself. Laurie Anderson is one of the most revered artists working today, and she is as prolific as she is inventive. She is a musician, performance artist, composer, fiction writer, and filmmaker (her most recent foray, Heart of a Dog , was lauded as an “experimental marvel” by the Los Angeles Times). Anderson moves seamlessly between the music world and the fine-art world while maintaining her stronghold in both. A true polymath, her interest in new media made her an early pioneer of harnessing technology for artistic purposes long before the technology boom of the last ten years. Regardless of the medium, however, it is exploration of language (and how it seeps into the image) and storytelling that is her métier.A few years ago, Anderson began poring through her extensive archive of nearly forty years of work, which includes scores of documentation, notebooks, and sketchbooks. In the process, she rediscovered important work and looked at well-known projects with a new lens. In this landmark volume, the artist brings together the most comprehensive collection of her artwork to date, some of which has never before been seen or published. Spanning drawing, multimedia installations, performance, and new projects using augmented reality, the extensive volume traverses four decades of her groundbreaking art. Each chapter includes commentary written by Anderson herself, offering an intimate understanding of her work through the artist’s own words.
- GenresMusicNonfictionArt
Hardcover
Published January 1, 2018
5 people are currently reading
286 people want to read
About the author
Unknown
506k books3,211 followersBooks can be attributed to "Unknown" when the author or editor (as applicable) is not known and cannot be discovered. If at all possible, list at least one actual author or editor for a book instead of using "Unknown".
Books whose authorship is purposefully withheld should be attributed instead to Anonymous.
Books whose authorship is purposefully withheld should be attributed instead to Anonymous.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 13, 2018
My review for the Chicago Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifesty...
A truism about live performance of any kind is that it is ephemeral. Laurie Anderson’s hybrid, high-spirited and highly engaging “All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language, and Code” commences with a calm reminder that really, all art is ephemeral; in fact, everything is ephemeral, subject to being swept away by impersonal forces over which humans have little to no control.
Anderson opens the collection with the 2012 landfall of Hurricane Sandy, when “the black water rose up over the banks, crossed the highway, and turned our street into a dark silky river. ” Two days later, she goes down to the basement she shares with her husband, Lou Reed, “to have a look at the equipment and materials I had assumed were soaked but still salvageable” only to find that “Nothing was left.”
Yet in spite — or perhaps because — of this sober opening, Anderson presents here a lively, lucid and life-affirming look at her own dizzying career, an honest and seemingly exhaustive excavation of her philosophies and motivations. “And I looked at them floating there/ all the things I had carefully/ saved all my life,” she writes in the opening piece, “And I thought how beautiful/ how magic and how catastrophic.”
As this book essentially floats the reader back over these transitory things, one begins to realize: In a world that increasingly encourages artists to hyperspecialize and stick to a personal brand, Anderson remains one of our most fascinating and exuberant polymaths. Having released seven albums and counting, as well as having exhibited around the world at such venues as the Park Avenue Armory in New York and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Anderson joyfully refuses, as the saying goes, to stay in her lane, ranging instead all over the place, across fields and projects with uninhibited abandon and intense thoughtfulness.
As a performance artist, composer, musician, installation artist, software designer, writer and filmmaker, Anderson’s brilliant and motley oeuvre spans 40-plus years. Lavish yet intimate, “All the Things I Lost in the Flood” arrives as the first book assessing her prolific output as a whole. “I’ve tried to make a personal as well as a somewhat casual book,” she says, and she has succeeded.
Curated by Anderson herself, the book has the person-to-person feel of going on a private tour of the artist’s archive as she herself makes real time discoveries, like when she notes: “In looking at the way I’ve told the story of the United States, I realize I’ve been describing the shift from aspirational democracy to privatization and corporate culture.” Or when she writes, “My difficulties in designing endings is also the reason I never have intermissions in my concert which require you to have two beginnings and two endings.”
Composed of eight chapters, the book affords a non-chronological retrospective of her major projects, ranging in scale, scope and tone from 2015’s critical, serious and heartbreaking “Habeas Corpus” — inspired in part by Mohammed el Gharani, one of the youngest detainees at Guantanamo — to the lighthearted and moving “Concert for Dogs,” which is exactly what it sounds like, and which she began touring in Sydney, Australia, in 2010.
As fans might expect, the book — as gorgeous an object as it is, crowded with photographs, film stills, virtual reality renderings, diagrams and scripts — has a pleasingly improvisatory and handmade feel. Paging through, one senses that the term that encompasses the multifarious work that Anderson has done over the decades is “story” — and how even when she’s at her strangest and most conceptual, language and narrative serve as her indispensable anchors.
In each section, she grants the reader a behind-the-scenes examination of how all these luminescent threads of story occur to her, and how time after time, she weaves them into art that is inquisitive, human, funny, sad and fun. Fun can seem like a trivializing word, but a trait that appears to unify all her undertakings is an extremely serious approach to play, one that is as utterly crucial as it might at first seem paradoxical.
Her obvious love and admiration for her influencers and collaborators — Gertrude Stein, Sol LeWitt, William S. Burroughs, Brian Eno, Susan Sontag, Laura Poitras, and Herman Melville to name a few — feels joyful to behold. And her work ethic takes one’s breath away, even as she admits, disarmingly, that “I usually feel I am running out of time and haven’t accomplished enough.”
In her dedication, Anderson expresses profound gratitude to her many teachers, in particular her late husband and frequent artistic partner, Reed. “I want to thank them,” she writes, “for their deep generosity and for the ways they showed me how to persist, focus, love and work every day.” This book makes the reader grateful to Anderson for doing the same.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifesty...
A truism about live performance of any kind is that it is ephemeral. Laurie Anderson’s hybrid, high-spirited and highly engaging “All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language, and Code” commences with a calm reminder that really, all art is ephemeral; in fact, everything is ephemeral, subject to being swept away by impersonal forces over which humans have little to no control.
Anderson opens the collection with the 2012 landfall of Hurricane Sandy, when “the black water rose up over the banks, crossed the highway, and turned our street into a dark silky river. ” Two days later, she goes down to the basement she shares with her husband, Lou Reed, “to have a look at the equipment and materials I had assumed were soaked but still salvageable” only to find that “Nothing was left.”
Yet in spite — or perhaps because — of this sober opening, Anderson presents here a lively, lucid and life-affirming look at her own dizzying career, an honest and seemingly exhaustive excavation of her philosophies and motivations. “And I looked at them floating there/ all the things I had carefully/ saved all my life,” she writes in the opening piece, “And I thought how beautiful/ how magic and how catastrophic.”
As this book essentially floats the reader back over these transitory things, one begins to realize: In a world that increasingly encourages artists to hyperspecialize and stick to a personal brand, Anderson remains one of our most fascinating and exuberant polymaths. Having released seven albums and counting, as well as having exhibited around the world at such venues as the Park Avenue Armory in New York and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Anderson joyfully refuses, as the saying goes, to stay in her lane, ranging instead all over the place, across fields and projects with uninhibited abandon and intense thoughtfulness.
As a performance artist, composer, musician, installation artist, software designer, writer and filmmaker, Anderson’s brilliant and motley oeuvre spans 40-plus years. Lavish yet intimate, “All the Things I Lost in the Flood” arrives as the first book assessing her prolific output as a whole. “I’ve tried to make a personal as well as a somewhat casual book,” she says, and she has succeeded.
Curated by Anderson herself, the book has the person-to-person feel of going on a private tour of the artist’s archive as she herself makes real time discoveries, like when she notes: “In looking at the way I’ve told the story of the United States, I realize I’ve been describing the shift from aspirational democracy to privatization and corporate culture.” Or when she writes, “My difficulties in designing endings is also the reason I never have intermissions in my concert which require you to have two beginnings and two endings.”
Composed of eight chapters, the book affords a non-chronological retrospective of her major projects, ranging in scale, scope and tone from 2015’s critical, serious and heartbreaking “Habeas Corpus” — inspired in part by Mohammed el Gharani, one of the youngest detainees at Guantanamo — to the lighthearted and moving “Concert for Dogs,” which is exactly what it sounds like, and which she began touring in Sydney, Australia, in 2010.
As fans might expect, the book — as gorgeous an object as it is, crowded with photographs, film stills, virtual reality renderings, diagrams and scripts — has a pleasingly improvisatory and handmade feel. Paging through, one senses that the term that encompasses the multifarious work that Anderson has done over the decades is “story” — and how even when she’s at her strangest and most conceptual, language and narrative serve as her indispensable anchors.
In each section, she grants the reader a behind-the-scenes examination of how all these luminescent threads of story occur to her, and how time after time, she weaves them into art that is inquisitive, human, funny, sad and fun. Fun can seem like a trivializing word, but a trait that appears to unify all her undertakings is an extremely serious approach to play, one that is as utterly crucial as it might at first seem paradoxical.
Her obvious love and admiration for her influencers and collaborators — Gertrude Stein, Sol LeWitt, William S. Burroughs, Brian Eno, Susan Sontag, Laura Poitras, and Herman Melville to name a few — feels joyful to behold. And her work ethic takes one’s breath away, even as she admits, disarmingly, that “I usually feel I am running out of time and haven’t accomplished enough.”
In her dedication, Anderson expresses profound gratitude to her many teachers, in particular her late husband and frequent artistic partner, Reed. “I want to thank them,” she writes, “for their deep generosity and for the ways they showed me how to persist, focus, love and work every day.” This book makes the reader grateful to Anderson for doing the same.
February 7, 2019
It's difficult to overstate the huge influence that Laurie Anderson's book Stories from the Nerve Bible (1993) has had on my thinking about art and life. I still routinely quote passages from it. All the Things I Lost in the Flood fills in a lot of what she's been up to since then, including a lot of installation work as well as performances, pieces that I had heard of and wished I could have experienced.
I think the only new pieces of hers I've experienced since that first book came out were Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, which gets significant treatment in this new volume (it precipitated my first trip to NYC in 1999), The Speed of Darkness (1996 or so, which she doesn't talk about at all in this book, but I'm pretty sure that was the name of the show I saw her do on a pier in Seattle around then), and Landfall (2014, with the Kronos Quartet, which I saw at the Cité de la Musique, or the Philharmonie I, as they now want it to be known for some reason, in Paris). I also saw her give a talk in Boston a few years back. I don't think it's sacrilege to assert that this new work is not as vital as her early work, or maybe I should just say that it doesn't have the same totemic effect for me. But it's still fascinating to read about; it feels a bit like getting caught up with an old friend after too long.
In addition to the new work, older works like As:If (1974) are presented in ways that provide a bit of tantalizing new perspective, supplementing what was already presented in Nerve Bible. She talks about why there isn't a lot of documentation of these early works, but I would still love to see a volume that pulls together everything that exists in high resolution to allow readers to try to imagine what it might have been like, like a script with photographs for study. But that would be a different volume.
A few weird things about the book itself: lots of pictures, but many of them are super tiny so as not to be so useful. Also, like the cover, the photos at the start of each chapter have been sort of traced and painted in a way that makes me really wish I could just see the original photo.
It's great to read the essays that start each chapter and see the resonances between early and more recent works. She quotes herself, but that's normal. One of the most important things she's taught me over the years is how life and art can kind of be the same thing.
Thank you, Laurie!
I think the only new pieces of hers I've experienced since that first book came out were Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, which gets significant treatment in this new volume (it precipitated my first trip to NYC in 1999), The Speed of Darkness (1996 or so, which she doesn't talk about at all in this book, but I'm pretty sure that was the name of the show I saw her do on a pier in Seattle around then), and Landfall (2014, with the Kronos Quartet, which I saw at the Cité de la Musique, or the Philharmonie I, as they now want it to be known for some reason, in Paris). I also saw her give a talk in Boston a few years back. I don't think it's sacrilege to assert that this new work is not as vital as her early work, or maybe I should just say that it doesn't have the same totemic effect for me. But it's still fascinating to read about; it feels a bit like getting caught up with an old friend after too long.
In addition to the new work, older works like As:If (1974) are presented in ways that provide a bit of tantalizing new perspective, supplementing what was already presented in Nerve Bible. She talks about why there isn't a lot of documentation of these early works, but I would still love to see a volume that pulls together everything that exists in high resolution to allow readers to try to imagine what it might have been like, like a script with photographs for study. But that would be a different volume.
A few weird things about the book itself: lots of pictures, but many of them are super tiny so as not to be so useful. Also, like the cover, the photos at the start of each chapter have been sort of traced and painted in a way that makes me really wish I could just see the original photo.
It's great to read the essays that start each chapter and see the resonances between early and more recent works. She quotes herself, but that's normal. One of the most important things she's taught me over the years is how life and art can kind of be the same thing.
Thank you, Laurie!
Want to read
April 24, 2018I'm excited to start this book!
...and she is at UBC Chan Centre this Saturday night
...and she is at UBC Chan Centre this Saturday night
July 20, 2025
This book - wow. At some point it just dawned on me that her thinking, writing and relating to the reader about her art is a work of art in and of itself. Yes there are dazzling pictures of her various works but there is so much in her written words that I came out with a new appreciation of her ingenuity and uniqueness. She is one of those people that I could listen to her read a phone book and be captivated. To this point, I think it helped that I’ve listened to quite a few interviews she’s given so I just played her voice and its tones and mannerisms in my head as I read this book.
I just kept reminding myself that she was writing about things (including a partner) she’d lost and was so wondrously grateful for their existence while simultaneously being at peace with their loss. This was an incredible and poignant lesson to take away from this book: stuff (and people) come and go but the impact they have on you can forever remain with you.
I just kept reminding myself that she was writing about things (including a partner) she’d lost and was so wondrously grateful for their existence while simultaneously being at peace with their loss. This was an incredible and poignant lesson to take away from this book: stuff (and people) come and go but the impact they have on you can forever remain with you.
October 13, 2019
While this book does not explore the effects of Hurricane Sandy on Laurie Anderson's life as much as the title and dust jacket suggest, it succeeds in using the hurricane motif as a jumping-off point for a review of her career. Anderson lost her archive when the hurricane flooded her basement. She summons up these lost memories by retelling stories, musings, and ideas from her five-decade career as a visual artist and musician. (There are enough high-quality photos and schematics in here to indicate that Anderson and her collaborators kept copies elsewhere, but one wonders what gems were lost in the flood.) Those familiar with Anderson's career may find this book overly familiar, as Anderson reuses prose from "Nothing in My Pockets" and some of her public lectures, but it succeeds as a portfolio and as a primer, especially for graduate students and art fans.
February 13, 2018
Wonderful book by Laurie Anderson, about her own art. It's filed with photo's many new to me. But I love the most are Laurie's writing about her work. How she approaches things.
The book is a work of art in itself, and I love how it makes you wonder about things from page one.
What a treasure it is!
The book is a work of art in itself, and I love how it makes you wonder about things from page one.
What a treasure it is!
July 21, 2018
An unsentimental memoir - a look at the work of Anderson, just the work. So much great work. Essentially it's a "critical autobiography". But of course it's an artwork in and of itself, a photo book, an essay book, so much in her. Huge depth and insight. Wonderful.
July 29, 2019
Just kill me now. Don't make me finish listening to this audiobook.
February 19, 2021
Enjoyed this historical, autobiographical overview of her work. Especially nice to find that many of the videos of her performances described here still can be found on YouTube.
July 16, 2022
Can't wait to see her at the Smithsonian next weekend!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews