Singing: Andrzej Mitan and Birds. Cover: b/w, enclosed in mesh-wire. Design: Cezary Staniszewski, Andrzej Szewczyk.

Music: Andrzej Mitan. Cover: b/w, enclosed in white cloth. Design: Cezary Staniszewski, Andrzej Szewczyk.

Music: Krzystof Knittel. Cover: b/w, yellow handwritten name of composer, hairbushels affixed. Design: Wlodzimierz Borowski, Andrzej Szewczyk.

Perf: Arnold Dreyblatt, Wolfgang Glum, Jan Schade, Dirk Lebahn, Wolfgang Mettler.

Exhibition-catalogue as record-box, white with title sticker, contains loose sheets, 46 pages and a LP-record, 1986, Amerika Haus Berlin / Initiative Berlin-USA e.V. The record is a production of the Kunstlerhaus-Bethanien, Berlin.

Anderson is a composer, but more visibly she is a "performance artist", which gives the first clue to her popularity. Performance art is the fashionable discipline these days, having succeeded painting, theater, dance and video, all of which enjoyed their place in the trend-setting sun over the past two decades. But there is more to her success than that; there are other performance artists, after all. Anderson owes her special recognition to her mixture of music and performance, and specifically to the way she embraced new-wave rock without becoming its slave. In all her guises she is a performer who seized the attention and holds it. She has a delicious sense of humor, which is not all that common in either punk or the avan-garde. And she is a woman.

Her early pieces were short and clever, owing something to happenings and the post-Cageian avant-garde theater of composers like Ashley. She would play the violin, for instance, but in an unusual situation - like standing in a block of ice - that called fresh attention to this most familiar of actions. She wrote poetry, made conceptual installations in galleries, and recorded short songs and quirky instrumental pieces, all in preparations for her larger projects.

The most ambitious of these projects to date is called "United States I-IV", an attempt to embrace and understand her native country, the inspiration for which came during her ever more frequent European performances.

All her work, including "United States", is best described as solo opera - although in her larger-scale recent productions she has had accompanying musicians as well as assistants to help with the sound, lighting, tape recorders and slide and film projectors. Still, it is Anderson alone who is in the spotlight. The effect is like a highly attenuated art-rock concert, a stylized lecture or perhaps a poetry reading writ very large indeed, with every aspect of the poetic concept amplified and counterpointed by aural and visual imagery. The subject is herself on one level, but more generally, in the tradition of all autobiographical artists, her observations on whatever it is that is the subject of a given piece. -Excerpt from John Rockwell: All American Music. New York 1983. Cover: only in white protective cover.

Laurie Anderson: playing her viophonograph (Turntable) mounted on a violin; needle in bow; '45 has 1 note on each band-needle scrapes. (1976)