A Conversation with Laurie Anderson and Julian Schnabel

Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned—and daring—creative pioneers. Her work, which encompasses music, visual art, poetry, film, and photography, has challenged and delighted audiences around the world for more than forty years. In a recent "60 Minutes" profile, Anderson Cooper said she “is a pioneer of the avant-garde, but ... that doesn’t begin to describe what she creates. Her work isn’t sold in galleries. It’s experienced by audiences who come to see her perform: singing, telling stories, and playing strange violins of her own invention ... she [blends] the beautiful and the bizarre, challenging audiences with homilies and humor. She blurs boundaries across music, theater, dance, and film.” The Washington Post has said she “doesn’t just tell stories; she draws out every word with a kind of physical pleasure, tasting its flavor as she probes the everyday mysteries of life,” and the Guardian has called Anderson “one of the great popular artists and storytellers of our time.”

Anderson released her first album with Nonesuch Records in 2001, the critically lauded Life on a String. Her subsequent releases on the label include Live in New York (2002), Homeland (2010), the soundtrack to Anderson’s acclaimed film Heart of a Dog (2015), and her Grammy-winning collaboration with Kronos Quartet, Landfall (2018). Additionally, Anderson’s virtual-reality film La Camera Insabbiata, with Hsin-Chien Huang, won the 2017 Venice Film Festival Award for Best VR Experience, and, in 2018, Skira Rizzoli published her book All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code, the most comprehensive collection of her artwork to date.

Recent exhibitions and installations of Anderson’s work include Habeas Corpus at New York’s Park Avenue Armory; her largest exhibition to date, The Weather, at Washington, DC’s Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art; and Looking into a Mirror Sideways at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, which was her largest European exhibition to date. Anderson recently toured with Sex Mob, performing her piece Let X=X. Earlier this year, she was awarded the 2024 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, along with Christopher Nolan and David Attenborough, and the International Astronomical Union named a minor planet in her honor: Asteroid 270588.

laurieanderson

Photo: Ebru Yildiz

Julian Schnabel’s work has been exhibited all over the world.  His paintings, sculptures, and works on paper have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1982;The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1982; Tate Gallery, London, 1982; Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1987; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, 1987; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1987; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1987; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1987; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, 1989; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, 1989; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1989; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 1989; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1989; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Monterrey, 1994; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1995; Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna, 1996; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main, 2004; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2004; Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma, Helsinki, 2008;  Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, 2009; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2010; Museo Correr, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 2011; The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, 2013; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, 2014; Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2014; NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, 2014; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2016; Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco, 2018; and Hall Art Foundation, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, 2017, 2022 and 2023.

Schnabel, an award-winning film director, has written and directed seven feature films. In 1995, Schnabel wrote and directed his first feature film, Basquiat, about fellow New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The film was released in 1996 and was in the official selection of the Venice Film Festival the same year. Schnabel’s second film, Before Night Falls, based on the life of the late exiled Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Venice Film Festival and Javier Bardem won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor. Javier Bardem was also nominated for Best Actor at the 2001 Academy Awards. In 2007 Schnabel directed his third film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  Schnabel received the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival as well as Best Director at the Golden Globe Awards, where the film won Best Foreign Language Film.  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Director. The film was also nominated for seven 2008 César Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor for which Mathieu Amalric won for his portrayal of Jean-Dominque Bauby.  In 2007, he also made a film of Lou Reed’s Berlin concert at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.  Miral, won the UNESCO as well as the UNICEF award at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.  Miral was shown at the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations.  At Eternity’s Gate (2018), a film about Vincent Van Gogh starring Willem Dafoe had its world premiere at the 2018 Venice Film Festival and was nominated for the Golden Lion Award. Dafoe won the Coppa Volpi at the 2018 Venice Film Festival and was nominated for Best Actor at the Golden Globes and 2019 Academy Awards. Schnabel has recently completed his seventh feature film, In the Hand of Dante, a film adaptation of Nick Tosches’s third novel of the same name, starring Oscar Isaac as well as Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Jason Momoa, Al Pacino, and Martin Scorsese. In the Hand of Dante will be released in the 2024/2025 season.

His work is in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Fondation Musée d’ArtModerne, Luxembourg;  Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Hall Art Foundation.

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Julian Schnabel. Photo: Louise Kugelberg, 2016