Washington

The composer John Cage described his collaborations with dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham as “less like an object and more like the weather. Because in an object, you can tell where the boundaries are. But in the weather, it’s impossible to say when something begins or ends.”

“Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirschhorn...

Washington

The composer John Cage described his collaborations with dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham as “less like an object and more like the weather. Because in an object, you can tell where the boundaries are. But in the weather, it’s impossible to say when something begins or ends.”

‘Laurie Anderson: The Weather’

Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, through July 31, 2022

“Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden invokes Cage’s meteorological trope in the title, and it’s apt for her retrospective. Since emerging in the 1970s from New York’s downtown art, music and performance scenes, and scoring a surprise pop hit in 1981 with her song “O Superman” (reaching No. 2 on the British charts), she has floated unpredictably across genres.

During that time, her persona—mediated by photography, film and video, synthesized voice and amplified violin—has not fluctuated. Wry, genial, brainy, allusive rather than literal, relentlessly curious about new technology, and still puckish at age 74, she projects an androgynous otherworldliness that, like David Byrne’s, seems more germane than ever.

As a career summary, “Weather” is fittingly unorthodox. The 51 pieces have been installed by Marina Isgro, associate curator of media and performance art, in no discernible order and with a dearth of examples from the 1980s and ’90s, arguably her peak of renown. It was reportedly Ms. Anderson’s idea to highlight her latest works.

These are only intermittently successful. “Salute” (2021), in the second gallery, consists of eight red flags on robotic arms that can’t seem to coordinate their flapping—low comedy without a payoff. The eight monumental oil paintings in one of the last galleries, background sets for her not-yet-staged opera “ARK,” won’t enhance her legacy.

Several of the pieces play with extremes of scale—sometimes effectively, sometimes not. The realistic clay figures projected as video in “Citizens” (2021) are 9 inches tall and placed in a row on the floor. Should we ignore or step on them, the sound of knives being sharpened warns us that we do so at our peril. (The threat of violence is present in the title, which carries echoes of the French Revolution.)

Laurie Anderson, ‘Habeas Corpus’ (2015)

Photo: Laurie Anderson: Ron Blunt

Further on, in what is Ms. Anderson’s most overtly political statement, “Habeas Corpus” (2015) tells the story of Mohammed el Gharani. Captured as a teenager in Pakistan and imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay for seven years until released by court order in 2009, he is seen as a giant video image, seated in a white armchair in a corner. As he is forbidden from entering the U.S., his testimony via video is necessary. He remains stateless. His biography would likely be even more poignant, though, were he rendered human-size instead of as a pharaonic colossus (albeit childlike, in gray running shoes) who dwarfs spectators in a darkened room.

The centerpiece of the show is “Four Talks” (2021). It’s an enveloping cloud of chalk-written phrases, interwoven with cartoonish figures and landscapes, that blanket every surface of a black-walled room except the lighted ceiling. Within the whirlwind, Ms. Anderson refers to everything from her own song titles (“It’s not the bullet that kills you—it’s the hole,” from 1977) and the John Cage quote to benign ethnic jokes and mordant homilies (“If you think technology will solve your problems, then you don’t understand technology—or your problems”).

This immersion in words, a seemingly boundless, tumbling stream of them, underscores that Ms. Anderson is at heart a storyteller. Her song lyrics are laced with skepticism about the hubris of science and government, and sensitive to mundane longings, her own and those of others. She is currently the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, and her new work honors traditional media—books and newspapers (including this one) figure throughout the galleries—while updating her communication tool chest. “Scroll,” another unsatisfying 2021 piece, consists of a Bible with AI-generated text supplemented by Ms. Anderson’s own writing.

An accepted member of New York’s professional avant-garde since the early 1970s, she first attracted notice as a performance artist. Two early pieces, documented in photographs, pop up toward the end of the show. “The Institutional Dream Series” (1972-73) was an experiment to see if her dreams were affected by places—a New York courtroom, the beach at Coney Island—where she lay down and went to sleep. “Object/Objection/Objectivity (Fully Automated Nikon )” (1973) is a caustic record of swinish male behavior on the street directed at her and her camera. The last gallery contains posters of her concerts over the decades, while a vitrine holds her digital and neon-illuminated violins along with other customized instruments.

Laurie Anderson ‘Four Talks’ (2021)

Photo: Laurie Anderson/Photo: Ron Blunt

What is largely missing here is Ms. Anderson’s dynamism on stage. Opening the show is “Drum Dance” from her 1986 self-directed concert film “The Home of the Brave” (1986). In the projected clip, she dances while pounding on her body, electronically outfitted to reproduce thunderous percussive sounds. Next January through July, when Covid-19 will presumably have abated and she is scheduled to give a series of live performances at the museum, visitors should be able to experience more of her less confined, object-laden inventions.

—Mr. Woodward is an arts writer in New York.