Anderson's United States Popularizes Performance Art.

When she first emerged from the welter of minor instant celebrities in New York’s SoHo artistic community to claim a national audience early in 1983, Laurie Anderson was greeted with enthusiasm by punk rockers and serious avant-garde musicians alike. Onstage for the performance of her mixed-media spectacular United States, Anderson cultivated a distinctly androgynous appearance. In an undersized black suit punctuated by an improbable spiky punk haircut, she might have passed for Stan Laurel on his lunch hour, a refugee from a Samuel Beckett play, or even a barely repressed anarchist about to detonate a bomb. Her first semiotic message to her audience was disturbing, sexually ambivalent, and highly complicated.