Laurie Anderson. Heart of a Dog, 2015 (still). Courtesy of the Artist and Abramorama Entertainment.

The 75-minute film moves ethereally through the artist’s dreams, memories, and, perhaps most poignantly, her failures. The soundtrack is lean but emotive, comprising sparse string instrumentation, layers of synthetic beats and scratches, intermittent sound effects, and Anderson’s ever-present narration. Those familiar with Anderson’s work will recognize her distinctive voice: one full of air, released with great intention, one syllable at a time, her esses melting into a sibilant hiss. The accompanying footage maintains a similar airiness, many of the frames blurred by a heavy peripheral vignetting, or filtered through rain or haze. The images appearing onscreen are pulled from a variety of places. Anderson’s drawings, her own footage capturing her New York neighborhood along with West Side Highway, and the modest adventures of Lolabelle provide visual material for some of the film, while other scenes are borrowed from 8mm family movies from the artist’s youth and footage borrowed from Anderson’s other video works. The images remain indeterminate, abstracted—in the very way that memories and dreams are visually recalled.

Anderson’s voice serves as the tether for the wandering narratives and segmented philosophies woven together in Heart of a Dog. She speaks poetically about the shifting consciousness that she and other New Yorkers felt in the days after 9/11, when they realized that danger could come from the sky. She recounts the delirium of her dying mother, who in her final moments spoke tenderly to animals she saw hovering near the ceiling of her hospital room. She talks about her friend, sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark, his monumental artworks, and the tragedies and schisms in his own life that she sees as roots for his “anarchitectural” interventions. She folds in wisdom and witticisms from Søren Kierkegaard, David Foster Wallace, and her personal meditation coach, among others. “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” she says, quoting Kierkegaard; “Every love story is a ghost story,” channeling Foster Wallace. The words of Anderson’s partner, Lou Reed, close the film with humor lilting through the emotion of his song “Turning Time Around.”

Laurie Anderson. Heart of a Dog, 2015 (still). Courtesy of the Artist and Abramorama Entertainment.

If we rely on the title for cues, we may be tempted to focus too much on Lolabelle—the supposed “dog” of the title. But the central figure in Heart of a Dog is indeed not Lolabelle, but Anderson herself, and the heart in question is definitely human. Anderson displays effusive affection for Lolabelle. When the beloved rat terrier goes blind in her old age, Anderson and the dog’s trainer teach her to make paintings and sculpture, and to play piano. When Anderson travels to the West Coast to escape the freneticism of New York City after 9/11, it is Lolabelle who accompanies her on meandering romps to the Pacific Coast. And when Lolabelle is dying, Anderson stays by her side for her final three days, waiting with her for death. Summarizing her relationship with Lolabelle, she remarks, “We had learned to love Lola as she loved us, with a tenderness we didn’t know we had.”

Laurie Anderson. Heart of a Dog, 2015 (still). Courtesy of the Artist and Abramorama Entertainment.

Lolabelle acts as a foil for another central figure in the film: the artist’s mother. While Anderson is filled with affection for the dog, she confesses that she never was able to love the woman who raised her. She is not able to stir affection for her mother in the same way; she cannot easily identify a moment when her mother had loved her without hesitation. While Lolabelle’s death is described with calm and patience, Anderson’s mother’s death is recalled with a frantic rush of doctors and little time to share words. Tracing these two parallel relationships and their drastically opposing arcs over the space of the film, Anderson explores the “heart of a dog”—prodding the strangeness of her own heart, its limitations, its idiosyncrasies, its pleasures, and its regrets.

Laurie Anderson: Heart of a Dog was screened at the Avon Cinema in Providence, Rhode Island, on December 12, 2015.

Tomás Saraceno, Cloud Cities, installation view, image courtesy Berlin Art Link

This winter the Hamburger Bahnhof’s exhibitions are (mostly) devoted to artists influenced by utopian architecture, a decision made to coincide with Tomás Saraceno’s Cloud Cities, an investigation into sustainable living that borrows heavily from the language of visionary architects and futurists like Buckminster Fuller.

Saraceno’s “biospheres” are fun, enormous and inviting, with long lines of art-goers waiting for a moment of awkward repose over the Bahnhof’s hangar.  They allude to the plasticity of our “futures” (Saraceno prefers the plural) but they also seem kind of garish, like giant floaties at an eighties-themed pool party in West Hollywood.

When compared to Saraceno’s epic balloon opera, the drawings and models of early German modernist architects like Bruno Taut and Hanzel Weblik are pleasingly modest.  These are displayed downstairs, in small dark alcoves as part of the sprawling Architektonika exhibition.

Architektonika offers up a few real gems, among them Dieter Roth’s scrappy and feral Gartenskulptur, a garden-environment-installation that was added to, catalogued and maintained for thirty years by the artist and his son. Then there are photographs and remnants of Gordon Matta Clark’s 1977 Office Baroque in which the artist sliced open a building in Antwerp and created a teardrop shaped hole in the façade (which was slated for destruction).  The result emits a bodily pathos unusual for the inanimate.

Paul Laffoley, The Orgone Motor, 1981, courtesy of Kent Fine Art, New York

Upstairs Paul Laffoley offers his take on utopia as part of the Hamburger Bahnhof’s new Secret Universe series.  I’m really excited about this exhibition series, which will last for three years and focus on visionary artists whose multi-disciplinary practices may have been overlooked by the larger art community.  Finally, we can see what the weird uncles of the art world are up to.

Laffoley is a former architect who merges Eastern religious dogma, Futurism (among many other “isms”) and Carl Jung into intensely weird diagrammatic paintings.  His aims are lofty, and he seeks to illustrate complex imaginary systems like time travel, the fifth dimension and “Absolute Life.”

Laffoley, an artist devoted to the possibilities of other worlds spent many years making these paintings in a one-bedroom apartment he dubbed “The Boston Visionary Cell.”   Mandala-like, they aspire to a kind of “utopic space” with their own visual hierarchy.

In a lecture given in 2001, Laffoley stated about his mission to explore utopic space:

I have developed this task by means of symbols, perhaps the only way an individual can approach such a project. Real symbols move the mind up to and through metaphor and finally beyond to a semiotic state that has never been successfully named.

Laffoley goes on to claim that the concept of utopic space should serve “as a neutral sounding board for all attempts at plumbing or prophesying the future.” His paintings are filled with repetitive symbols including eyes, circles, stars, outstretched hands multicolored rays.  In another context, this could be a Bikram Yoga invite hidden underneath a windshield.  But with Laffoley, these symbols read as sincere parts of a dense personal lexicon.

Laffoley offers the occasional autobiographical nod, charting his lucid dreams in black and white panels, in one recounting sticking his finger into someone’s “soft eye.”

Paul Laffoley, The Renovatio Mundi, 1977, courtesy Kent Fine Art

He offers advice culled from Eastern ideas of non-resistance in vinyl letters, claiming that “All suffering is the separation of boredom and care.” His works are taped off, crisp and obsessive, but possess a kind of sympathetic craziness, like Laffoley isn’t being intentionally obtuse, he’s just your everyday Shaman, trying to spare you psychic pain.

Presenting a less utopian vision of the future is the neighboring National Gallery Prize for Young Art, exhibition, which shows the work of the four artists who competed for Germany’s annual 50,000 euro award.

Cyprien Gaillard, Artefact, film still 2011, courtesy Sprueth Magers Gallery

This year, the prize went to French artist Cyprien Gaillard, a headline-grabber who moves between mediums like beer and neon.  At the Hamburger Bahnhof Gaillard shows the more nuanced “Artefacts,” a slow moving cinematic collage of contemporary Iraq, which weaves together tropes of Babylonian antiquity and American militarism.  Gaillard lingers both on the famed Ishtar Gate as well as soldiers shooting green lasers into a receding desert.  The film was shot originally on Gaillards’ Iphone, but was transferred later to 35 mm, creating an anachronistic loop, which is reinforced by the repeating phrase “Babylon,” from the David Grey song.

Klara Lidén, a beloved Berlin artist whose urban interventions, sculpture and performative acts are usually so sharp, offers up a lackluster contribution in the name of institutional critique. Liden presents a video of herself climbing into a trash can, set to the tune of “Helpless” as well as a manicured hedge at the museum’s entrance in the shape of a dumpster.

Andro Wekua’s film and adjoining installation are more ambitious, but rely too heavily on saturated colors and the tropes of surrealism.

Kitty Kraus is the only artist to eschew video, but her kinetic sculptures share a sequential and rhythmic similarity to film nonetheless.  The pieces, like minimal metal characters, are forged from found handles and made in reference to the guillotine.  They seem dangerous and unhinged (literally).  Kraus’ work questions the way we move in the world with austere and poetic precision.

Theo Solnik, Anna Pavlova Lives in Berlin, film still, 2011, courtesy of the artist

A new addition this year is the National Gallery Prize for Young Film-Art.  The winning film Anna Pavlova Lives in Berlin by Theo Solnik is an enthralling black and white character study of a party girl whose exploits in Kreuzberg seem more elegiac than depraved.  Through drugs, alcohol and sex, Anna Pavlova clouds her own reality, creating a romantic vision of herself and the world.

DS: So!  Since I haven’t seen you in a while, are you closest to Man, Woman, or Child?

CS: Closest to Child!  But since I’m doing these hair events, I’ve been growing the beard back.  It’s just not very long.  I have scruff, but it’s not a “beard” beard.

Chris Sollars, "Man Woman Child," 2011. 3 Framed C-prints, 20" x 26" each.

DS: I have to ask, which came first, the beard or the art?

CS: Well, even before the beard, I’ve always known that I wanted to make a wig of my long hair, which I’ve had since high school, and wear it at a later date. That’s why the title is Hair and the subtitle is When I’m 64.  I like the collision of those two moments of time—wearing hair from when I was thirty-four when I’m sixty-four.  So I think that piece came first.  As for the beard, I started growing it, and it just turned into its own thing.  My girlfriend took a long trip and by the time she got back, I already had a bunch of things I wanted to do with it.  Before I cut it, I wanted to let it grow a little longer and let it live on its own, and it inspired a series of works.  I’d done a performance in 1998 at Skowhegan where I went to a tool shop in Maine with a lot of old tools and was drawn toward this long handled axe… I personally tried to sharpen it and make a video of me shaving with it.  Of course, I didn’t have much hair back then, because I was 22, and I didn’t have the capacity to grow hair like I do now.  Anyway, I decided that with this new beard I wanted to do it again, with an axe.  Working with my wigmaker, however, I had to grow the beard as long as possible, and if I was going to shave it off with an axe, it wouldn’t work as a wig.  It’s a really a rare thing, to make a wig out of someone’s own beard hair, because you’re hand-knotting, and working with different clumps of hair—looping it like a rug—and it’s a difficult thing, even if your beard is really long, because it’s still so short.

Chris Sollars, "Hair: When I'm 64," 2011-2040. Hand-knotted wig made of human hair. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Beard," 2011. Hand-knotted facial hair. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: It’s probably pretty brittle, too.

CS: Yeah. So I decided to do the beard wig first, and then grow back a beard that was substantial enough to shave off with an axe.  So that was the process.  And in between, before I cut off all the hair, I wanted to do a series of related videos.

DS: Were you intentionally trying to touch on issues of gender and masculinity?

CS: Well, yeah.  I named the triptych (the photographs of myself) Man Woman Child (2011) on purpose, because… Well, a child would never have a beard like that and a woman would never have a beard to that extent.  I’ve always had fine hair, and I’ve always been in between being kind of “girlie” and, well, not.

Chris Sollars, "Shave," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: Shaving your beard with an axe is such an over the top gesture!  And you’re wearing this plaid flannel.  But I noticed that as you started to talk about your work, you weren’t talking about gender as much as you were talking about intersecting moments in time, or an interest in working with certain tools.

CS: Well, [the interest in the axe] led to that.  It led to the absurdity of knowing that I could cut down trees, but that I could also cut my face with the thing!  There’s a moment in the videos where there’s a cut or change or rupture that happens.  I’m thinking of the video edit like I am cutting hair, so there’s a real switch that happens, a change of one’s look, or the change that can happen with a cut when you juxtapose one image with the next.  Leading up to the show, in fact, and even currently, I’ve been hiding out a little bit, just until people have seen that work [and realize that Sollars is now totally clean-shaven]. It’s kind of a strange performance that’s still going on.  I was even wearing costumes to change my identity around town. I didn’t want to reveal that I’d cut my hair until the show had opened.  I realized as soon as I cut my long hair that that pieces like mine and like Chris Burden’s I Became A Secret Hippy (1971) don’t exist as just performances, but as pieces of our identity from that point forward.

Chris Sollars, "Hair Lay," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Hair Ball," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Beard Rub," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: What about race? Does that play in at all?  I might be reading more into the project than what you intend, but I read an article in the New York Times about Matta Clark’s Clock Shower (1973), and writer’s spin was about how it was this glorious time in New York when this guy could walk to the top of the Clocktower building and cover himself in shaving cream and then diddle with the clock.  And my thought was yeah, if he’s white, he can do this.  Going from that thought, and looking at your work, which includes this golden ball of hair surveying a forest and the golden blonde Hair Lays and the Beard Rubs, which seem to be about marking or claiming in certain ways, I’m just curious if there are any thoughts about…

CS: …about identity in relation to race?  Well, I think that perception of where I exist culturally, or politically or socially, changes with the haircut.  Going back to Burden’s Secret Hippy, you might be a countercultural person, but you’re wiped of that in terms of your identity.  I guess that’s why I also looked at Ana Mendieta’s piece with the transplanting of the man’s beard onto her face, taking on that masculinity.  Or Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being.  So I’m aware of these female performances and cross cultural performances with hair and identity, and I was thinking, okay, so if there’s this white man art with these things opposed to it or juxtaposed against it, what is white male identity art?  Or what is it specifically to me?  I guess that’s why I focus so much on the hair as a material, like with close-ups of the hair grain, which I think of as wood grain.  Kind of just investigating what is it that my being is made up of.  You know, the scraggly curly beard hair, the long fine hair… What happens when I change?  When I’m separated from it?  How does it exist on its own as an abstraction, like with the Hair Lays, or the beard itself rubbing on things?  I think the masculine action of shaving with an axe kind of completes the picture of that identity of that person.  And I’ve been so influenced by a lot of that ‘70s work that I was curious about performing that investigation on myself.