Name: Laurie Anderson. Empty Places. Schirmer/Mosel, 1994.
Availability: InStock

Published in 1994 by Schirmer/Mosel in Munich as volume 42 of Schirmer's Visuelle Bibliothek, this is the bilingual pocket edition of Laurie Anderson's Empty Places, the multimedia performance she toured across America and Europe in 1989 and 1990. The book gathers the complete text of the performance alongside lyrics from her album Strange Angels and a set of duotone photographs taken on tour. Anderson, by then already a decade past her unexpected pop crossover with O Superman, was using the Empty Places tour to push performance into a more directly political register: the United States as a country armed to the teeth, haunted by the future, and statistically certain about heaven. The original English edition, published in larger format by HarperPerennial in 1991, ran to over two hundred photographs in colour. The Schirmer edition is its condensed European counterpart, designed in the dual-language pocket format that defined the Visuelle Bibliothek series. Thirty-six duotone illustrations across 120 pages. German translation by Pociao de Hollanda. Softcover, 14.5 by 19.5 cm. Text in English and German. ISBN 9783888146794. A small object, made to live next to a record or a notebook rather than on a coffee table. Sourced for M.I.G. by Paris Image Unlimited as part of a thirty-three-title curation of rare art, photography, and design books. A reference for anyone tracking 1980s and 1990s performance art, the Strange Angels period of Anderson's work, or the Schirmer's Visuelle Bibliothek series as a collectible format in its own right.