Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson's performances involve a synthesis of elements of music, performance (she plays in complex ways with voice and persona), visual/technological spectacle, and storytelling.

In the above story, Anderson tells a story about her dog. It seems at first a simple story, but – told in the wake of 9-11 – it carries allegorical resonances of political events and American attitudes after the terrorist attacks...


Anderson made her splash in popular culture with the chart-topping song O Superman, back in the 1980s. Anderson's song was at the time technologically innovative, and strangely haunting. Its lyrically complex, with dense imagery where, again, the domestic slides into the political and the homely (even cutesy) and the uncanny collide...

Chris Marker

filmmaker Chris Marker is a master of the play between image and word. His masterpiece is probably Sunless/Sans Soleil (1983), which weaves all kinds of mystery in the gap between voiceover and image, in the juxtaposition of images, and in the play between words.

This is how the film starts:

Victor Burgin

Much work around the relation between text and image has been done by photographers – perhaps because our everyday experience of photography is so frequently mediated by the written word, and we are quite accustomed to reading between photographic images and text from existing formats of the media.

A key figure – both a photographer and a prolific writer of photographic theory – who explored the artisti plays between image and text during the 1970s was Victor Burgin.

Victor Burgin,  Possession (1976).

The poster above was flyposted around the city. It plays on (and appropriates) advertising imagery and asks about questions of 'property' in terms of gender and sex as well as social equality. Of course, today's society is actually far more unequal than the one Burgin described back in 1976. At the time of my writing (Jan 2016) this there was has been within the newspapers in the last week a study which has noted that a mere 62 of the world's richest people own more than the poorest half of the world's population. Burgin's question might come back to us again today: What does possession mean to us?

Sensation, 1975

Burgin's work of the 70s also looked at questions of gender and at the way that the fashion industry worked.

Life Demands a Little Give and Take (1974)

Burgin often played with the appropriation of different modes of writing (in the above, a kind of advertising speak), and their contrast ('montage') with disparate images.