WEEKEND REVIEWS : Pop : Stream of Consciousness From the Anti-Madonna

Laurie Anderson despises Jesse Helms and the right wing too, but in most other ways she’s the Anti-Madonna: “I’d probably be more excited about ‘expressing myself’ if I hadn’t gone to her concert and thought ‘Ann-Margret. I’m watching Ann-Margret’s Vegas revue,’ ” Anderson told her audience Saturday. Ultimately, she finds Madonna’s shtick “more about selling yourself than owning yourself.”

No one was about to mistake UCLA’s Royce Hall for Glitter Gulch when multimedia artist Anderson brought her own scaled-down revue there in what was billed (mysteriously, to much of the curious awaiting audience) as an “informal talk.” There was indeed plenty of talk, but not much informality: Her wide-flung stream of consciousness was as tightly scripted as her big-scale shows always are.

More than anyone else, Anderson has made “performance art” a less mysterious thing, picking up a rep as a great unheralded comic. Sans the songs ‘n’ slides that characterize her usual productions, Saturday’s show was politically charged stand-up at its best, with a seasoned raconteur nearly as fast-talking as a Robin Williams. She termed herself “a disguised moralist” but was hardly in disguise.

What separates Anderson from any pack is her ability to maintain a sense of wonder amid her anger, which is largely archly directed at conservatives and the media. Her most marvelous shows tend to bring together the anecdotal and the eternal, like joke-trading under a brilliant desert star-field.

Until the last few spooky minutes, this one was weighted on the anecdotal side, with much topical name-dropping appreciations of Burroughs and Mapplethorpe; digs at Reagan, Bush (“We’re caught in some ‘Fa ther Knows Best’ episode where father has forgotten how to talk”) and post-war delirium; a “Future Shock” treatment of trends in the avant-garde, whose bud ding artists foresee the course of their careers as “minimal suffering followed by a Gap ad.”

Anderson may not be “selling herself” a la Madonna, but she’s giving certain ideas the hard sell, which causes her to occasionally stoop to cliches like calling the ‘80s “the decade of greed,” grossly simplify ing the terms of the censorship debate, or using her Vocoder to satirize Reagan as an authoritarian electronic cowpoke. Pedantic missteps aside, though, there’s real delight in the way Anderson plays truth-or-dare in the actual service of truth.