SOME SURPRISING TURNS FOR LAURIE ANDERSON.

Byline: Rob Lowman Entertainment Editor

LAURIE ANDERSON was worried about two things - being misunderstood and her ``Happiness.''

She had just talked to a group of students at University of California, Santa Barbara, on the day her new work, ``Happiness,'' was about to make its world premiere. It seems one of the students had, at the end of the session, brought up the ``gnarly'' question of the purpose of art, and Anderson had essentially implied that it didn't have one, and then didn't have time to elaborate.

``Art is not to make our lives nicer, better. It's not to make us better people. And I think he didn't get it, and I'm feeling guilty now,'' she explains, adding that, ``otherwise, (art) is too much like gourmet cooking. It's supposed to make things more pleasant and beautiful. But it really comes out of chaos and adventure and not knowing things.''

Which leads nicely to ``Happiness,'' which comes to UCLA's Royce Hall on Saturday. In it, Anderson links some 25 stories with lots of music. Like her latest album, ``Life on a String,'' the New Yorker is taking a stripped-down approach, a stark contrast from earlier, elaborate multimedia works like ``Songs and Stories From 'Moby-Dick,' '' and ``United States.''

Part of ``Happiness'' stems from Anderson's experiences away from her art-world culture. She took a job at a McDonald's last year, learning to fill drinks properly and deal with customers. Anderson also worked on an Amish farmer near Lancaster, Pa., picking weeds and making scarecrows, ``though it rained most of the time.''

Another part of it was Sept. 11. Anderson toured Europe shortly after the attack and was dismayed to find ``a cartoon image of us'' there - that our reaction to the tragedy was being represented as something out of ``Moneyline,'' like Americans only cared about their investments.

``It's pretty shocking to think you live in a place where information flows around and it's pretty wideband and you think you can get a fairly accurate picture, and then you realize it's totally distorted,'' she says.

But Anderson is aware that she may not always have a clear view, either. ``As an artist, I have to build a dream world ... and sometimes I think that gets in the way of how I see things.''

She says what she learned most from her Amish and McDonald's experiences was ``how much my preconceptions were off.''

So she has brought them into ``Happiness'' - her art - trying to talk around a subject ``just to make it open enough so people can get into it and, hopefully, raise more questions than it can answer.''

This makes every performance of ``Happiness'' for Anderson a collaborative effort, for the audiences' reactions shape the piece as it moves on its national tour.

``I'm really really dependent on audiences that way,'' she says.

LAURIE ANDERSON'S ``HAPPINESS''

Where: UCLA's Royce Hall.

When: 8 p.m. Saturday.

Tickets: $ $25 to $40. Call [phone] or online at www.uclalive.com.

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``As an artist, I have to build a dream world ... and sometimes I think that gets in the way of how I see things.''

-Laurie Anderson