Laurel Nakadate @ PS1/MoMA

PS1 Gallery, Laurel Nakadate, Lucky Trigger 2009

There were many compelling pieces on Friday at PS1 and at the sculpture Center. I selected Lucky trigger by Laurel Nakadate at PS1. Lucky trigger was not my favorite work but it was one of the strongest. Nakadate took photographs of her self in seductive positions, and developed four by six inch images of them. She then sent the images to men and had them put ink on their fingers. You could see where then men touched the pictures by the ink fingerprints on the images in white frames on the white wall. There was a voice recording playing in the room. Nakadate called one of the guys and spoke to him while he looked at her pictures. He kept saying, “Wow you sure are pretty.” The recording was playing over a speaker instead of headphones. The man speaking changed my perception of the other pieces in the room as well as Lucky Trigger.

Upon first glance I was intrigued by the fingerprint images on pictures. I then tried to discover some organizations or rationality to the spacing and density of the fingerprints. I then read the explanation of the work. I was taken back by the daring nature of the artist and provocative experiment. Nakadate’s work encompasses the nature of human sexuality and lust. She conducts social experiments with middle age men that she meets driving across the country. I was initially disturbed by the idea of men touching the picture and seeing their fingerprints and even hearing the voice recording to know what they are thinking. I realized that all the elements were essential in creating a compelling work of art. She publicizes a very private interaction between a person and the photograph. The photograph can even be imagined as a fingerprint of herself. I found the relationship these men had with the images were imaginary. It’s like a guy looking through a magazine. The interesting part was to see how they touch the image as thought it were an actual person.

I chose this piece because I initially liked the aesthetics of the work. I am interested in this work because it was strong enough to bring me past my fear of creepy perverted strangers and I was able to enjoy the work and think about it on a conceptual level.

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Laurel Nakadate’s retrospective Only The Lonely at PS1 was one of the most genuinely discomforting shows I think I have ever seen. Nakadate’s work is troublesome in a lot of ways. It’s difficult to tell what her intentions are, or even to get a sense of how to read her work. On the one hand, it appears highly narcissistic; Nakadate primary interest appears to be her role in the spectacle. On the other hand, some film-based works not featuring Nakadate seem to set her oeuvre in a bit of a broader and more socially critical light. However it is cast, though, the work is compelling and disquieting and well worth examination, if only for the fact that its success might raise questions about the motivations and tastes of the institutions and communities that support it.

Nakadate’s favorite subject, aside from herself, is definitely female sexuality. In each project, she takes the archetypal nymphet, admittedly frighteningly prevalent in mainstream culture, and drags her through as many scenarios of objectification and abuse as she can find in the zeitgeist. Here we have the gaze of the aging male fixed upon the nymphet, Humbert Humbert trying to regain his vitality through the fountain of youth that is the body of his Lolita. There we have our own gazes fixed upon the nymphet as she acts out the gestures that have through their ubiquity in mass media become the language of sexual behavior for our era. Here again we are fixated with the nymphet, crying and alone (365 times), vulnerable because of the objectification she must endure: no more will she live to the expectation that pretty girls don’t cry.

Nakadate wants her audience to feel bad for her. She wants us to recognize that a culture that rewards beauty does not actually have much to offer to a beautiful person. Something comes through in her videos and images about the hollowness of sexuality and sexual behavior. She’s laying bare taboos that are quite ordinary—quite well understood in our culture—and showing how disgusting they are, how disgusting they can make us feel. But it’s hard to shake the sense that she’s telling us something that we know already. Yes, it’s uncomfortable to watch a pedophile make advances toward an adolescent. It’s also uncomfortable to watch a middle-aged man strip with a young woman. It’s sad to see young girls picking up sexual behaviors prematurely because of pop-cultural influence. We know. It’s been said before. It was never said with Nakadate’s face posted all over it, but it was said.

In a way, she’s just showing her audience that, as the artist-creator—fabricator of scenarios, worlds, and environments—she can take these situations, in which she would usually be the victim, and turn them around by exposing the offending party through the gaze of the artistic lens, and also exposing us, the viewers, as passive bystanders, or even perverse onlookers. There’s maybe something manipulative about her work. We cannot critique Nakadate because she presents herself in a weakened state; she is vulnerable and broken and we are watching her exposed and abused so it would be inhuman to subject her to further suffering, to cheapen her experience by questioning her motive in sharing it with us.

But I keep wondering about the “creepy old guys” in her videos. Do all of them belong in the position that Nakadate put them in? Maybe she’s turning them into objects. Maybe they’re part of a display, an exhibition of the grotesque embodied in the very apparent physiques and questionably purported lifestyles and psyches of sad, middle aged men. In the end, I just feel terrible for everybody—everybody but Nakadate. She’s getting the attention she thinks she deserves.

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Spanning the entire right wing of the second floor of MoMA PS1 is Laurel Nakadate’s “Only the Lonely,” an exhibition that will run until August of this year, and with good reason. The show is one that cannot be fully absorbed in a single visit, much less in a couple of hours. The exhibit showcases a combination of large-scale photographs, video installations, projections, and feature length movies, among other bits and pieces. The subject matter of the artwork takes the artist all over the country in search of suburban and rural middle America and the people who make up these places. The research culminates in an overwhelming display of interpersonal drama that unfolds with every step that is taken in the nine gallery spaces the exhibit inhabits.
“Only the Lonely” is an exhibition that appears to possess a specific start and finish, beginning with the video installation, “Greater New York” (2005), and ending with the movie, “Stay the Same Never Change” (2009). When it is viewed in this order, the works seem to speak with voices of growing volumes, both in content and form. The videos and photographs explore the notions of sexuality, loneliness, longing, and the element that ties them all together: displacement. Each piece in “Only the Lonely” appear removed from its home, framing images dissected from places far away and replanted on the museum walls. As one moves about the galleries, one feels entrapped in Nakadate’s personal world, filled with her most hidden fears and questions. The overpowering images magnify the subjects within them to astronomical sizes, leaving the viewers small and lost, like bewildered ants.
While at first I felt that many of the photographs were repetitive, I realized later that the redundancy was necessary to illustrate Nakadate’s self-aware, but highly ostentatious, cry for attention. In an attempt to broadcast her understanding of despair and turmoil, Nakadate needed to release an ocean of imagery upon imagery of, often times, the same scenes of women sitting alone on empty beds, hunched over and tear-stained. The way that the show was organized made the space appear to be reminiscent of a cathedral, a holy space in which Nakadate is able to worship and liberate her deepest emotional questions. The exhibition as a whole appears quite unedited and seems to be a showcasing of Nakadate’s entire portfolio. While I felt this was a more honest and personal demonstration, it leads to issues with inability to absorb and digest the show in entirety. The way in which the show is curated also contributes to this problem. Many of Nakadate’s large projected videos are played consecutively, though on her website, they are presented as singular projects. As a result of this setup, certain groupings of videos make less sense than others. I found that the videos that played on singular screens in the larger rooms were more successful than the larger projected installations. The videos, then, each become objects for evaluation, rather than one part of a sum of incohesive images.
What I found most confusing throughout the entire exhibit was Nakadate’s position on female sexual empowerment. Though at first harmlessly comical, many of her pieces appear to be tongue-in-cheek, and even a bit malicious. The video, “Don’t You Want Somebody to Love You?” (2006), for instance, left me somewhat disturbed, both by the actual content and by my own initial amused reaction. In the video, Nakadate appears to be playing a strict game of striptease with her partner, a balding middle-aged man with a sizable gut, stringy hair, and eyeglasses. Nakadate and the man take off their own clothes, one article of clothing at a time. When the two have only their underwear on, they take turns spinning slowly in circles, allowing the other to view their bodies in full. I thought at first that the piece could be about self-empowerment and the insignificance of conventional body types. However, I could not help but notice that Nakadate is dressed in an attractive sky blue bra and underwear set, with a pretty pattern and even whimsical frills. She is also very slim and toned, the opposite of her overweight partner. It did not help that the man seems clueless, playing along as he spins in his saggy white underwear. The back-story of this piece and many of the other pieces of this nature is that Nakadate found these men when they tried to hit on her. I can’t really understand the relationship between this initial meeting and the one in which Nakadate exposes the men in these video collaborations.
While Nakadate acts in most of her pieces, there are a couple of pieces that she merely directs that I thought are quite unsettling. They are, at times, even more bizarre than the ones she is in because they appear freed from the body. The invisible hand with which she directed the films is so heavy that I could almost feel her presence, a sensation that seems more powerful than when I can physically see her. The videos from the series, “Good Morning Sunshine” (2009),” are such examples of the eeriness that her directorial hand has. All the videos are shot in the same way, beginning with a young girl sleeping in bed and ending with her sitting up with a few articles of clothing taken off. The voice of the cameraperson, most likely Nakadate, instructs the girls to remove pieces of their clothing after waking them up and telling them how pretty they are. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the videos, the semi-erotic quality leaving nothing but more questions. The way that the audience space is set up makes me think that perhaps Nakadate is criticizing the audience. The viewer’s participation in viewing the film and not reacting is at fault for the issues she brings up. In the end, I just wasn’t sure how to respond to the pieces, leaving with only a sense of discomfort.
Nakadate’s “Only the Lonely,” is without question an exhibit worth investigating. She brings into the spotlight the place of females in a sex-driven world, though what she lacks is a direction of where she stands as a woman herself. Nakadate appears to be a very singularly driven individual, but perhaps the statement she wants to make can be aided by a greater feeling of community and female camaraderie.