a message from pretty: on laurel nakadate
Artist’s talks—up for review, like a gallery show or spread in Artforum? A few nights ago I saw photographer, video artist, and filmmaker Laurel Nakadate give a presentation on her work at SAIC, and it was one hell of a mindspin. As I see it, Nakadate makes two kinds of work: the kind she’s in, and the kind she’s not in. Interestingly enough, I can’t seem to find any images of the latter on the internet—which probably has something to do with the fact that, when Nakadate puts herself in front of her camera, she’s usually wearing little to no clothing, unless she’s dressed up in what I roll my own eyes to call Lolita-esque getups.An extremely beautiful woman who is also half-Japanese, half-Caucasian, Nakadate’s race and age are, as she told the audience, ambiguous: “I make a lot of friends,” she said, as an object of taxonomic curiosity, though not (or so she seemed to imply) sexual interest. Despite the fact that a good part of her videos record unlikely “relationships” between herself and men who approach her on the street, Nakadate is careful never to describe these relationships as erotic, characterizing them rather as a form of “spending time” together. That spending time with Nakadate means watching her dance to “Oops! I Did It Again”, celebrating her birthday with cake, candles, and song, drawing her in the nude, or begging for your life while she holds an unloaded gun to your head, does not seem to inflect the artist’s own insistence that the narrative vignettes she creates are not about her desirability or her power (sexual or otherwise), but rather about how “pathetic” she is, how embarrassingly desperate to not be left alone.
Now, if you look here or here, you might notice that Nakadate’s pathos is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the men with whom she chooses to share the viewfinder have what it probably doesn’t do to refer to, with academic politesse, as a fairly compromised sovereignty. By repeatedly identifying them as her “friends” and “collaborators,” Nakadate craftily forecloses the impulse to say aloud exactly what the audience is thinking about these male subjects—that they’re losers. These images push your nose into the cruelty of your own habits of reading; they refuse to be made legible in their own terms, while also relying heavily on the likelihood that you will think exactly the thing (“These guys are losers”) that you can’t say. In other words, Nakadate’s images produce a confrontation with the unspeakable, not as the encounter with trauma or moral horror—Beg for Your Life is not Night and Fog—but rather with the impossibility of candor about the aesthetics of everyday life. The semiotics of the overweight and pallid body, of the lonely apartment and unironic furniture are as vulgar as the wildly over-determined scenario of an Asian-looking woman wearing nothing but rollerskates. Disgust and desire arise from the same simultaneously vicious and banal operations of a contingent eye, sunk in the socket of historical violence.
Which is why it was so troubling, and intriguing, to watch Nakadate studiously avoid any discussion of the race, gender, and class dynamics of her work, even as she off-handedly described herself as, perhaps, “a cross between a picture-bride and a cowboy.” At one point during her talk, in response to what seemed like a too-much-protested claim for the “sincerity” of her impulse to eat cake with older single men in their New Haven apartments, someone behind me murmured “I don’t buy it.” I didn’t either, but my first thought was, “Who cares?” Sincerity is about as boring a subject as it gets, when it comes to art and maybe to everything else…however, the discourse of sincerity is so much a part of Nakadate’s work that it does seem appropriate to question it, although not, I would suggest, in such binary terms (it’s there or it’s not, I buy it or I don’t). What I wonder about, specifically, in relation to this work is the deliberation around, or built into, the sincere impulse. I lived in New Haven for four years, and I find it odd, or rather statistically improbable, that Nakadate’s impromptu encounters on the city’s streets landed her only in the homes of white men. Why does the generic scene of white man/Asian woman become the paradigmatic tableau of (to use Nakadate’s language) sincerity and embarrassment? How does this pair produce an unspeakable clarity that another set of bodies would deny, most likely by soliciting, or necessitating, a certain form of critique and hyper-discursivity?
In some profound way, Nakadate’s work is about being unloveable. My favorite work that she showed—which, again, seems written out of the virtual record, even on her own website—is a series of 30 photographs taken while Nakadate spent a month by herself on an Amtrak train. According to her own account, she got sick of (taking pictures of) herself, and wanted to come up with some other way to register her presence as it sped through the country. The result? Pictures of her panties as she threw them out the window of the moving train. The images, of very pretty, very feminine, and probably not-too-cheap pairs of underwear captured in extreme focus the split second before they hurtle into the bare and blurry backgrounds of rural America have a different sort of pathos, drawn from the too-intimate recognition that someone’s idea of herself as a trace is the lacey pink shadow–the caul, if you will–of her own pussy (I use the word deliberately). To make panties the archive of presence is reductive, certainly, but it is also a gesture that dramatizes an ambivalent attachment to the self as sexed, as gendered, as commodified, as clothed. The lovely underwear is a site of scopic and tactile pleasure, but it is also an enduring symbol of the location of female singularity in the commercial and the sexual: the history of a woman’s movement registered in the memory of her sexual objecthood. Now that’s what I call sincerity.
There’s a train that takes 30 days to get across the country?
This is terrific, and I think you’re quite right to question why “Nakadate studiously avoid any discussion of the race, gender, and class dynamics of her work.” One answer (or part of one answer) may be that Nakadate wants to imagine a fantasy in which what really matters about individuals becomes legible over and against race, gender and (especially) class. As she explains here, “I was really affected by this scene in the Planet Earth BBC documentary that came out last year. It’s a scene of a polar bear swimming in the ocean, and it’s clear to the audience that he’s not going to make it [...] And it really affected me in the way that seeing these single men who had no one to go home to really affected me, and I started drawing lines between the idea of a drowning bear and the idea of a man without a family. The feeling, for me, was the same sort of heartbreak.”
The heartbreak we’re supposed to see in these “relationships,” it seems, is heartbreak that follows from the fact that clearly they can’t be relationships, that is, that she and the men in the photographs can obviously never be anything more than two people who won’t create a home or be a family, even though they (almost) could. In that sense, her claims that these relationships are not erotic register that what matters most in the photographs isn’t the obvious markers of sexual power, implicit domination and subordination, and/or impoverished living conditions; what matters most is the absence, indeed–the impossibility–of family. Like the swimming polar bear, even like the underwear slipping away, the men are caught up in a world where what they want–and what we supposedly want for them–is all the more desirable because it is clear it can’t be had.
The site is fixed but this page is still fucked up!
I’m definitely using “the lacy pink shadow–the caul, if you will–of her own pussy” in a poem.
Robbins is using that line in a poem. Fine.
But I’m using the photo of Nakadate holding the gun to the old, overweight man’s head as the cover of my next book.
First, a correction: I mean to delete the phrase “even like the underwear slipping away” (it was part of a different thought) but hit submit too early.
Second, I suspect the month on the train was part of Amtrak’s Rail Pass. Besides, if you’ve been on an Amtrak train lately, you’ll know that it just might take a whole month for one of them to get across the country. Plan accordingly.
>if you’ve been on an Amtrak train lately, you’ll know that it just might take a whole month for one of them to get across the country. Plan accordingly.<
And bring along plenty of underwear!
Seriously, though, this is great stuff, Anahid. I’d seen a reference to her somewhere recently, but this is first time I’ve read about her work. Where would you see her in relation to a Carolee Schneemann, or would that be not much of a useful comparison?
Good comment by Boyd, there, the one about the polar bears and such.
Boyd: Yes, LN told us that polar bear story too last week. It reminded me of Patricia Williams’s incredible essay, “On Being an Object of Property” (in The Alchemy of Race and Rights), in which polar bears become the symbolic crux of a fantasy about racial pedagogy and violence–very apropos when it comes to that particular video series. You’re right on about the attempt to produce or project humanity as heartbreak here…this seems, to me, to be what makes Nakadate such an interesting, and interestingly problematic, artist: her sincere pursuit of tenderness in the face of a relational impossibility mapped out inside images that are saturated with hyper-socialized affects of domination and disgust. If I may reiterate my own rather cruel observation, all her work really does seem to be about her own unloveability, itself cloaked, intentionally, by an insistence on her good intentions and, unintentionally, in a certain narcissistic grandiosity of Good Will.
Kent: The Schneemann comparison is useful, to me at least, because Schneemann’s video work (I’m thinking of ‘Fuses’ and ‘Kitch’s Last Meal’ in particular) is, by contrast, powerfully intimate without jeopardizing the opacity of the experience it documents or records. Schneemann’s an intimist–neither a romantic, which Nakadate too is not, nor a bully, which Nakadate, I think, is–which is worth noting, since there are a lot of bullies in the art world but very few of them are female and bullying, even with the recent number of spooked feminist reviews of Antichrist, remains an under-elaborated form of aesthetic production.
On a related note, a friend of mine once asked me to send him a pair of my panties and a map of Chicago so he could make art with them. The result was pretty unimaginative, especially considering that this friend is quite fantastically talented: the north side of Chitown under an executioner’s hood of black lace. The trouble there seems, at the very least, to be endemic to the formal monotony of the piece. Nakadate’s panty pictures are as compelling as they are because, as I tried to suggest, they use the differential clarity between foreground and background to dramatize the vanishing of place from person (rather than person from place) and of emotional mourning from sexual melancholy.
MR: Can I get an epigraph? Like as though I were a 16th-century treatise on astronomy? You can spell pussy with an -ie.
Hey! Look what went up over the weekend.
Anahid, to paypal my $0.02, I think your reading of this work as coming from profound loneliness is spot on. (I’m probably distorting your meaning — please say so and forgive me if so.)
Now I’m wondering how general a description of the source of post-modern art-making that is, profound loneliness.
Is it OK that I find this work really hot?
> really
Is it ok that you ask is it ok, you mean. I’ve got to think the answer in both cases is yes.
Michael Robbins, going rogue, asks:
>Is it OK that I find this work really hot?
You betcha!
As a friend of mine typed yesterday, “Looking through her images again, my main thoughts are, ‘1. Wow, she’s hot. 2. Wonder why she only has still of the videos?’”
Not to be pedantic about our desire, but hotness is a part of the idiom of the images, no?
I’m not sure I can entirely agree that what we see in Nakadate’s work is hot, or, if it is hot, I’m not sure that hotness is something about which we end up getting hot and bothered. What is interesting about the erotic in her work is precisely the way in which the erotic idiom is deployed as a kind of mangled phrase, a trace of a (by now) truncated articulation. No doubt part of the point of the photographs with the older men, for instance, is to make family seem like the very condition of their belonging, or, to put it another way, to make the heartbreak of the photographs synonymous with the heartbreak of (being able to go on) living without family. It creates, if you will, a kind of unerotic concupiscence. So the erotic operates on at least two planes; that is, it becomes legible only through a process of disappearance. I think you’re exactly right, Anahid, to talk about “the differential clarity between foreground and background [that dramatizes] the vanishing of place from person (rather than person from place) and of emotional mourning from sexual melancholy” in the shots of the underwear. And we can see this shifting back and forth and dramatization of foreground and background in other shots too, shots that more clearly center upon the erotic body smudged by what look like fingerprints, as though the real object of desire were the body that left these incidental traces on the erotic pose. The question I have, and I can’t tell whether this is a critique of the work or a question that the work itself raises, is whether it matters that we actually care about what Nakadate’s work makes us see, that is, whether we believe that this man’s life would really be different with family or whether the body we end up wanting here really is or could be a body at all. It may be that part of the point is that these interior desires are already mapped out externally before we even ask that question, before, indeed, there is any question for us to ask.
See, that’s exactly what I’m not saying. I’m saying it’s hot!
MR, do you mean the eroticism of these images is not mangled but effective, unimpaired? Or do you mean the work itself is less interesting aesthetically and intellectually than it is plain sexy? In other words, when you say “hot,” you mean [fill in the blank]?
Well, that’s interesting: seems my links to the man on the bed and Nakadate reflected in the window that faces the urban industrial landscape got mixed up (or do they rotate randomly at Nakadate’s site?). Perhaps it makes the same point in a different way, regardless.
I do second Anahid’s questions to MR, though, for the sake of clarification.
I mean—& further than this we get into questions of my erotic psychology, which I will not answer—for me the eroticism is effective because mangled. I realize that’s probably not her intention.
I’m not so sure that “that’s not her intention.” No matter how often Nakadate represents her impulse to make work, though not the work itself, as guileless and uncomplicated, I don’t think it’s possible to read these pieces without being hailed by their siren song of tough, sexy, fucked-up femininity. My same friend, who agrees with you about the hotness of the art, translates the interior monologue of LN’s images as “You want me. That’s kinda messed up. You are sort of a bad person. But your objectification of me turns me on and gives me power.” That that power is compromised or crippled by its own emotionality is just another string being yanked by the game of puppet LN’s playing with our desire; she’s mastering the domain of her own subjection by coding it as something less extreme, as embarrassment or excruciating solitude, making herself into an erotic object who is fit for attraction even if that attraction is ambivalent.
>eroticism is effective because mangled
Yeah, I get you. See, that’s just the thing too: it is as though eroticism in the work can’t even get started unless it has already been compromised, a point that doesn’t defuse eroticism but makes our recognition of it simultaneous with misrecognition, or at least makes possible the dramatization of foreground and background mentioned above. Sure it is hot, but it is hot not least because it is, already, not hot. No doubt Nakadate is right that the relationship between her and the men in the pieces isn’t erotic–even though it ends up being (and must be for the work to function) intensely erotic. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising then to see the erotic emerging at precisely the point she describes as most sincere. So there appear to be two choices, to look at the eroticism (you name it) or to look at what is obscured by the eroticism (the swimming polar bear), but they end up being the same choice because the latter, which might seem as though it could do without (and which we might even be less interested in than) the former, actually makes it possible in all its guises.