Laurel Nakadate

Nakadate's work seems to share a slight resonation with my own... interacting with strangers, reaching out to build friendships/relationships, spring forth from a place of loneliness; but there's something I didn't quite trust from her lecture. There's a air of exploitation that's all-to-easily dismissed with a carefully scripted response. Much of the work begs to be redone with sexes of the main characters switched.

While daring and reckless, some of the work shows the artist's youth in ways that poke at cracks forming in the script and polish. There's such a dependence on certain processes that wouldn't come across if they hadn't been communicated in the lecture.

Nakadate's insistence that the work is collaborative and more of a two-way communication with her performance partners is problematic as well... The pieces, with her participants able to lead the piece in any direction, end up so closely following an expected path the works seem scripted, with people becoming caricatures as opposed to humanizing them as she claims in her lecture. Even the works she's done with the gentleman she's had a 12-year friendship with come out feeling canned, predictable, strictly, tightly, almost suffocatingly formulaic.

I feel perhaps that the visiting lecture format did her work a disservice. It's almost impossible to examine her early works without the lens of today's ubiquitous digital interactions and networks- facebook, youtube, (and she repeatedly, almost pathetically, tried to erect a historically distant construct for the audience to engage the work with- "this was before cellphones", "you've got to remember, this was before facebook was around"... while brushing quickly passed her current works, which may be stronger in the contemporary setting.

I felt like she was unsuccessfully swimming her early work upstream against a monstrous wave of culture, while attempting to isolate the current work from it. I've seen more socially and culturally poignant pieces randomly uploaded to youtube and littered about on tumblr and ffffound.