Laurel Nakadate - studio visit

I decided to try something different with Nakadate. It was necessary, because, if we had sat in my studio, the only thing I could have offered was a tired nothingness. I wanted to get her out of this building, I wanted to get out of this building.

I somehow needed to find out if she was actually a human being, a real person, or if perhaps some corporate entity had long-since replaced her with some sort of robot that was being flown here and there, awarded this and that, giving speeches and lectures, and always opting for the "pat down" instead of the metal detector and chemotherapy at airport security.

she looked at the work on my walls, which is all older work. work that I entered the program with. work that I had FUN doing, work that meant something to me, and I felt could mean something to others. She laughed, giggled, and then I took her to coffee.

I was tempted to ask her to do a performance with me, come to my house and take a shower with me or something. But the notion made me tired. I can act all day, any day; I'm sure she can too. Nothing would get proved there. Perhaps nothing I could do would reveal anything about her to me, but I can try being a person to her, and see what that would return to me.

We walked to the library; I bought her coffee, and then we walked to the small circle where people sometimes practice trumpet or trombone. The cherry blossoms were full and falling.

We talked about:

how she can pretty much ask for any price, and if she doesn't get it, she's not taking the job
what kind of coffee she wanted
where the restrooms were
if she has family in japan
if her family was ok from the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear fallout
if she liked cherry blossoms
how her time was in japan
if her ex-bf was japanese
that she liked my work, it was funny
what a day in the life for her was like
where she was going and getting flown to
her show in nyc
that she has put in her time
she used to have trouble saying no
it nearly ruined her
she's happy flying around
but misses being in the studio
she wants to work again
for me to not give up

it was a nice meeting. i DID in fact feel that I had ascertained that she was NOT a robot, and perhaps saw a tiny bit of real Laurel. maybe. i saw something that was different from the Laurel that gave the lecture. something different from "Art" Laurel.

That was important for me.

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.