WE ARE ALL MADE OF STARS: RECENT VIDEOS BY LAUREL NAKADATE Rating: NNNN
Laurel Nakadate’s videos, which she’s been producing since 2000, appear to deconstruct male conceptions of sexuality and power from a female perspective by placing the vivacious, frequently underdressed artist in a room with a middle-aged man and inviting us to watch her taunt him with her hotness.
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But it’s just as possible to argue that Nakadate’s videos actually reinforce male ideas of sexuality and power by placing her in a series of submissive sexual situations. Sure, she’s always looking directly at the camera, but is she challenging our voyeurism by meeting our gaze, or just too much of a narcissist to engage the other person in the frame with her?
Is Nakadate mocking Britney Spears’s self-exploitation when she dances with older men to Oops… I Did It Again in 2000’s video triptych Oops? Or is she just dancing?
Does the 2004 project Love Hotels – for which she travelled to Japan and mimed various sexual positions with an invisible partner in a series of by-the-hour accommodations – represent an inquiry into the intensely personal nature of coitus, or is it just artistic masturbation?
How about Where You’ll Find Me, a series of clips in which a half-naked Nakadate imagines her own lonely death in a dozen different ways? Does the amateurish conception of her various suicides by gunshot point to a childlike innocence, or just a lack of interest in props?
And what does it say about the artist that she uses the smouldering cityscape of Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, as a backdrop for her standard staring-at-the-lens pose in We Are All Made Of Stars?
I have no idea.
And after reading a 2006 interview with Nakadate in The Believer, I’m not sure she does either. But I do enjoy trying to think it through.
Screens Saturday (October 11) at Latvian House as part of Pleasure Dome’s A Lower World: Excesses And Extremes In Film And Video.