Whose Mid-Life Crisis Is She?
When I saw Laurel Nakadate’s video art for the first time, I was most struck by a segment where she stands alone in a room, wearing a naughty French maid outfit and a defiant expression. A dog rushes into the frame and begins enthusiastically humping her leg. The scene was entirely fascinating. Since her first video installation, “I Wanna Be Your Mid-life Crisis” at Daniel Silverstein Gallery in 2002, Nakadate has steadily made a name for herself in the nebulous world of video art, most prominently romancing lonely middle-aged male strangers on-screen. This autumn, her efforts have shown at Danziger Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, and the Asia Society. The spring finds her with exhibitions in Australia, Boston, and at the IFC here in New York. When I caught up with Nakadate in November, she had harsh words for “feminist” name-callers and some prescient thoughts on Britney Spears.
Have you been recognized on the street from your videos?
Yeah, more than I would think… Recently, this man came up to me and decided that because he recognized me he got to have a free-for-all discussion, so, in the middle of my day, I got to defend my work on the spot.
Was he being mean about it?
He was being very confrontational about the nature of my work and my working method. Discussions like that are engaging, but there’s a time and place for them and I don’t feel like I ever need to defend why I work. I was happy to talk to him. I just felt like he wanted to start a fight with someone, and I happened to be that person.
Was he by any chance an older single man?
The best part was that he totally could have been in one of my videos! Maybe he was reacting to something he felt about himself and maybe recognizing elements of his own loneliness or insecurities in my video.
Since you put yourself in awkward situations in your work, are you better equipped to deal with real life awkward situations?
It’s funny, you know, it’s gotten to the point where I just observe it, and maybe that’s because of how I make my work. I’ve noticed recently that I am a little bit less responsive to really horrible, awkward things than other people.
I was noticing that in the Mary Boone gallery, your video is on sale for $4,800. That struck me as kind of odd. I couldn’t imagine that someone would buy an eight-minute DVD for $4,800 and then, say, watch it in their den.
It doesn’t strike me as odd in that someone would buy a photograph for $4,800 or a painting or a sculpture.
I guess it just never occurred to me that you could bring video art into the home.
A lot of collectors take it really seriously. I can understand that people would think it odd when you can watch videos for free all day long on YouTube, but there’s a difference between video art and YouTube.
I’m surprised at how serious you are. For some reason I keep thinking about the Paris Hilton song in your video, and, not that you don’t seem fun-loving, but I was just picturing someone who listens to Paris Hilton…
No, I mean the songs that I choose to put in my videos are songs that I really respond to! I think interviews are a really strange thing because when I make the kind of work that I make, I need to be really serious in interviews to show that I’m serious about my work, and it’s not disposable or dismissable. There’s already enough suspicion about whether video art is credible, whether girlishness in art is credible, etc., that in some ways, I have to be on my best behavior when I’m talking about my work.
But at the same time, Paris Hilton’s songs are pretty amazing. I used to use Britney Spears a lot in my early work. I thought, here’s this girl who is making incredibly complicated—at the time—pop music, and so many people are getting off on her in different ways.
Like?
Like, girls are getting off on her because she has the perfect body. She’s the perfect southern blond girl. Guys are getting off on her because she epitomizes this fetish. For conservatives, she fuels their arguments about moral decay, and liberals are getting off on her because she’s doing whatever she wants. So I was interested in her as a sort of phenomenon and would like to think that my work pushes buttons with certain people in the same sort of way. So maybe I see Britney as sort of a mentor.
It’s probably good to move on to Paris Hilton because Britney Spears is sort of deteriorating.
She’s a tragic figure! She really fell from grace. But she’s getting ready for a comeback. I read that she already lost 30 pounds after her baby was born, and she’s getting ready to go blond again. Everyone loves a comeback, so I think that people will accept her.
If you walked into a gallery and saw your work, not knowing anything about it, what would you think?
I would be interested, but I would wonder about the artist personally. But I guess I see my art as mini-performances, not as “me.” Like, an actress in a movie would never get called many of the things I’ve been called, since she’s playing a role…
What sort of things have you been called?
You can find many people hanging out in their pajamas saying mean and vicious things about people in the art world, and my theory is that they’ve got too much time on their hands. What I really love is when women who claim to be feminists badmouth girls for making art that seems girlish.
That seems like such a waste of energy.
Personally, I think they’d be better off getting dressed and going to work.
Why do you think they don’t get dressed?
I recently found a Web page where these women were saying that because I make all this work where I go find men on the street and make videos with them, I’m a slut. Can you really, in this day and age, call other women sluts for making work about… anything?
So, I keep reading, and the one girl’s like, “What are you doing today?” and the other girl’s like, “Oh, I’m still in my pajamas,” and meanwhile on the Web blog, it’s like 2 p.m.!
So, clearly you need to leave the house and make something of your own.