Laurel Nakadate's retrospective at MoMA PS1 (Only the Lonely) has some of the most interesting video performance peices I can remember seeing in a museum context. What I like about her work is that she brings an element of real risk back into the equation. She takes the video camera into the unknown anonymous homes of middle aged men.
In one piece, she randomly asks three men, total strangers, if she can come over to their house and have them sing Happy Birthday to her around a birthday cake lit with candles. So we the viewer see three seperate t.v. screens with three different interiors with a different man singing happy birthday to her in their home and then her blowing out the candles. She looks like a teenager and the men are in their 40's and 50's. Are they perverted creeps or just down-to-earth living-alone-men being kind to a stranger? After that question swings for awhile, it appears that these men are happy to be singing to her for her birthday and the initial sense of menace is lifted. The scene is sometimes akward, sometimes hilarious and sometimes debilitatingly lonely. And so it is in her other video peices where she goes into other strange men's houses(or young women's) to pose, dance and to play dead. Also in this exhibiton are copious amounts of large photographs of herself as part of a project where she documented her self shedding tears everyday of the year calling it a, "Catalogue of Tears." The exhibit goes until MAY 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment