Laurel Nakadate doesn’t read criticism about her own work. At least that’s what she told me during a public Q&A last year in Houston following the screening of her film Stay the Same, Never Change (2009). Maybe it’s acceptable for pop stars and video blogettes (whose tactics Nakadate imitates) to ignore tabloid gossip, but an artist who disregards her work’s critical reception suggests an unwillingness to take responsibility for its larger implications. Her solo exhibition at PS1, skimming the surface of bad-girl feminism with a heavy dose of exploitation, does little to refute this accusation.

Laurel Nakadate, ​Farther From Home Than I'd Ever Been​, 2007; from ​Fever Dreams at the Crystal Motel​; courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks+Projects.

Only the Lonely surveys Nakadate’s work of the last ten years, a period that coincides with the rise of a pervasive confessional culture. Her early videos feature Nakadate’s sexualized interactions with strange and antisocial men who approach her on the street: she poses as an art model in her underwear and roller skates (Lessons 1-10, 2001), asks them to throw her a birthday party (Happy Birthday, 2000), and performs routines to Britney Spears songs while they sort of shimmy along (Oops, 2001). The men appear pained and awkward, hapless foils to Nakadate’s mercenary Lolita; they are dimly aware of her camera, but altogether unaware that they will become the butt of her art joke. One decade later, these tapes continue to elicit a skin-crawling frisson only because on first glance, they look more like sex-murder courtoom evidence than works of the relational aesthetics era1 (even though Nakadate’s work is similarly fraught with manipulative dynamics).

Though Nakadate’s aesthetic is more indebted to schlocky horror films and MTV than an academic illustration of theoretical discourse, she has not ignored her performance art predecessors. A few works on view take wobbly steps toward the self-criticality of feminist artists to whom some critics have compared Nakadate. Beg for Your Life (2006) features men doubled over in nervous fits of giggles or suppressing smiles as Nakadate cocks a fake gun to their heads. The video references the tactics of Valie Export’s Action Pants Genital Panic, where the artist paraded down the aisles of a pornographic movie theatre in crotchless pants with an AK-47, in order to question the nature between spectator and on-screen fetish object. Nakadate’s work, however, only reinforces a regressive power dynamic: the men in her videos are unable to take her seriously as a dominant figure, even in the context of sexual fantasy. Adding syrupy pop tracks to these contrived vignettes, a by-the-book ironic strategy, only underscores how uninspired her scenarios are. The photographic series Lucky Tiger (2009) bears witness in a more subtle and searing way, with pin-up style photographs of the artist smudged by the fingerprints of men she solicited on Craigslist to look through the images. Anonymous to us as viewers—we don’t see the men’s faces—yet incriminating, these participants’ actions are gently prodded toward the alienation effect as the artist asks them to describe the photos in an audio piece. They still rest a little too comfortably, however, in Nakadate’s self-objectification, a fact that she casually dismisses as a shared loneliness with her male participants.

In other series Nakadate adopts the voyeur’s position in addition to her former role as the isolated and helpless object of desire. The flashy and obviously staged photographs of 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears (2011) plaster every empty wall of the exhibition, exhausting the trope of eroticized distress. Unlike other artists who work in a similar vein—think Cindy Sherman’s film stills—Nakadate relates the scenarios depicted in her photos only to her other works, instead of addressing larger questions of identity performance and the male gaze.

The artist also plays the sleazy film auteur, directing young teenage girls in two feature-length indie flicks about their emerging sexuality. As a prelude to these films, the video Good Morning Sunshine (2009) has Nakadate behind the camera, coaxing three young actresses in modest pajamas to undress with smooth-talking clichés. By miming a more explicitly manipulative role—but now with younger women as her nebulous collaborators—Nakadate’s video is disturbing to the point of revolting, particularly considering her focus on an actress who bears a shocking resemblance to her younger self.2

A group of teenaged girls viewed this video at PS1 next to me, and I wondered how they digested Nakadate’s ironic strategies. If Nakadate ignores art critics, perhaps she at least pays attention to the reactions of her younger viewers. Turning a 180 from an embedded and complicit participant in art videos to a film director twee-ifying teen sexuality, Nakadate throws her whole body of work into question. If her worldview suggests a voyeuristic free-for-all, how can she justify her self-righteousness over the male subjects of her earlier videos? After all, these documentations of her meetings with such men only function as a fine art project because of the politics of art-world critique: we feel justified in laughing at these men because we believe that their interactions with Nakadate deserve rebuke. Thus the question of audience with respect to her films becomes much more complicated. If Nakadate can move so easily into the director’s seat as a “feminist” artist, is there a way for her to bring a refreshing point of view to the stale Lolita narrative without repackaging it as the critical flavor of the week?

• 1. Of course, not all works of the social practice genre traffic in feel-good dynamics. Claire Bishop’s now-famous “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (in October 110 (Fall 2004): 51-79) distinguishes between artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, who produce bohemian micro-topias in museum atmospheres, and artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra, who illustrate social “antagonism” in works implicating the art public and marginalized communities. Unlike Bishop, I would not argue that antagonizing the audience or employing shock-value tactics are criteria for aesthetic success.
• 2. Tellingly, out of the three young actresses in Good Morning Sunshine, the Nakadate look-alike is the only one who was cast in The Wolf Knife (2010), Nakadate’s most recent feature film.