Sex, Danger, and Videotape

Walking into Laurel Nakadate’s solo show at Danziger Projects, “A Message to Pretty,” is like stumbling into a theater where titillation and voyeurism show their sinister side.Ms. Nakadate loves to flirt with sex and danger. The 31-year-old artist is best known for videotaped encounters with creepy, sexually frustrated older men who try to hit on her. She follows them to their apartments, in a twisted form of wish fulfillment, and convinces them to stage awkwardly neutered, Lolita-esque scenarios with her. They’ve ranged from seemingly innocent play-acting to getting a portly man to discuss how he’d like to hurt her.“I went out looking for men to hang out and make videos with, and I told them to vent all of their unresolved feelings,”Ms. Nakadate said. “It’s interesting how quickly they go to this painful, angry place.”The main focus of the show are two video projections, one in which Ms. Nakadate re-enacts Meg Ryan’s most famous scence from “When Harry Met Sally,” in different locations and stages of undress, and another in which she asked several older men to address the camera as it if were a former lover.The ensuing violence and verbal abuse, hitting fever pitch with disturbing conviction, is unsettling. Danziger Projects owner James Danziger sees sharp social commentary in the repressed violence Ms. Nakadate got the men to express.“It’s disturbing work, but just look at today’s newspapers and you realize that it’s incisive and prescient about issues that come up and that we deal with every day,” Mr. Danziger said.Playwright and director Neil LaBute, whose work has addressed similar issues and characters, attended the opening and commented on his own work in comparison. “I make this stuff up — the guys in these videos, they’re really out there somewhere,” Mr. LaBute said. “It’s hard today to still be genuinely disturbing and unnerving — she has the ability to do that. It’s like really good Polanski.”The largely female crowd at the opening roamed in the dark with small flashlights provided by the gallery, scrutinizing photographs of the scantily clad artist, as well as several dioramas, some even riding the explicitly named hobbyhorse included in the show. All that in the shadow of a projection of Ms. Nakadate, larger than life, moaning at the camera with a deadpan glare.This is an artist who thrives on the voyeuristic discomfort. “No one wants to make eye contact with me,” Ms. Nakadate said.”I guess they don’t want to admit they’ve seen me naked.”For all her apparent provocations, she’s quick to dismiss the idea she’s merely out to shock. “I don’t think I exploit sex for sex’s sake. If anything, I think the sex in my work is sad and unfulfilling,” Ms. Nakadate said. “A lot of people read my work as if it’s about girly sexiness — it’s really about girly loneliness.”Despite the intense anger and misogyny captured in her new videos, Ms. Nakadate insists she did not feel vulnerable while making them. The danger involved is also part of the point.“I’ve never really felt threatened. Most of the men in the videos have a lot of free time and no one to spend that time with,” she explained. “They’re just lonely.”“But I’m really interested in the danger, in things that go wrong and end badly. If I ever feel physically threatened, I just take my camera and leave.”Until November 25 (521 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-629-6778).

Sex, Danger, and Videotape

Sex, Danger, and Videotape

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