{"id":19349,"date":"2011-12-30T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-30T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=19349"},"modified":"2011-12-25T12:56:46","modified_gmt":"2011-12-25T17:56:46","slug":"strangers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/30\/strangers\/","title":{"rendered":"Strangers"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re out this week, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2011 while we\u2019re away. We hope you enjoy\u2014and have a happy New Year!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Laurel Nakadate, still from Stay the Same Never Change, 2008, 93 minutes.<\/p><\/div>\n

When I was in high school, the few friends I had all lived in other states\u2014the far-flung gains of various summer camps\u2014which meant that I took a lot of long train trips on weekends. On these rides, I developed the habit of sitting next to a very specific kind of stranger: a middle-aged man who looked lonely. The goal was to find someone who\u2019d talk nonstop. That was how I met Tom Malone: on the train from New York to Raleigh. Over the course of the eight-hour journey, he talked about everything from his government job to his pit bull\u2019s separation anxiety. He told me he used to braid his ex-wife\u2019s hair every night, back when they were married. He explained in detail the reasons Amtrak\u2019s business model was bound to fail. He said my name a lot, and with formality: \u201cHere\u2019s the thing, Jean,\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d never felt safer in my life, sitting next to Tom\u2014his belly like a life raft, and me nodding like a therapist. At one point though, he ruined the spell. He said, \u201cYou look exactly like that girl Lennon dated. What\u2019s her name.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYoko Ono?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, no, not Yoko Ono. Oh, darn it. May. May Pang? You know her? Lost weekend?\u201d I didn\u2019t know her. And I wanted us to go back to talking about him.<\/p>\n

About five years ago, when I first saw the work of artist Laurel Nakadate<\/a>, I could have sworn that she had cast Tom in one of her videos, which feature middle-aged, sometimes overweight, mostly white men who had approached her in the street or hit on her in parking lots. In return, she\u2019d invited them to go home with her and act out strange one-on-one scenarios in front of video cameras. We see them shaking her inert body and yelling, \u201cWake up! Wake up!\u201d or performing an exorcism, or sharing a birthday cake. In a scene from I Want to Be the One to Walk in the Sun<\/em> (2006), her hirsute costar strips down to his loose-fitting underpants, while she takes off everything but her bra and panties. Then, with her index finger, she traces a clockwise circle in the air over his head. It\u2019s a signal for him to spin around, which he does, while she watches, unblinking and tender. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Laurel Nakadate, from Lessons 1-10, 2002, 1 minutes, 59 seconds.<\/p><\/div>\n

Nakadate, who grew up in Iowa and received an MFA at Yale, has been alternately referred to as \u201cruthless,\u201d \u201cattention-grabbing,\u201d and \u201cprovocative\u201d (in the pages of Artforum<\/em>, The Village Voice<\/em>, and The New York Times<\/em>, respectively). Her notoriety comes as much from her interactions with men, whom some see as desperate and therefore vulnerable, as from her general willingness to appear in her art nearly naked\u2014in one photo she\u2019ll pose beside a blue pickup truck wearing panties, a T-shirt, and a cowboy hat; in a video she\u2019ll dance in the Utah desert dressed in shorts and a tie-dyed bikini top. Recently, she directed two feature films depicting scenes from the listless lives of young women. She appears in neither of these films, but then, as if to make up for her absence, she embarked on \u201c365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears,\u201d a 2010 project for which she took a picture of herself crying every day for a year.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Laurel Nakadate, June 14, 2010, from the series '365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears,' 2011.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve heard people say that Nakadate\u2019s male fans outnumber her female ones.\u00a0Or they’ve pointed out that so many of the lengthy, in-depth reviews of her work\u2014in Artforum<\/em>, Art in America<\/em>, Frieze<\/em>, Modern Painters<\/em>, The Nation<\/em>, and The New York Times<\/em>, for instance\u2014seem to have been written by men.\u00a0One colleague even told me, \u201cYou\u2019re the only woman I know who likes Laurel\u2019s work.\u201d Actually, there are many others: her gallerist, Leslie Tonkonow<\/a>, comes to mind, and Marilyn Minter, who curated a portfolio of Nakadate\u2019s work in the latest issue of The Paris Review<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0and Mary Gaitskill, who wrote about her for the San Francisco Film Society.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s almost impossible for me to think of Nakadate\u2019s art as made for anyone but women, if only because her self-portraits, the ones set in the Midwest, remind me unbearably of myself\u2014and my friend Miya and the summers I spent visiting her in Scottsburg, Indiana. Her family had moved there so her father could teach Japanese literature at a local college. I loved Scottsburg: so full of parking lots at sunset and crickets at night. And the Berg-Tanaka household was an oasis of art catalogues, kachina dolls, and tea. In her parents\u2019 bathroom, once,\u00a0I found an old National Geographic<\/em> with an article about Polynesia that led me to conclude that I resembled an Easter Island statue with seaweed on its head. I told Miya. \u201cActually,\u201d she said, \u201cyou look more like a Thai prostitute.\u201d We were fifteen. I remember that, around that time, she\u2019d begun dancing a lot in public, in broad daylight\u2014like, in a parking lot, or in the baseball field where we walked her family\u2019s King Charles spaniels. When I see Laurel gyrating in the Utah desert, I can\u2019t help but think of Miya swinging her hips.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Laurel Nakadate, Lucky Tiger, 2009.<\/p><\/div>\n

I still don\u2019t know why Miya stopped talking to me. Maybe it had something to do with the crazy prank we pulled together the last summer I visited her. It began with the weekend we went down to Louisville in her parents\u2019 car to celebrate Miya\u2019s new license. As we parked, we were approached by a woman with enormous sunglasses on her forehead. This woman explained that she worked for a director who was shooting a political ad later that day, and they were looking for extras to play students for a scene set in a classroom. She handed us a business card. It was embossed with the words RADICAL UNIT PRODUCTIONS followed by a Louisville street address. Before we could say anything, she drew a small map on the back of the card. \u201cI\u2019ll leave you to think about it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her directions led us to a warehouse with a tin roof and a huge loading-dock entrance. Inside, we found ourselves on the shadowy perimeter of a room. The space before us was lit up with blinding stage lights, and men navigated their way around cameras and dolly tracks, holding each other\u2019s waists when they crossed paths, to avoid collisions. One of them noticed us and brought over release forms for us to sign. Then, at his direction, we went to join about twenty other kids our age, sitting along several rows of desks. We settled down next to a girl who kept turning around to the boys behind her and saying, \u201cYou\u2019re both such morons.\u201d \u201cWhat!\u201d they\u2019d reply, their hands in the air. She was incredibly sweaty, this girl\u2014her blonde hair had clumped into damp brown stalks along her forehead. She must have come straight from soccer practice or something, with her shorts and jersey.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Laurel Nakadate, from Lost Party Guest, 2011, 5 minutes, 29 seconds.<\/p><\/div>\n

Meanwhile, a man in a baseball cap stood up at the front of the set as if to make an announcement. But he remained silent, tugging at his cap and looking at the scene in front of him. As I watched him, it suddenly became clear: he was looking at Miya and me.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan I have you\u201d\u2014he pointed at me\u2014\u201cmove to that side of the room?\u201d<\/p>\n

I did as he asked.<\/p>\n

After several more seconds, he said:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know what? I think we have enough extras. Can the two of you\u201d\u2014now he gestured at me and Miya and then trailed off. \u201cThank you guys for coming, big time. It\u2019s just\u2014we need to keep the scene small. So there aren\u2019t too many factors at once.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only after everyone turned to look at us for about five minutes did I finally realize, he wanted us to leave.<\/p>\n

What happened next I still can\u2019t explain. Back in Scottsburg, Miya came up with the plan and the camera (but I agreed to it). We pulled scarves and hats and blazers from her closet, and then her mother\u2019s armoire. In the corner of her bedroom, in direct sunlight, she began taking photographs of me. After we went through a whole roll of film, she handed me the camera and I photographed her. We must have taken about fifty shots. There was one with me in purple lipstick and a turtleneck sweater, pulling up its collar along my jaw line. Another with her eyebrows penciled in to look like Frida Kahlo\u2019s. Miya dropped off the film at the pharmacy down the street, and then came back with black-and-white photos printed at eight-by-twelve inches. Meanwhile, we\u2019d made out a stack of envelopes to the street address listed on the business card we\u2019d been given. Into every envelope went a single photo. Nothing else. To keep it mysterious, maybe a bit creepy\u2014that was the idea. Over the course of that week, we mailed the envelopes one by one to Radical Unit Productions.<\/p>\n

The rest of August went by. I returned to New York. Not long after that, Miya stopped returning my calls. I still have no idea why. Maybe she\u2019d gotten tired of being the person I\u2019d known. That winter, for her birthday, I sent her a flat-rate box that contained nail polish, caramels, and origami-tipped toothpicks I’d found in an Asian emporium in New York City. I called Miya\u2019s house the day after her birthday to see if she\u2019d received the present, and Mrs. Berg-Tanaka picked up. \u201cOh, Jean,\u201d she said. There was a long pause, and her voice sounded sad. \u201cMiya can\u2019t come to the phone.\u201d Then she asked, \u201cHave things been well with you?\u201d<\/p>\n

That was ten years ago now. I was never all that upset by the end of our friendship. (Other things were on my mind. Right around then, I started dating the skinniest boy I\u2019d ever met, a soccer whiz whose family moved to town from Peru.) But then, several weeks ago, I went to Laurel\u2019s retrospective at P.S. 1. I watched the video Greater New York<\/em>, and when I noticed myself crying a little, it was from remembering Miya, though she and Laurel look nothing alike.\u00a0In one scene from that video, Laurel appears on a city rooftop, wearing a girl scout uniform. A big column of smoke billows forth from the skyline behind her. It turns out that footage was filmed on September 11, and the smoke was from the burning Twin Towers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Laurel Nakadate, still from Greater New York, 2005, 5 minutes, 10 seconds.<\/p><\/div>\n

In an early review of Laurel\u2019s work, Jerry Saltz mentioned she was half Japanese and made reference to her \u201cslutty, back-alley exoticism,\u201d but I have yet to encounter a single other review that mentions her race. Sometimes I wonder whether critics are politely taking their cue from Laurel\u2019s press releases, which never seem to bring it up either. And then I wonder if Laurel\u2019s silence on the topic has anything to do with what it\u2019s like to grow up in America strange-looking and pretty in ways that go unspoken. You start having secret thoughts about your face. You start thinking it\u2019s all in your head.<\/p>\n

I have been so lonely and private about everything I\u2019ve done. Meanwhile, Laurel has been sharing so much about herself: We know that she is someone who makes art by bringing home older men. She\u2019s someone who thinks to dress up in a girl scout uniform and film herself next to the Twin Towers collapsing. She\u2019s someone who has taken maybe four hundred photographs of her own face. As she puts all this on museums and gallery walls, I start to think she\u2019s forgiving herself\u2014as much as she knows how\u2014for acting so inexplicably in the eyes of others. She understands: from a certain perspective,\u00a0of course<\/em> such a lovely girl would be compelled to play-act fake birthday parties with lonely men twice her age or to film herself dancing in cowboy boots on a porch in Iowa. But how do you go about forgiving yourself the way Laurel does?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Images courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tallis Eng\u00a0is a writer living in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re out this week, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2011 while we\u2019re away. We hope you enjoy\u2014and have a happy New Year! When I was in high school, the few friends I had all lived in other states\u2014the far-flung gains of various summer camps\u2014which meant that I took a lot of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2258],"tags":[3213,3214,3212,3153,3216,79,3223,3220,3226,3222,3224,3211,3218,3208,3206,3215,2268,3207,3225,3227,3217,227,3221,2955,863,3209,3219,541,3210],"class_list":["post-19349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction-2","tag-365-days","tag-a-catalogue-of-tears","tag-artforum","tag-camera","tag-carol-diehl","tag-film","tag-footage","tag-frida-kahlo","tag-gallery","tag-greater-new-york","tag-half-asian","tag-i-want-to-be-the-one-to-walk-in-the-sun","tag-jerry-salz","tag-john-lennon","tag-laurel-nakadate","tag-leslie-tonkonow","tag-marilyn-minter","tag-may-pang","tag-museum","tag-p-s-1","tag-rick-moody","tag-self-portrait","tag-september-11","tag-summer-camp","tag-the-village-voice","tag-train","tag-underwear","tag-yale","tag-yoko-ono"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStrangers by Tallis Eng<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 30, 2011 \u2013 We\u2019re out this week, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2011 while we\u2019re away. 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