Analyze This

Artists are actors—at least the savvy, self-aware ones. They shape their persona and don’t let it slip, or else get carried away by who others think they are. If Nora Turato seems like a special case, it’s because the young artist is best known for see-sawing monologues stitched together from veritable pools of found text snipped from unknown origins. Skeins of voices and caricatures, overbaked memes and highbrow articles, flow through her as nigh-sensical diatribes. She embodies textual chaos, makes it hers—and then makes it her. It’s understandable to want to know: Which Nora am I speaking with now?

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“Performing is a terrible step,” Turato tells me, her expressive grasp of language undiminished by Zoom. “There is something about the attention and not having enough of it and filling a hole, and you’re seeking something by doing this shit to yourself.”

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Born in 1991 in Zagreb, Croatia, Turato’s childhood coincided with four years of civil war, followed by integration with Western Europe. As a teenager, she played noise and punk music, solo and in bands, uploading songs to MySpace. It gave her a taste for the stage. “I just wanted to sing and make music,” she recalls, “but I couldn’t find words, it was weird. And so I just started to pull words and sentences from books.” When she was 18, she moved to Amsterdam to study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and it’s been her home since.

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Graphic design might be her métier, but language is her passion, and Turato’s practice falls roughly into three areas, all drawing from the same pool. Her artist books may be the most fundamental—particularly an ongoing series titled “Pool” (designed with Sabo Day), now in its sixth volume, each of which collates and prints a year’s worth of written gleanings with varying intensities of flourish. Her wall works feel the most processed. These include prints, hard-edge pastel drawings, murals, banners, enamel panels, and video—but all broadly consist of one or two key found phrases typeset on high-contrast slabs of color. For instance: “an ambiguity we feel compelled to resolve by acquiring more facts,” or “govern me harder.” Turato’s performances, though, find a sweet spot between the books’ logorrhea and the wall works’ aphorisms. They compose these same parts into exhausting physical recitals, the viscera of real performance jabbed in the craw of an art world accustomed to predigested life. Since you can’t own these performances—you can barely document them—they are the real work. The rest is merch at the show.

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All these arrangements of text came from somewhere, but have been filtered by Turato’s subjectivity. In the sense of words getting stuck in an air filter, they are skimmed from context and represented under her brand in a distinctly inexpressive way. Her 2024 work, Pool 6, grayscale and stark, takes a particularly harsh approach. There’s barely identifying info in the book at all, save for a “hidden” colophon at the center of the publication that forces even the most astute of readers to faithfully scan its pages for title and byline.

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Authenticity was, and is, “all hot in advertising,” says Turato. “And of course, there’s this idea of optimization in it, which is, I think, very wrong. The only authentic thing you can be is what you are now.” Her gift to her audience, in a way, in its semi- or faux-authentic packaging, is a picture of what “authenticity” means when it comes to artists. We expect them to be more authentic than us, and symbolically they are. But that’s not the same as expressing clear meaning.

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“I’m a firm believer of looking at the surface,” Turato continues. “People like to speculate about things. They like to get symbolic.” Yes, they want a deep, penetrating idea, and they want artists to provide it. But, the artist says, “I’m really trying less and less to have an idea.” In fact, she suggests, this is a fundamental difference between graphic design and art. Designers, like advertisers, “have an image to project,” she says. “They have something to sell, an idea to, you know, incept the minds with, and they have the surface to arrange, content to arrange.” Art, though, “ideally would emerge,” manifesting on the surface from within it, rather than on. In other words, does the idea come first, or does the work?

Turato’s vocation falls under the latter. Being an artist leads her to performing in odd museum back rooms, pseudo-industrial sound stages, and among the spandex-wrapped bistro tables of art fairs. Her material is found, but her embodiment makes it strange. She’s also worked with a Hollywood dialect coach to expand her vocal range and add to her repertoire of accents. Her performances exceed summary—unlike a Marina Abramović work, for example, where the basic idea comes across in a sentence. (Witnessing the work in-person is different, I hear.) With Turato, carving out a jagged, indescribable interval of time is part of the point. It’s not about an idea, not even about “information” as torrent or spree—it’s about ambivalence and ambiguity, being-here-now or you-had-to-be-there-then.

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“I was reading this book about vowels,” she tells me. There’s a theory that “consonants made us human. I remember my coach once said that consonants are ego.” It puts you in mind of the eternal Om, its slide of open vowels. “It’s just harmonies. And then, this human starts coding, starts projecting, starts organizing.”

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Maybe this is why we take ambivalence as a provocation, to be constrained. Whatever their previous intention or use, the phrases Turato collects belong to an undifferentiated bardo, without agenda or political valence. It’s all post-Trump, post-Truth, even as weaponized language scums the surface. There’s no fact-checking here. Turato’s scripts are filtered, but not judged. Nor is her work sheer irony. Don’t we all want answers to deep questions, for our questions to be deep?

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“I performed in LA not so long ago,” Turato says—on the occasion of her show “it’s not true!!! stop lying!” at Sprüth Magers earlier this year. She describes the work as “a lot about authenticity and spirituality, you know, all the things woo woo and health and optimizing yourself.” The West Coast audience was tickled. “There was so much laughter. I was wondering, How is this art, you know? It was too funny.” Turato sees a precedent in the biting social observations of stand-up virtuoso George Carlin. “It’s like a mirror and people laugh, and maybe some of them see the mirror for what it is, underneath the laughter. And maybe some of them just take the laughs.”

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Not unlike many of us, Turato started gathering “woo woo” material because the world felt (feels?) uncontrolled and doomed. There’s a sincere desire there. Sure, a lot of this language seeped into the culture through sponcon and influencers, but it would be a mistake to write it off as unserious. Especially because, in important ways, self-care is part of the artist’s process. She guards her time, keeps gregarious studio hours in her apartment, avoids frivolous social engagements. “Nothing is fully bad; nothing is fully good,” she says, “but I always have a little bit of trouble connecting to communities.” Her words from a conversation last year ring true: “If I start hanging out with stupid people and doing foolish things, unless I preserve my soul somewhere in a closet, it will dumb the work.” She walks her dogs, tends her houseplants, plays the piano. All the while parsing words.

“I’m really trying less and less to have an idea.”
— Nora Turato

Turato’s books and wall works certainly convey a sensibility—acidic, bemused, omnivorous—but you wouldn’t call it an identity. The artist remains a cypher. Her earliest performances, she says, were “much more expressive. I had to kind of dump it somewhere. There’s this energy in the body and it lifts these words up, and it almost didn’t matter what the words were.” She continues: “There’s a lot of pain and fear in it. It doesn’t feel good watching it. And I think that also makes it very powerful.”

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Like a punk band learning to play their instruments, discovering a fourth chord, Turato’s performances have gotten “more precise and more precise,” she adds. Her monologues might seem unhinged, touching the full emotional range of the human voice, sometimes stuttering and collapsing, but she says it’s all part of the score. And she’s moved away from her self, layering in more of the personalities that might utter her source texts. “I literally, in some sense, started to channel, become other people,” Turato says. She describes dissociating from her body during performances, “starting to not feel like myself anymore and say things that I think I would not say.”

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Is this inauthentic? Or the pinnacle of authentic performance? “You could take it as a critique” of her sources being trite or fake, she says. “But I think it’s very real.” Turato is balancing a total choreography. She’s living her life, but also playing The Artist, in a way deadpan and evasive enough to confound traditional ideas of self-expression—but also effusive enough to tantalize her audience with the chance of an authentic emotional discharge. It falls back on the viewer (the self-aware one, at least) to question what it is we expect from art, from artists, from Turato.

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This dissociative quality also coats Turato’s primary material: language. Her turns of phrase evoke moments of slanted recognition, quips that sound familiar but you can’t quite place, and occasional flashes of ownership—“the queen’s throat,” for example, printed on a Turato poster, is also the title of a Wayne Koestenbaum book about opera. But you can’t own language, not really—even “who said it first” is dubious metadata. The power of language to express an individual’s interior life starts to seem not just dissociated but communal. This can be a relief. For Turato, who grew up speaking Croatian, using “other people’s words,” and English ones at that, is “like an artistic hygiene of sorts, you know, to not get stuck in the expression of your own shit.”

Not least because she’s a student of self-help slogans and advertising copy, Turato brings precision to her professional self-presentation, too. As an artist who found success in her mid-20s, she seems wary of being typecast. (She’s said that, in a perverse way, Covid lockdowns came at a pivotal moment in her career, forcing her to slow down and rethink her 2022 performance at MoMA.) Take, for example, a page in Pool 6: “the curse of a successful artist / u get famous for ur unconscious bullshit and the artworld traps u into it / so you keep reliving it / in a way ur shadow becomes u.” These sound like Turato’s own words.

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“I was always into Madonna,” Turato says. She unpacked, album by album, the singer’s mid-career. “She decides, this is Madonna, I see what Madonna is, and then she takes the Madonna and starts using Madonna, you know. She’s actively working with the product that is Madonna.” The risk, as Turato sees it, is to trap yourself in one definitive image: “She gets infatuated with that surface Madonna, and she cannot stay that, and that’s the fixation, and that fixation doesn’t allow her to move.”

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Turato intends to keep moving. Her texts have become mostly her “own” words—she’s been writing a lot. “Maybe I’m very shitty at it, you know? There’s this possibility that I’m just doing a completely uninteresting thing, but I think that’s cool to own,” she says. “It’s taking the risk of doing something that you don’t know if it works.”