Nora Turato’s Emotional Outsourcing

 The English word ‘cliché’ derives from the specific click sound made when a cutting die stamps a metal sheet to form a letter. The typographically-attuned artist Nora Turato, who first trained as a graphic designer in the Netherlands, has long collected English vernacular phrases and clichés: hypocritical advertising catchwords, irate YouTube comments, poetic iMessage autocorrects. Skimming the froth from the bubbling blob that is contemporary speech, Turato finds an emergent poetics of accelerated weirdness.

In ‘Not your usual self?’ at Sprüth Magers, Turato repurposes stock-phrases, rendered by hand on seven hand-painted enamel panels, which hang over another text-work, a huge cobalt-blue wall painting reading undefine yrself (all works 2023). Each work – in a new serif font developed in collaboration with Sam de Groot and Kia Tasbihgou – carries emotionally ambiguous wording such as not yourself?/ what have you done to yourself? or this place is sick / always something. On each, a wiry grid summons a tunnel or wormhole.

Turato makes what she calls ‘pools’, private archives of found language that she collects and samples in her performances, videos and paintings. For her exhibition ‘pool5’ (2022) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, she worked these into hypnotic verbal performances echoing contemporary social ironies and agonies. Watching Turato perform is a bit like watching Jerry Seinfeld on Adderall, if Seinfeld were possessed by a demon, and that demon’s name was TikTok.

Turato does not perform in ‘Not your usual self?’ Instead, she draws on her designer roots to visually render our hackneyed vocabularies around anxiety and care: What are the mantras we use to get through the day, to tell ourselves that everything is fine, to convince ourselves we aren’t feeling what we are? Sick? ‘It’s all in your head’, reads one panel. On another: ‘watch your head’ – an innocuous but absurd idiom if you think about it.

Beginning in the 1980s, Barbara Kruger – another artist with roots in graphic design – blew up messaging sourced from corporate, media and political jargon. Turato owes much to Kruger’s repurposing of power-signifiers – like her, she squeezes them just enough so that their implicit contradictions ooze out. Yet, Turato’s world is different to Kruger’s. What social control was to Kruger, self-control is to Turato: its interiorized and therefore lonelier analogue. In the 1980s, power may have seemed top-down, the business of governments telling citizens what to do. In an age of vanishing reproductive rights, Kruger’s view of the world still largely holds. But – and here’s the rub – today every possible burden is passed down to individuals while the powerful seem unaccountable. Just as we can no longer rely on institutional medicine but must ‘self-care’, we must also self-censor, self-police and self-medicate in the absence of alternatives.

Self-empowerment (‘lean in’ reads one of Turato’s early text snippets) is an inherently defeatist rhetoric: it all but guarantees failure by saddling ordinary people with the responsibilities that were once the remit of doctors, schools and entire political institutions. For Turato, the language of affirmation hawks this emotional outsourcing as opportunity, not burden. (You are ‘approved’ for a high-interest loan: hurray!) ‘Control yourself’ is what you would tell a child, but it’s also an instruction we give ourselves to get on with the day. At what cost?

The risk in sampling from the world’s clichés is that the works become arbitrary by virtue of the hollowed-out quality that was the original reason the artist found these phrases revealing. In other words, their defeatism might make them self-defeat. In an age of climate protest, political agitation and phenomena like quiet-quitting, I’m not always convinced that individuals are as powerless as Turato suggests. Or so I hope. I might be deluded. As Turato might counter: ‘What have you done to yourself?’

Nora Turato’s ‘NOT YOUR USUAL SELF’ is on view at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, until 7 November.

_{Main image: Nora Turato, does that make any sense? (detail), 2023, vitreous enamel on steel, 1.9 × 1.2 m. Courtesy: the artist, LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristina, Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich, and Sprüth Magers, Berlin; photograph: Ingo Kniest}