“You ever had a gut feeling that maybe you were meant for more?” Nora Turato asked a packed house as she began her performance, pool 6, at Sprüth Magers during Los Angeles Art Week. In a monologue that accompanied her solo exhibition at the gallery, the Croatian-born, Amsterdam-based artist appropriated the same sort of self-help language that was also featured in her large-scale text-based paintings, video installations, and murals. For forty minutes, Turato employed mantras from popular films and wellness discourses, rallying her audience “to think positive thoughts all the time,” “set your boundaries,” “do the work,” and “magnetize yourself,” whatever that meant. By parodying personas across the spectrum of pseudo-guruism — from soft-spoken white women who peddle spiritual knowledge as luxury products, to Frank T.J. Mackey types for whom motivational speech is a violent masculine display— Turato laid bare the absurdity and cultish appeal of quick-fix, commodified self-care practices.

Capitalizing on the conflation of minimalism and truth, Turato utilized sparse staging to lend credence to her charlatanism. For the entire performance, Turato stood barefoot in front of a black curtain on a black carpeted floor, wearing an unremarkable black long-sleeved shirt and jeans reminiscent of Steve Jobs’ uniform. This strategically understated fashion sensibility provided the illusion of accessible genius and wealth while belying a calculated self-branding. In a performance riddled with contradictions, the artist suggested that an optimized and prosperous self is produced through both banal and deliberate choices.

Throughout her performance, Turato continued to tread the fine line between individual choice and the capitalist logic of accumulation. Although she clarified that the “more” referred to in her introductory question was not “about just more money, more things, more stuff,” but also, “more joy, more choice, more balance, more trust,” a fidelity to a growth mindset persisted. Midway through the performance, Turato valiantly exhorted audience members to “Get yourself going. Get your dreams going. Your purpose: going… what you have always wanted to do is who you really are,” while curtly dismissing “the rest” as mere disturbance. “Get rid of all disturbance. Now,” she demanded. At times, Turato broke character, unconvinced by her own performance of expansionist values. The artist laughed unintentionally as she extolled the virtues of “humming at particular frequencies” to boost nitic oxide levels, which relaxes and refocuses the body but also “makes your dick hard,” she added once she had regained composure. With this ludicrous observation, Turato exposed the laughable irony of self-help prescriptions that promise personal fulfillment and peace through the capitalist creed of virile productivity.

While many audience members laughed with Turato, their humor seemed tempered with sheepish self-consciousness. Los Angeles, after all, is saturated with fervent believers of the latest wellness fads and optimization trends. Turato’s parodic sincerity seemed to elicit a kind of uneasy self-recognition, exposing the extent to which these discourses permeate everyday life in the city. But her mantras might well resonate beyond the city’s boundaries, as they intimated the hollowness of individual pursuits in an era marked by collective political, environmental, and economic crises. Accentuating the ambiguities and contradictions of self-help ideologies, Turato’s performance was subtended by the sobering reminder that personal liberation and well-being are conditioned by highly regulated, and even repressive, systems and doctrines.