SETTING THE STAGE

Written in 1987 and presented in Atlanta at an academic conference on evil, Cady Noland's Towards a Metalanguage of Evil outlines in detail the power politics inherent to the relationship between a psychopath and his victim, or 'mark.' In fifteen named sections, the disquisition ranges across a variety of references from the television shows Dynasty and Dallas to Hemingway and Hitchcock; from Erving Goffman and Emile Durkheim to Little Red Riding Hood and Antonioni's Blow-Up. In the process the essay, which veers from academic appraisal of key sociology texts to scenarios that could have been lifted from her life as an artist, delineates the territory in which Noland would work for approximately ten years, before effectively removing herself from the art circuit in the late 1990s.

The essay posits a model of social activity as a vicious game of lies, deception, and coldness, with X, a person who exhibits psychopathic characteristics, and Y, X's victim, as constants. Despite the site of its initial presentation, the paper refuses to stick to an academic tone and theoretical subject matter. It is a constellation of fragments, each held together by pop- or academic-culture references and anchored in the concept of psychopathology. Yet X and Y are never grounded in real-world examples, and it is therefore tempting to assume that one stands for Cady Noland herself and the other for the celebrity and tabloid cultures she interrogates in her work. But rather than directly insert her into either role, it may be more useful to simply keep the essay in mind while considering her work. Her sculptures and installations can be viewed as a visual corollary to several concepts outlined within the text: several works derive their names from the essay itself.

By issuing a prescriptive manifesto of sorts, it is easy to connect Noland's art to that of Minimalists such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson, all prolific writers as well as sculptors. Formal connections are also present, from her use of industrial materials to her deployment of increasingly reductive visual forms over the course of her career. But her art refuses the muteness of Minimalist works. Noland's Minimalism, if it can be called that, is instead rooted in an economy of gesture: each installation is specifically calibrated to produce maximum effect on the viewer; no object is out of place and each contributes to the greater whole; as Robert Nickas has noted, she finds meaning in material and language.[1] (Another key difference is that hers was a finish fetish with its sleeves rolled up; the cold silver steel comes from tough, pre-fabricated objects instead of delicate custom-made forms.) The flooding of minimal forms with associative meaning places her works squarely within the realm explored by the Postminimal generation of American sculptors whose work blossomed in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

These artists, such as Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Mike Kelley, also imbued minimalism with meaning, but theirs was often lyrical or personal. Noland's life seems resolutely separate from her art: T.S. Eliot's dictum that “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates” would likely meet with her approval. Despite presenting less intimate concerns than her peers—this deliberate removal of self from work perhaps prefigures her later attempt to remove her art from the art world—formal links to other artists of the period can be discerned. For example, Noland's early “Trashed Mailbox” works, collections of pre-fabricated objects (including a mailbox) corralled by a gridded steel basket that looks like an industrial dish rack, parallel works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in which the artist sold an empty box to a collector and then slowly filled it with personal mementos via mail. At the other end of her career, Noland's Untitled, 1997-98, a sculpture of a metal pipe standing vertically at the center of a whitewall tire, resonates with Gober's sculpture of the Virgin Mary pierced by a culvert, the central image of his 1997 installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. These artists' gaze often turned inward; Noland's eye is unblinkingly focused on the oddities and perversities of the outside world.

Article continues: Next page