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     AN AMERICAN GIRL

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Noland's art could not be misattributed to an artist living outside the United States: her sculptures and installations—accumulations of metal pipe, geriatric walkers, American flags, police paraphernalia, automobile accessories, chain-link fencing, Budweiser cans, and other industrially-fabricated objects—disclose an obsession with and canny understanding of the seamy underside of lower-middle class white American culture. “Pathology” is a term often used in the discussion of her art, and during this period her eye acted as surgeon or scientist, dissecting the body of American social interaction and extracting the toxins within. At the beginning of her essay, Noland reiterates a theory, attributed to Columbia University professor Ethel Spector Person, that states the activity of a psychopath is similar to socially sanctioned characteristics of entrepreneurial males. Boundaries are only crossed by the psychopath's amplification of that behavior; likewise Noland's “curio collection of dramatic ordinariness and casual catastrophies”[2] amplifies meaning. Her art made visible the psychopathology of American culture.

Part of this process occurs through divorcing objects from their natural setting. Noland brings some items in from outside—chain-link fences, gallows, mailboxes, and barbecues—and moves others from the domestic environment to the gallery space. This dissociation heightens the communicative ability of each individual object; each is viewed on its own terms. In Our American Cousin, 1989, the accoutrements of summertime festivities—a grill, Budweiser cans, hamburger buns—seem oddly out of place, an unnaturalness heightened by their juxtaposition with a folding bed frame snapped shut around a car bumper, a pair of handcuffs, and a red, white, and blue USA 1 decorative license plate. The narrative built from each element's associations, like that offered by Towards a Metalanguage of Evil, is disjointed and open-ended. Our American Cousin mixes genial backyard relaxation with implicit violence; a commercially available patriotism with the decay of the body alluded to by geriatric walkers; the taint of alcoholism with the restraint of police forces; or, most literally, the horror of automobile accidents with the enveloping security of the bedroom.

Around this time Noland also worked with images that wove together American history, pop culture, and violence. She silkscreened book pages—one from a history of the Colt firearms company, another one from an account of Abraham Lincoln's assassination by John Wilkes Booth—and wire service images of Patty Hearst and Lee Harvey Oswald onto aluminum panels. These were either propped up in the center of a gallery space or leaned against its walls. It is somewhat ironic that perhaps the most often reproduced artwork of her oeuvre, Oozewald, 1989, appropriates the infamous image of Lee Harvey Oswald doubling over after being shot by Jack Ruby: the artwork's popularity perpetuates the image's infamy. The metal onto which this picture has been silkscreened is also metaphorically shot: Noland has excised several circular “bullet holes” from Oswald's face, heart, and midsection. In an apposite reminder of where the action, the image, and its appropriation takes place, Oswald oozes not blood but the red of an American flag.

Noland's repeated use of Patty Hearst imagery parallels another late 1980s use of 'radical chic' imagery in contemporary art: Gerhard Richter's meditation on the Baader-Meinhof gang in the fifteen-painting cycle October 18, 1977. There are several coincidences: Richter created his paintings in 1988 while Noland began her sculptures in 1989; Ulrike Meinhof left a career as a journalist to go underground as an activist/terrorist and Patty Hearst is heiress to the publishing fortune that bears her name. But the key similarity is in both works' ambiguity: neither Noland nor Richter comment directly on the content of their images, instead relying on the efficacy of what they picture. (When considering their power, it is worth noting that the pictures will long outlive the people in them.) Robert Storr has written that Richter's paintings “speak from a confusion that more accurately defined the reality of the situation than any view that presupposed an unclouded perspective.”[3] Stated intentions cut off avenues of interpretation, especially when working with culturally loaded imagery. Noland and Richter's silence regarding their artworks allow a profusion of connotations to blossom. It is also important to remember that Germany's relationship to the Baader-Meinhof gang is different from America's relationship to Patty Hearst. As Storr notes, when Richter first exhibited this suite of paintings, German citizens were still making sense of more than a decade's worth of terrorist attacks; Richter was prodding a wound not yet healed. Response to Noland's works seems to have been much less conflicted. We have relegated Hearst to a position of historical anomaly as we move on to the actions of other celebrities and outlaws. This transformation is also central to Noland's practice: she is concerned with both the conditions that give rise to these images and, ultimately, their transience.

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