Published as “Why We Should Talk About Cady Noland,” a one-off photocopied fanzine, in an edition of 250 copies.

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.

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.

APOTHEOSIS UNDERGROUND

The text of Towards a Metalanguage of Evil was re-edited and given three-dimensional form on the occasion of Documenta IX in 1992. Noland’s installation was placed in the underground parking garage at the Friedrichsplatz—site of the Museum Fridericianum, a central Documenta venue—in Kassel, Germany. Here, Noland cast her eye further than with previous installations, incorporating not only discrete objects and appropriated images, but also elements of the site itself and works by other artists. The installation ran along fifty meters of concrete wall between the pedestrian entrance and the vehicular access ramp, and in it

…documentary photographs from newspaper [reports] are mixed up with work by other New York artists and materials lying around for electric systems that still have to be installed. Escape route markings and monochrome canvases, small wall elements between massive concrete supports, barriers and graffiti, markers stuck on the floor next to patches of petrol and oil—boundaries between what is staged and what is already there become blurred. Old traces and newly laid tracks can no longer be clearly distinguished.[4]

The objects are once again unsettled. The empty, overturned, and wrecked passenger van—the first object seen by viewers in a passing car—was set upon a symbolic sculptural base made of wooden pallets. Several blown-up sections of the text—Noland silkscreened the essay onto aluminum panels and included them in the installation—are partially obscured by loosely wrapped transparent plastic sheeting of the kind often used to store artworks. The lamps illuminating the installation brightly light from below part of another car, as if a mechanic was at work. The entire installation seems provisional or still under construction, abandoned or frozen.

Roland Nachtigaller, in the exhibition catalogue, points out the absence of the body amidst this detritus. Indeed, although everything included is in some way man-made, the lack of a living presence speaks to our dissociation from what we have produced. Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, sometimes discussed as a precursor to Cady Noland’s work, succinctly illustrated this schism while allowing it to reside safely in the past. The violence in Towards a Metalanguage of Evil is both past- and future-tense; it has either already been enacted upon the bodies depicted in its imagery or is waiting to be activated by bodies that enter its space. (The entire work was cordoned off by red and white striped caution tape.) The potential for pain is discomfiting and is a product of the openness with which Noland approaches her work.

Noland transcended the specifically American context of her earlier work to present an artwork rooted in time but not place: the installation is characteristic of an image-saturated late modern moment and culturally relevant to an international audience. The violence depicted in this work permeates the air like a fine mist, subtle yet ever-present, mirroring the way contemporary culture is suffused with suffering, destruction, and confusion. Noland’s prowess lies in her ability to artistically arrange everyday reality to highlight that which we might not otherwise want to see.

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

There is a pendular theory of historical progression which states that each swing from one endpoint to the other occurs in a decreasing amount of time. The conditions that gave rise to the Nixon-era late 1960s and early 1970s mined by Cady Noland’s art were coming back into view while she made her work twenty years later. Now, a dozen years after her installation at Documenta IX, and faced as we are with an unpopular war on foreign soil, Michael Jackson’s pending court battle, and countless other abnormal scenarios, it seems that the pendulum has once again come full swing. (Think also of Unknown Quantity, the widely discussed exhibition Paul Virilio curated recently for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris.)

Noland has removed herself from the art world but one cannot help but wonder what she makes of the present moment. The last section of her essay is titled “Time Mechanisms: Rushing and Stalling,” and states:

There are times when X sees that the configuration of elements—be they persons, objects, or events, are in a pattern of environment hostile to the development of his program. X has two choices in this case: he may vacate the situation, or he can wait until a shift occurs which makes the environment more adaptable to his plan.[5]

Perhaps she is stalling and will one day choose to exhibit her work. As we move further from the time of its creation and exhibition, and as her influence proliferates among a generation of young artists eager to plumb the underside of contemporary culture, it becomes increasingly important to not let her significant achievement slip from memory.

SOURCES

1. Nickas, Robert. “Cady Noland: Publyck Sculpture,” MONO: Oliver Mosset, Cady Noland. Zurich: migros museum für gegenwartskunst, 1999. Unpaginated.
2. Nachtigäller, Roland. “In the Garage of Meaning,” Towards a Metalanguage of Evil, Edition Cantz, Stuttgart, Germany, 1992. p. 46.
3. Storr, Robert. “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting,” Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002. p. 76.
4. Nachtigäller, p. 46.
5. Noland, Cady. “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil,” Towards a Metalanguage of Evil, p. 22.