January 12, 2004
Why we should talk about Cady Noland
Here are disconnected excerpts from Why We Should Talk About Cady Noland, the first in a series of handmade zines. They cost me eighty-nine cents to make, so if you'd like one, please send me a dollar and two stamps. E-mail me for my mailing adderess.
From the preface:
Why We Should Talk About… is a series of irregularly published handmade zines. Each is dedicated to the work of one or two artists whose work I care about but might not be able to consider in the larger publications I write for. The D.I.Y. impulse to create them springs from the same enthusiasm that led me to write many punk rock fanzines during my teenage years; consider these Art History fanzines. The artists I will write about are linked only by their consistent ability to amaze me. Thinking about their art is rewarding and influences how I see works of art created by other artists. Whether or not you are familiar with the subject of each zine, my hope is that these ruminations might kindle an interest to learn more.
From the essay:
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.
[...]
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” amplifies meaning. Her art made visible the psychopathology of American culture.
[...]
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. [....] 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.