Lot 335: Big Hole

Cady Noland (b. 1956)
Big Hole
signed, inscribed, numbered and dated 'Cady Noland 1994 #1 of 1 CN-55-SC This can be hung in any of four directions' (on the reverse)
silkscreen ink on aluminum
51¼ x 36¼ x ¾ in. (130.2 x 90.1 x 1.9 cm.)
Executed in 1994. This work is unique.

New York, Paula Cooper, Cady Noland , March-April 1994.

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

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Cady Noland produced a series of seminal exhibitions in the 1980's and 1990's in which she explored decidedly American themes and imagery. Like her contemporaries Richard Prince, Mike Kelley and Barbara Kruger, Noland synthesized the strategies of appropriation to profound effect. Imbuing the ready made Americana of beer cans, tire swings, and celebrity, Noland has laid bare the violence and suppression implicit in the everydayness of these symbols.

The most ubiquitous and charged of these motifs that recur in the artist's oeuvre is that of the flag of the United States. As for Jasper Johns before her, the bold structure of this image of power provides Noland with ample material to explore formal concerns central to her work. Lines for Noland often connote confinement. In Big Hole , the stripes function as fences or as prison bars, dividing space and preventing movement. In a simple gesture, Noland is able to reveal the interconnectedness of western expansionism, the prison system and blind patriotism. Noland offers caution with her revelations. With no fixed position, the piece may be hung upside-down, the international symbol of distress.

Produced by silkscreen on aluminum, Noland is directly alluding to the practice of Andy Warhol, who also provided ambiguous commentary on the culture of celebrity and violence most notably in his Death and Disaster series. The industrial metal provides a mirrored background on which the all red flag floats. The viewer is confronted with a reflection of herself, Noland implicating us all in the contradictions that it represents. It is this uncanny ability to condense and expand meaning that separates Cady Noland's work from her peers.

"Noland, not Barney, Hirst, or Gonzalez-Torres, is the crucial link between last 1980's commodity art and much that has followed; she is the portal through which enormous amounts of appropriational, political and compositional notions pass. So mercurial, so fierce, and originally poetic is she that I think of her as our Rimbaud."
(J. Saltz, "Invasion of the Sculpture Snatchers", The Village Voice , May 12, 2006)