Lot 5: Cady Noland

No Title
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

23 x 60 x 6 in. (58.4 x 152.4 x 15.2 cm).

Chrome pole, fittings, American flag, grommets, tubular part of a screen door spring and metal grill.

1992

Max Protetch Gallery, New York (1992)

Through her aesthetic language and use of industrial objects, popular imagery and appropriation, Noland engages with art historical strategies associated with Minimalism, Post-Minimalism and Pop Art. Fascinated by our obsession with celebrity and violence, her mixed-media installations, sculptures and collages investigate the dark, seamy side of the American psyche. The present work exemplifies profoundly the poetic way in which Noland’s works reflect on the underpinnings of the American dream.
In her early work, Noland incorporated press photographs, advertising images and newspaper print. By the late 1980s, she began to examine the violent foundations of American history and delved deep into the public’s disturbing interest in violence using potent symbols, from beer cans to cowboys to the American flag itself. Noland’s Crate of Beer (1989), for instance “is a wire-mesh basket full of empty Budweiser cans. In her 1989 untitled installation at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Noland stacked six-packs of Budweiser atop one another. Metal scaffolding transformed these mountains of alcohol into a construction site.” In a similar way, here Noland subverts and transforms a masculine symbol. The metal grill, a signifier of the ultimate American past time of barbecuing—of the man as master of the grill—in this work is rendered a kind of fence, a mesh of metal wire as a symbol of exclusion. The grill is composed of a metal grid—the very grid that helped define Modernism and Minimalism, from Piet Mondrian to  Agnes Martin.
“Flags, too, populate Noland’s work. In The American Trip (1988), Cheap and Fast (1989), and related works, the flag is draped or hung, limp or pierced, like Noland’s cowboys” (www.guggenheim.org). While departing from its predecessors through its compelling psychological charge, Noland’s works invite a host of overlapping allusions including art-historical references to the industrial materials of Minimalism and the appropriation of the American flag. Like Jasper Johns in the 1960’s, here Noland points to the iconic status of the American flag and questions the assumptions and implications of what that image represents.
The sense of violence that pervades most of Noland’s pieces is achieved via signs of confinement, including enclosures, gates or boxes. In No Title, specifically, she accomplishes this by using the chrome bar to block the doorway in which it is designed to be installed, reiterated by the tubular part of a screen door hinge that hangs from it. As the artist herself explains, “violence used to be part of life in America and had a positive reputation…at a certain point violence used to describe sociology in a very positive way. There was a kind of righteousness about violence—the break with England, fighting for our rights, the Boston Tea Party. Now, in our culture as it is, there is one official social norm—and acts of violence, expressions of dissatisfaction are framed in an atomized view as being ‘abnormal” (© Copyright, Journal of Contemporary Art, Inc. and the authors).
While Noland is attracted to objects that are full of cultural significance, she is also interested in their anonymity as well. By treating these objects simply as objects she does something to them, somewhere between transforming and re-writing them. In effect, what becomes subtly apparent are the definite associations of the materials out of which they are made. For example, the use of the metal, Noland explains, “is sometimes hierarchical—to use chrome one place and galvanized aluminum in another is to describe relative relationships to it. The coolness might infer dissociation, but the mirror effect in some places is to draw you back in after the dissociation” (© Copyright, Journal of Contemporary Art, Inc. and the authors).
Both formally and conceptually, her sculptures and installations have continued to assert their influence over many contemporary artists and secured her status as one of the most important American sculptors.