The Brooklyn Rail

In the late 1980s, the art dealer Daniel Newburg showed me several milk crates filled with various bits of pipe, tools, and other objects by Cady Noland, which he planned to include in a group exhibition. At the time, Noland’s work, reminiscent of both Robert Rauschenberg’s and Joseph Beuys’s formal strategies, resonated with the aesthetic and conceptual zeitgeist. Over time, the work became more ambitious and larger in scale. Noland began to incorporate social content by expanding on the associative potential of her objects. These additions included silkscreens of grainy tabloid photographs featuring figures such as Patty Hearst and Lee Harvey Oswald. This aligned her with a growing number of artists who sought to make their work socially relevant by appropriating loaded imagery in a non-committal manner, which allowed them to claim their work was part of a political critique. The trend, marked by the 1993 Whitney Biennial, coincided with significant social and cultural changes, including the AIDS crisis, the end of the Reagan era, and postmodernism.

Though Nyland Blake and Jason Rhoades are among her peers whose works have a greater affinity to Noland’s, at the Glenstone Museum her work is interestingly paired with exhibitions of Mel Edwards’s welded metal “Lynch Fragments” and Lorraine O’Grady’s graphic text pieces. Both Edwards and O’Grady are African American artists who emerged in the 1960s and ’70s; what connects all three artists is that their works touch on such social issues as identity, class, and everyday life. This grouping also represents the significant role that Conceptualism and post-Minimalism played in shifting socially responsive art from protest to critique, from the literal to the symbolic.

Cady Noland’s exhibition at Glenstone fills three galleries. It begins with Our American Cousin (1989), a tableau resembling the detritus of a long-abandoned family barbecue. It consists of much of Noland’s standard iconography: industrial fencing, handcuffs, police paraphernalia, beer cans, spare car parts, milk crates, walkers, license plates, etc. All of this contributes to an aesthetic of abjection. This is accompanied by Clip-On Man (1989), a photo-silkscreen of a smiling man in a suit with a six-pack suspended from his belt mounted onto a grid of aluminum extrusion. As is often the case throughout this show, it’s hard to tell without referring to the checklist if the installations consist of one piece or multiple works.

Glenstone’s Room 8 contains works from the late eighties to mid-nineties, all with socio-cultural associations. The room features Oozewald (1989), a cutout of Lee Harvey Oswald in the immediate aftermath of his being shot by Jack Ruby. His figure is perforated by holes with an American flag stuffed into one of them. There are also grainy photo-silkscreens of a protester and one of a Nixon campaign poster, each a separate work. The room includes as well a tire swing, a section of chain-link fencing, and a minimalist public stock, which mimics those used in the pre-modern era.

Room 10 displays multi-part works from 2023, which are presented as a single installation. The unifying element is tape marking the placement of each object, or in some cases its removal or re-alignment, as if the installation constituted a massive crime scene.

The objects themselves consist mainly of items such as new garbage cans and industrial skids alongside her usual tropes. What’s different from Noland’s works from the eighties and nineties is the significant amount of glossy, clear, resin tables displaying bullets, crushed beer cans, and sheriff badges, which have been preserved in clear resin cubes. There are also plexiglass boxes containing car parts and police paraphernalia. Though much cleaned up and perhaps a bit more self-referential, Noland’s work continues to be aesthetically forceful, though her message has become less resounding and debased.

The artist and her critical supporters have said that her art explores what she has referred to as “the American Nightmare,” focusing on toxic aspects of the failure of the American dream, but sometimes her critique feels detached from the real causes and consequences at play. Like much art called political or critical, her work requires analogies to fill the gap between the work and its intended meaning. For example, while her tire swing set, consisting of three white wall tires suspended by chains from an aluminum frame structure, initially evokes the image of childhood play, we are told it is meant to carry much darker connotations. This is encoded in the title’s unusual spelling: Publyck Sculpture (1994), which is meant to convey association with such occult figures as Aleister Crowley and Charles Manson, though it is more likely to evoke lynching or a gallows, if anything. As such, these references are most likely lost on us and with them the work’s criticality. What we are left with is industrial materials in a formally minimalist structure.

Ironically, while Noland’s work itself may not be explicitly critical or proactive, her approach to her career and interactions with the art world demonstrate a deep, critical awareness of her own position as a successful artist. This awareness manifested in the late nineties when she began to “exit” the art system as a producer of work. At the time she refused to produce new work, she also took over the management of existing pieces. She also demonstrated a critical stance toward the concept of the artist as a public figure and opted out of her role as a celebrity. These actions, along with her legal battles over the handling of her work, constitute what she identifies as her “aesthetics of refusal.” She held to this position for more than a decade, and only returned to exhibiting new works around 2021 when she launched, at Galerie Bucholz, her self-published, two-volume book, titled The Clip-On Method. Seemingly, this exhibit at Glenstone, and a previous one with Gagosian Gallery in 2023 of new works, represents her comeback tour.