T’s Art issue looks at the iconoclastic artists who have found power in saying no.
“WHAT AM I looking at?”
That’s what the curator Bill Arning asked himself as he flipped through an envelope of Polaroids delivered to him by a then-little-known artist named Cady Noland in 1988. The snapshots of everyday objects like jumper cables and crates in bizarre configurations looked more like evidence from a crime scene than art.
Intrigued, he asked Noland, then 32, to take over an empty gallery at White Columns, the nonprofit art space he ran in SoHo. She spent so long tinkering with the installation that he finally just handed over the keys and told her to lock up. When he returned the next morning, “I had this sense that something significant had happened, art historically,” he said. To enter the gallery, visitors had to duck under a metal pole. Walkers hung over a stanchion next to a large silk-screened image of a pistol; IV bags dangled from a crate. It looked like a cross between a Social Security office, a police station and a hospital. “I couldn’t articulate why,” Arning said, but “this room felt like a perfect encapsulation of all the dystopic, absurd things about American culture.”
Noland began showing work in New York during a moment of transition. It was the end of the Reagan era and the height of the AIDS crisis. Massive, gestural paintings by the likes of Julian Schnabel and Georg Baselitz were beginning to look stale. Their hyperconfident spectacle fell flat in a city whose creative community continued to be in mortal danger. Noland, on the other hand, was making art that reflected the violence, fragmentation and nihilism of the time.
After her debut at White Columns, Noland was critically praised and became famous by the standards of the art world. She had an unusually packed schedule of solo shows — six in two years — and was prominently featured in some of the world’s most high-profile exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale. She never seemed comfortable in the spotlight; she avoided mainstream press and didn’t participate in photo shoots. (She once submitted two childhood photographs of herself to a book publisher in lieu of a headshot.) But she regularly attended openings and occasionally collaborated with other artists.
Then in the late 1990s, she began to pull back further, turning down requests for exhibitions and letting few people into her studio. In 2000, Team Gallery in West Chelsea included new sculptures of hers in a group show: three barricades stacked with dozens of A-frames. The minor obstacle at the entrance of her first outing — the pole blocking the door — had evolved into a formidable barrier. Obstruction had become her art.
The work didn’t sell and, after the show had closed, Noland asked Team’s owner, José Freire, to dismantle it. Following her instructions, the staff left one A-frame on the street every few days until the whole thing had disappeared. In an essay published after his death in 2005, the artist Steven Parrino, whose work was on view in the same room as Noland’s at Team, likened the weekslong process to “a serial killer disposing of a body.”
After that, the artist seemed to, for all intents and purposes, disappear.
NOLAND WAS BORN in 1956 to a family with deep ties to art and politics. Her father is the prominent American color-field painter Kenneth Noland; her mother, Cornelia Langer, co-owned a boutique in Alexandria, Va. (Cady is named after her maternal grandmother, Lydia Cady; her maternal grandfather was the governor of North Dakota. After he was ousted amid a financial scandal — a later-overturned conviction for violating campaign finance laws — Lydia ran to replace him but came up short of winning.) Noland attended the liberal arts college Sarah Lawrence (her mother’s alma mater) and moved to Manhattan after graduation to begin her life as an artist.
More than anything else, those who’ve worked with Noland remark on the clarity of her vision and her focus on how even minute adjustments can transform a space. Arning said that when she attended parties at his Manhattan apartment, her first order of business was to inspect the sculpture he had bought from her to make sure nothing was out of place. (Noland denies this.) Called “Rotten Cop,” the piece was a walker that had a police badge, a holster and gun-range earmuffs affixed to it. (In a 1989 essay, Noland noted that this series was intended to capture the disjunction between a police officer’s work life — “a place of danger and thrills” — and a home life full of “comforting but suffocating tedious obligations.”)
Lore about Noland abounds. One source recalls her having worked so late into the night on an installation that she slept in the gallery the next day, though Noland herself says that wasn’t so. She’d install some sculptures so close to each other that they seemed to take on a new form; dealers had to ask where one stopped and another began so that they understood what they could sell. “Most artists confronted with all that attention would just go along,” Arning said. “She just kept saying, ‘No, I’m going to do it this way.’ She didn’t give the venues a choice.”
Freire said that as a condition to participate in Team’s 2000 group show, Noland had to approve the installation not only of her own work but of the entire exhibition. (Noland denies this, too.) In the days before the opening, Freire said, there were few discernible changes to the layout, but her presence was evidenced by the empty six-packs of O’Doul’s nonalcoholic beer that she left behind. He describes the experience with a perhaps surprising amount of fondness. “I found her incredibly easy to deal with, and incredibly charming,” he said.
James Rondeau, the president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, recalled observing Noland prepare a show back when he was a curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut in 1996. The exhibition included 10 newspaper photographs silk-screened on aluminum and steel sheets installed low to the ground. They chronicled fringe headline makers, from Squeaky Fromme, a Manson Family member who attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford, to Vincent Foster, a lawyer for the Clinton administration whose death by suicide spawned conspiracy theories. Against one wall, Noland installed shiny bleachers, also made out of aluminum.
Shortly before the opening, however, she felt that the whole thing “just didn’t work,” Rondeau said. She and the crew spent hours tweaking the placement of various sheets until the installation “snapped into place.” In the end, people could sit down and take in the silk-screens like a sporting event, implicating them in tabloid culture. “That was such a revelation to me — how two inches to the left and two inches to the right could change the gestalt of a room,” he said.
Much of Noland’s work — from aluminum silk-screens to walls of stacked Budweiser cans to installations incorporating handcuffs, chain-link fences and stockades — examines how American culture dehumanizes its participants. Tabloids invite audiences to scrutinize and judge celebrities; admen manipulate consumers into becoming mindless spenders; the state restricts what its citizens can do.
“I became interested in how … people treat other people like objects,” Noland told the Journal of Contemporary Art in a rare interview in 1990. “I became interested in psychopaths in particular because they objectify people in order to manipulate them.”
She had explored the parallel between psychopathy and capitalism further in a 1989 essay, “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil,” referencing the work of the psychiatrist Ethel Jane Spector in arguing that “the psychopath shares the societally sanctioned characteristics of the entrepreneurial male.”
The essay originated as a slide lecture that she developed for an academic conference called “The Expression of Evil” in Atlanta and was later published in a journal called Balcon. In 1992, she adapted it for an installation at Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany, where she printed oversize excerpts and installed them in an underground parking garage surrounded by friends’ artworks, cinder blocks, puddles of oil, a Camaro and a van flipped on its side with the windows bashed in. Once again, her work looked like the aftermath of a crime. Society was the perpetrator, and Noland, the criminal profiler.
The Documenta installation also included an addendum to her lecture called “The Bonsai Effect,” which describes how American culture keeps minorities distracted with “impossible projects” and women preoccupied with “absurd expenditures of time and money to achieve and maintain beauty.” The whole “game,” Noland writes, “depends on investing in things which accrue in value, or in wasting things in an obvious way.” Those who remain in the dark about these rules, she writes earlier in the essay, “are ripe for exploitation.”
Noland’s skepticism of capitalism put her on a collision course with the art market, which had ballooned over the course of the 1980s, when contemporary art became ever more of an established commodity, and increasingly people could buy new art from galleries and sell it at auction a few months later for considerably higher prices. (Most artists do not make residuals when their work is resold in the United States.)
Having once worked as a bookkeeper, Noland was “very cautious with” the art business, said the dealer Lawrence Luhring. Collectors who wanted to buy a work from her celebrated 1990 show at his former gallery, Luhring Augustine Hetzler in Los Angeles, had to sign a contract agreeing to involve Noland in any subsequent sale of the work — a provision that, even decades later, is still deployed by only a handful of artists.
Taking inspiration from its Hollywood backdrop, Noland’s Los Angeles show included a log cabin facade and a wooden stairwell to nowhere that resembled set pieces, as well as a metal silhouette of a cowboy shoveling what appears to be pancakes into his mouth, with a circle the size of a baseball cut out of his shoulder. According to Luhring, Noland rented Wild West-themed costumes for every employee and required people to wear them. Staff members were told to answer the phone with “Howdy.”
The same level of control and precision that made her so adept at producing an exhibition could also make her complicated to collaborate with, or to represent commercially. Luhring believes that he and Noland fell out after he advised the collector Peter Brant on an exhibition that included her work (which she had not approved) at Brant’s foundation in Connecticut; Noland says that their split happened earlier than that.
Another dealer who had a complex collaboration with Noland was Paula Cooper, who presented a solo show of her work in 1994. The exhibition featured various instruments of shame and humiliation in American culture. There was a set of stockades — Noland once described them as the first public sculptures in colonial America — which visitors were permitted to pose in, and silk-screens from newspaper clippings about public figures, including the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton, who was kicked off George McGovern’s 1972 ticket after it became public that he had been hospitalized for depression. (Cooper recalled that Eagleton’s son brought his father to see the show; he seemed to get it.)
The best-known work to debut at Cooper was “Publyck Sculpture,” a monumental installation that looks like a dystopian swing set with three tires hanging from chains where the swings should be. The tableau recalls not only childhood playthings and American car culture but also all manner of circular shapes with violent associations: nooses, bullet holes, pillories and targets. (The shape also recalls the targets that her artist father painted over and over.) The most expensive work on view, it was priced at $45,000 (or $96,893 today, accounting for inflation). It is now in the collection of Glenstone, the private museum in Maryland founded by the billionaire industrialist Mitchell Rales and his wife, the curator Emily Wei Rales.
Cooper said that her relationship with Noland began to fray after the gallery recommended an assistant who did not meet the artist’s standards. (Noland disagreed with this characterization without elaborating.) “I think I’m not good at treating special people specially,” Cooper said. “Although that’s hard to say if you work with many different kinds of people. I think she’s a terrific artist.”
IN THE DECADE after Noland withdrew from public life, the art world became an even larger and more voracious machine. People who blurred the line between dealer and collector got rich trading art without adhering to the old-school requirements that they represent artists or stage exhibitions.
According to legend, this transformation at least in part motivated Noland’s disappearance. Noland denied that. But for an artist who believed that nearly imperceptible adjustments had a substantial impact on the viewer’s experience, the journey of an artwork in this increasingly profit-driven system — from the studio to the gallery to a collector’s home, where it could be installed however they choose, and then possibly to an auction house, shown next to whatever else happened to be on offer — must have been disturbing. Because she was already represented in the collections of the country’s most important museums and patrons, Noland had accrued enough power and privilege to turn her back on the art world without being erased.
Noland never explained her absence. Over the next few years, the mythology surrounding her became more calcified. She was difficult. She couldn’t handle the pressure. She was crazy. Or she was a genius. “People started putting an emotional spin or a psychological spin” on the story, the writer Greg Allen, a Noland obsessive, said. “When there became a reason, it was people calling her mental health into question. It was misguided and driven by the misogyny and ableism that were more unchecked in that era.”
The art world loves an eccentric, but generally only if that eccentric shows up to parties. If the eccentric is both elusive and a woman, things get far dicier. “As a woman, when you know what you want, you are always seen as difficult,” said Susanne Pfeffer, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, who has worked with Noland. The artist “always knew what she wanted and not, and a lot of times that was ignored. She is one of the most free and feminist people I know.”
For the next 10 years, Noland kept a low profile. (To this day, there exist only two known photos of her online, one of them taken at Documenta in 1992; she is covering her face with her hands.) Yet she didn’t disengage entirely. She contributed an essay about Andy Warhol, whom she admired, to Artforum in 2004, and her work appeared on that issue’s cover. She quietly created at least a handful of new works, including a sculpture of a metal basket holding two motorcycle helmets, a film reel and three subway straps for the Walker Art Center that she made in 2008. She restored at least one piece that had been damaged.
It wasn’t until 2012, however, that she truly re-emerged. This time, it was as a defendant in a lawsuit. The Swiss art dealer Marc Jancou sued Noland and Sotheby’s after the artist disavowed a work that he wanted to sell at auction. “Cowboys Milking” (1990) was a silk-screen on aluminum depicting two men wrangling a cow alongside text about Henry Plummer, an outlaw of the American West. Noland visited Sotheby’s to view it, along with two other works destined for the block that season, and found its corners so damaged that she considered the work totaled. Sotheby’s called off the sale. Noland allowed the other two sales to proceed: “Bloody Mess” (1988), a haphazard-looking collection of beer cans, headlight bulbs, rubber mats and other objects on the ground, sold for $422,500, while “Oozewald” (1989), a larger-than-life silk-screen-on-aluminum cutout of Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, with an American flag stuffed into one of eight oversize bullet holes scattered across its surface, sold for $6.6 million. The latter made Noland, for a time, the most expensive living female artist at auction.
Jancou was apparently furious. He emailed the auction house asking why it would trust the advice of someone who had “no gallery representation and … a biased and radical approach to the art market.” The court eventually dismissed Jancou’s suits. But it was hardly the last time that Noland would defend her art’s honor. There was a series of lawsuits over “Log Cabin Facade” (1990), a life-size wooden sculpture that the artist disavowed after its previous owner allowed it to be installed outdoors for over 10 years and then replaced the rotted wood with new logs. “This is not an artwork,” she said in a handwritten fax addressed to its new owner, the Ohio-based collector Scott Mueller (whom she then knew only as the “mystery client” of the art adviser who had contacted her), in 2014. A judge rejected Noland’s claim that the restoration was tantamount to the creation of an unauthorized copy. She appealed twice and lost both times. According to Mueller’s own lawsuit against the Berlin gallery that sold him the piece, a dealer told Mueller’s liaison that there were few “options to calm ‘crazy’ Cady down.” (This suit was also dismissed.)
Then there were the disclaimers. At the Art Basel fair in 2012, the dealer Christopher D’Amelio presented her work without her authorization but included, at her request, text informing visitors that Noland did not consider him “to be an expert or authority on her artwork” — despite the fact that, according to D’Amelio, he had worked with Noland as a director at Paula Cooper for three years and then sold work on her behalf at his own gallery from 1997 to 2006. The 2014 show at the Brant Foundation included a placard noting that Noland “reserves her attention for projects of her own choosing” and “hasn’t given her approval or blessing to this show.”
In Noland’s most recent interview, with the author Sarah Thornton for the 2014 book “33 Artists in 3 Acts,” the artist said that policing the integrity of her work had become “a full-time thing.” Thornton’s chapter is perhaps the peak of the Noland-as-crazy-artist story line. (It included a disclaimer, at the request of Noland, that the artist had not approved the text.) In Thornton’s telling, Noland believed that her phone was tapped as a result of a lawsuit in which she was involved.
Thornton goes on to say that in the early 2010s, the art dealer Larry Gagosian hired the curator Francesco Bonami to stage an exhibition of her work. Noland — at least according to Thornton — told Bonami that she had no interest in being “saved from obscurity” and suggested she would shoot Gagosian if he went through with it. Asked about the episode recently, Noland said, “I wasn’t interested in having an unauthorized show.”
FOR A LONG time, Noland existed more as a fable — or, to some, boogeyman — than as a living, breathing practicing artist. That changed in 2018, when Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Art presented a monumental survey of her work. To many in the art world’s surprise, the show had Noland’s full cooperation. There wasn’t a disclaimer in sight.
Pfeffer, the museum’s director, says that she talked her way into getting Noland’s phone number from a mutual acquaintance and the artist agreed to meet her at a Le Pain Quotidien in Manhattan (a seemingly regular haunt for Noland — it’s the same baked goods-and-coffee chain where she met Thornton). Before long, the show metastasized into a sprawling presentation of almost 90 works.
Since Noland doesn’t fly, Pfeffer visited New York every three weeks for almost a year. Together, they planned the show by placing maquettes inside a meticulous scale model of the museum. (Around this time, Noland was working out of a studio in Brooklyn.) “It was really intense,” Pfeffer said, “and we had a lot of fun.”
According to the curator, Noland never really stopped making art. Although the show did not present material made after 2008, she saw work that Noland had created more recently in the process of developing it. “If you are an artist, you can’t stop working as an artist,” Pfeffer said. Noland also sold work directly to collectors after 2000 — yet another seeming rejection of a system built to rely on dealers and other gatekeepers.
Although Noland never visited the Frankfurt show in person, the experience seemed to crack open a door that she had kept closed for decades. In 2021, the unthinkable happened: She showed new work in New York. The exhibition, at Galerie Buchholz on the Upper East Side, coincided with the release of a two-volume artist’s book that she created with the art historian Rhea Anastas, “The Clip-On Method,” which compiled images of her work alongside essays, newspaper articles and other archival material. (Several of Noland’s closest collaborators, including Anastas, did not reply to or declined requests for interviews.) The show seems to pick up right where Noland left off, with a new metal fence sculpture and A-frame barricades on view. Then in 2023 came an even more surprising development: Noland presented a show of new work at Gagosian.
Once again, familiar motifs were evident: crunched-up Budweiser cans, bullets, sheriff’s badges, chains. In many of the works, these objects are encased in acrylic blocks, placed in clear acrylic boxes or on filing cabinets, upside-down trash cans or tables, as if in a storage facility or strangely sparse boutique. Was this Noland’s way of placing her work in amber, exerting total control? Or was the joke on us, those who insist on turning her into a commodity?
Some were skeptical of her return. Bonami, who had tried and failed to organize a Noland show at Gagosian around a decade earlier, described her as “a seminal artist” whose “attitude caused in her what I call ‘the Cinderella syndrome’ … meaning that if a radical artist like her waits too long, what was magic disappears — a golden carriage after midnight turns back into a pumpkin and, in her case, a beer can as a piece of art goes back to being a beer can.”
Works in the show were reportedly priced between $200,000 (for the sheriff’s badge pieces) and $1.5 million (for larger sculptures). All of them sold. Glenstone, the private museum, bought out the entire exhibition. A selection of works from the show will be included in a major presentation of Noland’s work there, opening Oct. 17, and developed “in collaboration with the artist,” according to the institution.
This past June, Noland’s work appeared in perhaps the most unlikely venue yet: Gagosian’s booth at an art fair. And not just any art fair — Art Basel, the most elite commercial event of them all, and the fair where she’d asked the gallerist Christopher D’Amelio to post her disavowal of his entire presentation. Gagosian presented two new works with the artist’s full permission: a silk-screen-on-aluminum excerpt from an article about the New York City crime boss John Gotti and a red basket full of hubcaps, pipes, a license plate holder and a red revolver.
Whether or not Noland has softened her earlier anticommercial stance is hard to say. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she declined to be interviewed for this story. But she did agree to share her email address after a lengthy game of telephone involving her, me, a Gagosian publicist and a Gagosian staffer. In response to my email, Noland replied: “I don’t do interviews. If something needs fact-checking, you can email me.” (Noland responded to queries from a fact-checker.)
Initially she seems to have made it clear to some sources that she did not want them to share images of her work with this magazine. “We very much do not want to upset Cady,” a spokesperson for Luhring Augustine said by way of explanation. Shortly before publication, Noland appeared to reverse her decision and also shared previously unpublished Polaroids of her work.
Many have remarked how much Noland’s themes — tabloid culture, political manipulation, the failures of the American dream — remain resonant at a moment when a former reality-TV star is running for a second presidential term and a Supreme Court justice has made headlines for the upside-down American flag that flew outside his home. “The venom that has been directed toward her is matched only by the accuracy of her critique,” Allen said.
Yet Parrino once wrote that Noland’s subjects are “not social anthropology” but in fact “highly personal.” Noland made art about car crashes, he said, in part because she’d been in an automobile accident as a child; she made a piece called “Plane Crash Photos” because she is afraid to fly; she fixated on Patty Hearst’s kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army because she has a fear of cults. “She aestheticizes her fears and tries to control them by pinning them up,” he wrote.
It’s easy to imagine that Noland is in a prison of her own making, trapped inside her fears as well as her desire to do the impossible: control the art that she has put out into the world. But Noland might say it is the rest of us who are trapped inside the many structures built to profit from our labor and drain us of agency. At a time when many believe that the only way to succeed is to be seen, Noland offers an alternative. “Boundaries are always being explored and exploited,” she said in a 1996 interview with Rondeau. “At this moment, privacy is our version of the Western frontier.”
While writing this story, I frequently found myself thinking about something Pfeffer told me: that working on Noland’s retrospective fundamentally changed her view of the world. It made her feel that “everything standing in public is, in a certain way, a public sculpture.” I thought about this every morning when I left my apartment and stepped onto the street, where a construction crew had dug up the asphalt and set up an elaborate ring of A-frames around a giant hole. Noland may still be elusive, but those who have been exposed to her work are liable to see it everywhere.
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