Whenever I wonder why no one has ever reviewed or analyzed Cady Noland’s 2021 monograph, The Clip-On Method, I wonder if I’m the guy in the hot dog costume or the guy in the color-coordinated suit. I mean, I’ve read both volumes, and refer to them regularly for info and images, but I’ve never written about them, or what they contain, or what it means, and what it tells us about Noland and her practice and the world she sees.
Well, someone finally did, and the results are bleak as hell.
Craig Garrett’s Feb. 11 Darkforum essay, “On Artists, Entrepreneurs, and Psychopaths,” is subtitled, “Cady Noland predicted all of this.” And I fear he’s absolutely right.
Garrett takes a long, close look at Noland’s work, but also a close read of her texts. He begins with her signature 1987/1992 essay on our culture of the psychopath, “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil,” which has been namechecked for years without, apparently, sinking in. But he then goes deep into the essays and papers Noland included in The Clip-On Method, key texts by sociologists Stephen N. Butler and Ethel Spector Person.
[brb gotta run to a lecture, but the Glenstone Noland exhibition closes tomorrow, so get going.]