cady noland – greg.org

What Might Cady Noland Be Up To?

Looks like more writeups of the Cady Noland installation at Glenstone are turning up—and more images of it are getting out. Ian Ware at 202 Arts Review has apparently found the same stash of Noland photos online—though he is more assiduous in his image copyright crediting than I was.

And that’s all reason enough to rejoice. But beyond that, Ware has a very interesting, site-specific take on Noland’s take on her works’ new home. He finds a relationship between the temporary walls Noland erected to block a distracting view of the museum’s pond, and the museum’s own temporary walls blocking off the building’s renovations.

He also sees in Noland’s alterations and additions to the installation a critique of the Raleses and their multibillion-dollar project. Here he draws on the larger context of the Raleses’ business dealings and Glenstone’s construction–and the lawsuits with its contractor that precipitated the current closure and renovations of the new museum building—and even some of the lurid investment shenanigans by the contractor’s family—a local real estate dynasty, apparently—that “may as well have been written for a tabloid delivered straight to Noland’s doorstep.”

What feels more resonant—and which I think takes more properly into consideration the involvement of Emily Wei Rales, in curating, collecting, and institution-building—is the exhibition of Noland’s work alongside the text collages of Lorraine O’Grady and the powerful sculptures of Melvin Edwards.

As someone who’s watched the Raleses develop their vision from various vantage points, I feel like they’ve been thoughtful to iterate away from the narrow trophyism of, say, the Fisher and Broad collections. The collecting path from Split/Rocker did not have to lead to Noland, or O’Grady, or Edwards, but here they are. If they do take a couple of hits from an artist they think is significant, I imagine they’d be undaunted, maybe even appreciative. Their venture faces more credibility risk from privileging artists’ approbation than from accommodating their critiques.

But this gets to the crux of Noland’s work today, when the poisonous forces of media, politics and power have outstripped everything she flagged back in the day. Can her new work make a similar impact to her earlier hits? Is that even something she considers? Or does the proliferation of objects trapped and neutralized in acrylic blocks, perched on industrial logistics flotsam target a new, contemporary source of dread we’re still too asleep to realize? And does this luxuriously contemplative installation help us to see, or does it sedate us?

The House is (Still) on Fire, But There’s a Cady Noland Show to See. [202artsreview]

Cady Noland Pavilions

“Beginning October 17, and spanning three rooms of the Pavilions, Glenstone will share a presentation of works by Cady Noland. Developed in collaboration with the artist, this presentation will mark the first major survey by a U.S. museum of her decades-long career.”

Reader, the presentation has been marked. Last year I poured one out for anyone who’d hoped to buy a new Cady Noland work. But now I feel for anyone who’s been trying to buy a major Cady Noland the last 17 years. Because Glenstone got them all. Look at that map; Glenstone has Cady Nolands even Glenstone doesn’t know about.

Three of the six open pavilion spaces are Noland’s work. [The others are two galleries of works by Lorraine O’Grady and Melvin Edwards, and the little library.] The first thing you see as you go down the stairs is not a Noland sculpture, but a Noland architectural intervention. At first it read like an Ellsworth Kelly, if only because architecture-scale Kellys were just on view here. Up close, no, closer, inside it, it read like an Anne Truitt, of the back of the Anne Truitts that had backs.

The no photography proscription is excruciating, and I find myself trying to no spoilers my way through this post, as if it’s feasible to say, let’s discuss it after you’ve seen it. The artist adjusted the space to minimize distraction and focus attention on her work, and it works. They borrowed Clip-on Man. Charles Gatewood’s book with the source image is in the library.

The Raleses purportedly acquired Noland’s entire show last year at Gagosian, but it also somehow fills a space three times the size. There is a lot less tape, except when there isn’t.

There are pallet plinths that are not elements of the work, except when they are. There are foam and carpet blocks that precede an installation, except they’re still here. It’s at once pristine and provisional.

The paper labels remain on the white wall tires. You may not ride the tire swings. The internal gear to lift the massive stockade is freshly lubed, but the crank is padlocked. The chain that connected the bench is gone. Oozewald has its corrected and copyrighted stand. The wear on the corners of one (non-mirror-finish) aluminum panel propped on the floor is enough to make the owner of Cowboys Milking weep.

It’s like this survey surveys not only the range of Noland’s work as she made it, but as it was presented, processed and purchased since. Maybe being cast in acrylic and thoughtfully placed in the contemplative suburban art temple of benevolent billionaires is not, after all, all bad.

Two for T

I was excited to read Nicole Acheampong’s feature on David Hammons in art issue of The New York Times’ T Magazine because I knew it would focus on some of the artist’s less documented works off the beaten art world path. [They’d asked me about images of Hammons’ public artworks in Savannah, but opted to not go the appropriated Google Streetview route.] And it does, and it’s great, and it’s especially nice for pointing me back to a profile I misesd in 2018 by M.H. Miller of LES publisher, poet and longtime Hammons whisperer Steve Cannon.

Cannon is one of the creative suns like East Village photographer Alex Harsley who looped Hammons into their regularly orbit from the early 1990s. In the white artworld, Hammons developed a reputation of being aloof, reclusive, evasive But the truth is, he just had his own people he’d rather be in dialogue with, and Cannon has definitely been one of them.

But I was stunned to read Julia Halperin’s cover story about Cady Noland, which tracks the artist’s rise, her apparent withdrawal from the art world—and the rumors or sniping around it—and her recent return to exhibiting her work. Noland’s dedication to the precise positioning and presentation of her work is an ongoing theme, along with the power her work derives from attention some saw as excessive.

I was stunned even though I’m quoted in the article—as “a Noland obsessive,” which lmao is going straight on my bio—stunned because though she refused an interview, Noland agreed to respond to Halperin’s inquiries. The article is thus replete with parenthetical denials of rumors and clarifications of others’ statements, as if she’s carefully correcting the position of each element in her narrative.

Noland also provided the Times with previously unpublished Polaroids. And they confirmed that the artist has been involved in the new installation of her work opening at Glenstone in less than two weeks. Also that the Raleses did indeed buy out her entire show at Gagosian. What is a collector but an obsessive with ten billion dollars?

The Secret Art of David Hammons [t mag]
A Blind Publisher, Poet—and link to the Lower East Side’s cultural history
Cady Noland and the Art of Control

Paint Fair, Nuts’N’Shirt

Artist Keith Haring takes a break from work in his studio making paintings for an upcoming art exhibit.

Poking around The Broad’s Keith Haring show, which is at the Walker for another week or so, led me to this photo of Haring at work. It was taken in late 1982 by Alan Tannenbaum. I feel like I’d seen images of this moment before, but this time, what caught my attention was Haring’s t-shirt.

Paint Fair, in carnival lettering with a circus tent and a frilly, scalloped, tent-like border.

Cady Noland with Diana Balton, *Nuts’N’Shit*, 1990, screenprint on metal, 28 3/4 x 42 1/8 in., fabricated by Big Apple Printing, collection: MoMA

I noticed it because it looked very similar to Nuts’N’Shit, a screenprinted metal work by Cady Noland and Diana Balton. The one at MoMA [above] is listed as a screenprinted edition of one, but the one in Frankfurt was enamel, framed, and from the Brants. I will trust the artist to sort that out.

Cady Noland Tire Swing

A Steven Parrino I think is *Bradley „The Beast“ Field R.I.P.*, 1997, and Cady Noland’s *Trashing Folgers*, 1993-94, installed in Noland’s exhibition at MMK Frankfurt in 2019

Sometimes I really am slow on the uptake. Like when it took me all this time to really look at the extensive installation views of Cady Noland’s exhibition at MMK Frankfurt. Somehow I’d just been stuck with the imageless brochure/checklist, and the works I wasn’t familiar with remained unnoticed to me, even when I should have known better.

Like Trashing Folgers (1993/94), the large landscape above, a full-bleed screenprint on aluminum of a c. 1969 wire photo of the junked up backyard from Barker Ranch, the post-murder desert hideout of Charles Manson and his “family.” It’s in the collection of FRAC Grand Large in Hauts-de-France, which is on my Lacaton Vassal bucket list, but which does not help me here.

OH OH: Cady Noland at Basel

HO HO, what’s that on the floor of the Gagosian booth at Basel, between that 1990 Judd stack Zwirner also repped, and that 1990 Christopher Wool painting of Thompson Dean’s that Christie’s ended up with after it didn’t get one bid in 2021?

It is a Cady Noland with a 1990s subject—a NY Post article on mobster John Gotti’s 1992 trial—but a fresh, 2024 date.

Dapper Don Defiant: a screenshot of a new Cady Noland work, screenprint on aluminum, but now between a Basquiat and a Jordan Wolfson?? via Gagosian’s Basel 2024 IG story

What does it mean that Noland put out a work in 2024 about a vain mobster nicknamed “the Dapper Don” being called out by the judge for trying to poison his trial by threatening witnesses? What does it mean that she seems to have made this work out of the same photocopy Andrew Russeth spotted five years ago, in Joanne Greenbaum’s wild 70+ artist group show, “Notebook,” at 56 Henry? [n.b.: “Notebook” closed a couple of weeks before the MMK retrospective opened.]

Did Noland look around her studio and laugh as she considered Greenbaum’s request for one notebook drawing or work they “would never show to a dealer or pull out during a studio visit”?

And the plinth? I just listened to Jeannine Tang’s talk at the MMK symposium that included several quotes from Noland and her sources about the problems of plinths. But I guess they’re OK for high traffic art fair booths?

There is another new Noland in Basel, a wire crate-o-stuff, and if I see the photo again of the guard-like woman standing next to it, I’ll post it here.

UPDATE: The photocopy Cady Noland sent to 56 Henry for Greenbaum’s *Notebook* show in 2019

UPDATE: Meanwhile, here is what I understand is the piece Noland included in Notebook at 56 Henry in 2019. No date was forthcoming, but it is not, in fact, identical to image silkscreened on the 2024 work. It looks to be a cropped variation, copied with paper strips placed over the elements Noland wished to exclude. There is a little anomaly in the right side of the Gotti caption, which looks like a logo for The Container Store. Is it perhaps a trace of a plastic document sleeve, that might also be the cause of the uneven edge? It’s a narrow window into a practice few people even knew in 2019 was active. If, indeed, that was when Noland made this copy.

Towards A Cady Noland Cupboards Collection

Study for Cady Noland Cupboard Collection Motiv 1: *Oozewald x Ikea Pax*

This post will be updated as more motivs emerge.

Absolutely Would Tanya

Cady Noland, *Patty Hearst Wooden Template*, 1989-90, 72 x 47 in., selling Feb. 29 at Sotheby’s

Of all the work remaining to be sold from Chara Shreyer’s fascinating collection, there’s a lot to like. But nothing lands quite like this Cady Noland sculpture. It’s labeled as Patty Hearst Wooden Template, though the aluminum version at MoMA is titled, Tanya as Bandit.

Cady Noland, *Tanya as Bandit*, 1989, screenprint ink on aluminum, 72 x 48 x 3/8 in., collection MoMA

Also this one is dated 1989-90, while MoMA’s—which one would think was created using this template and the instructions written on it in marker—is dated 1989. Maybe it took a little longer for Noland to decide this, too, was a work. But I don’t know, and as the artist’s statement to Sotheby’s makes clear, she was not consulted:

Statement from the Artist:

In an atmosphere of rapidly trading artwork, it is not possible for Cady Noland to agree or dispute the various claims behind works attributed to her. Her silence about published assertions regarding the provenance of any work or the publication of a photograph of a work does not signify agreement about claims that are being made. Ms. Noland has not been asked for nor has she given the rights to any photographs of her works or verified their accuracy or authenticity.

Me, I’d also ask her about that base.

Lot 456: Cady Noland, Patty Hearst Wooden Template, est. $50-70k, update: sold to someone else for $88,900 [sothebys]
Previously, related: An Anthology of Cady Noland Disclaimers
Tania Facsimile Object (N1)

Let’s Review The Tape

There has been surprisingly little written about Cady Noland’s show at Gagosian’s Park & 75th Street storefront space. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know quite what to make of it all, either. All the years of absence and anticipation just end, and people maybe don’t quite know what to do or say. In the last 20 years, Noland’s practice has been understood as a harbinger, coming from the past, with relevance for the present. In the 80s and 90s she threw the dodgeball of prophecy about American violence and celebrity politics and art world commodification at our heads, and every disclaimer, auction record, and lawsuit of this century was another hit.

As Noland’s first show of new work, and a lot of it, in decades, it’s easy to want it to be important. But now that means figuring out what it’s doing now; is it relevant in this moment, or is it yet another harbinger?

Cady Noland More Relevant Than I’d Like

*The New Yorker* cover illustration, 2 Oct 2023, by Bruce Blitt

Shoutout to Cady Noland for making the cover of The New Yorker this week. We have been overdue for a discussion of the walker as a symbol of American boomer hegemony.

Cady Noland, *Untitled (Walker)*, 1986, metal walker, metal police badge, leather gloves and case, denim strap, leather strap with metal clip, nylon strap with metal clip, copyright Cady Noland, photo: Owen Conway via Gagosian

cf.

*Untitled (Harvey After Untitled (Walker))*, 2019, walker, tennis balls, retractable stanchions, galvanized barrier, stepstool, hi-viz coat (image:AFP via Getty Images via PageSix)

Non-Existent Cady Nolands

Once I could confirm she included no LL Bean tote bags, I made my peace with not blogging every review and post and image of Cady Noland’s one-room exhibition at Gagosian. But it’s hard to resist, especially in this window before I get to the show in person.

detail of a photo of archival Polaroids from Cady Noland’s exhibition at Park & 75th, showing an undated sculpture with the label, “doesn’t exist,” via octavio-world

On tumblr Octavio has posted some intriguing photos that were not in the gallery checklist: a collection of archival Polaroids, some stacks several pictures deep, of earlier installations and details of work. I’m going to wait to go through them more carefully, but I will absolutely rush to post the discovery of a new category of Cady Noland sculpture alongside “destroyed by refabrication” and “disavowed because of damage and conservation shenanigans”:

“Doesn’t exist.”

1986

It’s been two days and the #CadyNoland hashtag’s been kind of quiet. Maybe folks are still thinking about what a newly seen 1986 work might imply about the possible existence of a Cady Noland Warehouse. [wtf send moar pics]

“Hopefully, instead of providing solace, a new source or cause for anxiety is opened up in relation to the coupling and uncoupling of elements in a way that has no predictable relation as to whether things are old or new, or in what manner they are alike, like a random killer being on the loose,” Cady Noland wrote in the artist statement for her first solo show, at American Fine Arts, in 1989, the date for most other Untitled (Walker) works, as published in The Clip-On Method.

Also: “I made three pieces with walkers and police equipment. These are more about the _equilibrium_ of the iconographic police officer who manages at once to enjoy the righteous action ‘out there’, a place of danger and thrills, but also to fulfill the comforting but suffocating tedious obligations to the family, civilian life, etc. The hero cop is a family man, not a ‘swingle’ (the occasional deviant ‘kook’ like Serpico or the fictive Dirty Harry notwithstanding).” Hmm.

Cady Noland, *Saw Action/Duty*, 1986, metal walker, metal police badge, leather glove, leather holster, ticket book, leather strap with metal hook, published in *The Clip-On Method*, 2019

Later today update: Three things to note from revisiting Noland’s 2-volume publication, The Clip-On Method, which was released with her 2021 show at Galerie Buchholz. This 1986 Untitled (Walker) is not represented, but a similar work, Saw Action/Duty, is.

She wrote about how adding or taking away elements of her sculptures doesn’t change their meaning—until it does. It’s an idea that prompts closer study of what each work comprises, and where they differ. [It also prompts me to imagine a Cady Noland Kit of Parts, where she can stick accessories together like an Officer Potatohead, give it a name, take a picture, then dismantle it, and repeat as often as she likes. ACAD (All Cadys Are Documentation).

Or are they? Of the 162+ images of works in The Clip-On Method, 59 of them are not from exhibitions. It’s an admittedly crude metric for tabulating her total output. But it does feel significant that just two years ago, the universe of known Nolands grew by more than 50% in one pop. And now, two days later, a new show with another previously unseen sculpture confirms that the Cadyverse is still expanding, and at an accelerating rate.

The World Has Changed: Cady Noland New Work

cover of the brochure for Cady Noland’s 2019 retrospective at Museum MMK in Frankfurt

The signs were all there, if only we were inclined to see them: The litigation and disclaimers. A work at the Walker dated 2008. A museum-filling retrospective in 2019. An exhibition with new work at Buchholz, supporting a sweeping, two-volume monograph in 2021. And now, a show of new work at Gagosian. Whatever you think the world was like when you went to bed, the truth is, we woke up in a world where Cady Noland makes and shows work. At Gagosian.

screenshot of the gagosian.com page for Cady Noland’s show, which includes an image of a sculpture, *Untitled* (2023), copyright Cady Noland, taken by Owen Conway

And that world starts, as new worlds have, on September 12th. The forms include crushed cans and weapons encased in acrylic and wire baskets of detritus. The hashtag for Facebook and Twitter [sic] is #CadyNoland. So yes, some things still do feel like the old world.

I’m personally fascinated with the way I focused on the little moving pads under the corners of the sculpture’s meeting points with the floor, which I read probably undue significance into, even after they ended up not being listed on the ingredients list. But everyone involved is a highly trained professional, and Noland sculptures have been made or broken over less, so I don’t feel like I’m being unreasonable

Cady Noland, 12 September — 21 October 2023 at Gagosian, Park & 75, NY
The Clip-On Method, 17 June — 11 September 2021 at Galerie Buchholz NY

Untitled (Free As In America), 2016/2023

America by Budweiser, available from Memorial Day thru Election Day, 2016.

Beginning the Spring of 2016 and running through the Fall, I put out Untitled (Free As In America), a series of Cady Noland sculptures replicated with the America beer cans that Anheuser-Busch InBev replaced Budweiser with in the run-up to the US presidential election. The concept was to remake any sculpture for only the cost of the raw materials it required.

Exactly none of these sculptures were realized in the window in which Budweiser’s America cans were available.

You see it. I’m not mentioning it or linking to it.

Now the window has reopened. As the right wing is consumed by its own flames of hate and violence, it seeks to transform that hate into consumption. Recognizing the futility of icing out the giant, international beer conglomerate for paying a trans woman to promote one of their products on her own social media channel, some grifter created an alternative: right-wing beer.

Cady Noland, *This Piece Has No Title Yet*, 1989, Budweiser and scaffolding and stuff, the Rubells

As long as this beer is actually for sale, then, I will make Untitled (Free As In America) sculptures available again. I will replicate any Cady Noland sculpture, replacing the Budweiser cans with perfect replicas of—when I started this post, it was going to be replicas of the grift beer. But no, it will be replicas of the 2016 America cans, made by the finest trans metallurgists and artists in the world. All proceeds beyond the production costs will be used to fund trans legal defense, health care, and emergency support services. Prices run from $100 million for a basket to $1 billion for a room-sized installation.

ONE DAY LATER UNBELIEVABLE UPDATE: In a statement literally titled, Our Responsibility To America, Anheuser-Busch InBev caves to trolls attacking their product and threatening humans with baseball bats. To update Cady Noland, “Violence has always been around. The seeming [systematization] of it now actually indicates the [work] of political organization representing different interests. ‘Inalienable rights’ become something so inane that they break down into men believing that they have the right to be superior to women (there’s someone lower on the ladder than they) so if a woman won’t date them any more they have a right to murder them.”

A FEW DAYS LATER UPDATE: I joked about it, but now other people investigating the grifter’s sourcing are saying it is actually likely the case that the rightwing grifterbeer is made in an Anheuser-Busch plant. It’s America all the way down.

Previously, related: Free As In America

WilliWear Showroom by SITE, 1982-87

Screenshot of SITE’s WillieWear Showroom and a building they scavenged, from James Wines’ GSD presentation. photos: probably Andreas Sterzing

SITE founder James Wines spoke at Harvard GSD last night for the first–but hopefully not last–time in his 90 years. [It was great, and available online. s/o Alexandra Lange]

Though SITE is most frequently brought up in an architectural context for their BEST Products stores, a project that jumped out at me from Wines’ talk was the 38th Street showroom he and SITE partner Alison Sky created for WilliWear, the groundbreaking ’80s street fashion label of designer Willi Smith. SITE and Smith both had a love for found materials, salvage, junk, and the fabric of the city. Wines talked about how Smith took him on inspo trips to seedy gay clubs on the West Side, and then they’d jack construction material, hardware, plumbing, fencing, bricks, you name it, which ended up artfully installed in the showroom.

Those do look like shackles, but perhaps they’re just abandoned stevedore gear from the piers? Screenshot of a model in SITE’s WilliWear showroom, from James Wines’ GSD talk

SITE’s simple genius was to #monochrome it all out, painting everything a highly aesthetic, and flattering backdrop grey. A runway rulebreaker, Smith used the showroom for fashion shows, too, which, Wines giddily announced, included much nudity.

SITE has used the monochrome strategy in other contexts, to great effect; Wines mentioned how it helps make the public notice each other, and to look good to each other. He didn’t mention Warhol, though, or the Silver Factory, which had a similar effect almost twenty years earlier.

And he didn’t mention if a young Cady Noland worked as an intern at WilliWear, or as a fashion reporter cutting her chops covering these performance art-like shows. But this urban hardwarescape is definitely putting off a Nolandian vibe, which is something I’d not considered before.

Cady Noland, The Clip-on Method, Summer 2021 exhibition at Galerie Daniel Buchholz

Wise also didn’t mention SITE’s design for the Willi Smith retrospective at the Cooper Hewitt. Which, the much-anticipated show opened, haplessly, at the beginning of March 2020 and existed–I can’t say it was open or closed–until the end of 2021. I can’t find any photos; maybe no one saw it in person?

He did mention Rauschenberg as an American Arte Poverist and an inspiration, which Hilton Als had just mentioned, too, in his review of the JAM show at MoMA: “if there is a Black aesthetic it’s about making do, and using what little you have to express who you are.” JAM was Smith’s era, but it’s not clear if it was Smith’s jam; there don’t seem to be any mentions of JAM or Linda Goode Bryant in the Willi Smith Community Archive (yet).

Screenshot of Willi Smith’s office by SITE, featuring what is now called the De-Arch Desk, made of brick, mortar, paint, and glass, from James Wines’ GSD presentation

I did not see the Willi Smith desk turn up in Miami last year. Wines recreated the pile of scavenged bricks and glasstop desk from Smith’s office for Friedman Benda. It is/was available in an edition of 10, though I think he’d respect a bootleg. If you want to head out to a construction site tonight, I’ll bring the car around.

Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts: James Wines [harvard.edu]
SITE site [sitenewyork]
Willi Smith: Street Couture [cooperhewitt.org]