Tag: cady noland

[This is not the Cady Noland log cabin you’re suing for] Log Cabin Blank with Screw Eyes and Café Door (Memorial to John Caldwell) (1993), collection Norman & Norah Stone, image: stonescape.us

What is the deal with Cady Noland and her sculptures, especially this Log Cabin (sic) situation?

Which is not to say this Log Cabin. Let’s be clear, the Cady Noland sculpture above is not the one in dispute in Scott Mueller’s lawsuit against Michael Janssen Gallery. It is owned by the Stones, and is installed happily in Stonescape, their art vineyard in Napa. As of Saturday evening, Courthouse News, Artnet, Artforum, Art Market, and everyone who followed their initial report still has this basic fact wrong.
The facts about the sculpture’s history and provenance don’t line up to this work and this image, but you can’t expect a court reporter to pick up on that. The reason the Stones’ Log Cabin is mentioned or pictured at all is because it’s on Google, whereas Wilhelm Schuermann’s is not. [Courthouse News and everyone also got the basics of the refabrication wrong, and that matters, and it is because people don’t read the primary material, they just go with whatever.] But Mueller has attached the sales agreement as an exhibit to his suit, and it includes a 2-page information sheet on the artwork itself [“Artwork Description And Provenance”] that leaves no doubt what it is, where it’s been, who owns it–and some of what happened to it. I assume it was prepared by Janssen in cooperation with Schuermann. [Download it and read along: schuermann_noland_log_cabin_appendix.pdf]

Continue reading “Why Wasn’t Cady Consulted?”

I got stopped by this line from Andrew Russeth’s report on the disclaimer Cady Noland required at the entrance to the Brant Foundation’s group show containing her work:

Since then she has shown very, very few new works (the Walker in Minneapolis has one from 2008), and she has been notoriously meticulous in controlling how her work is handled and presented.

A 2008 Noland? In the wild? Sure enough. Untitled, a familiar-looking locker room basket containing some motorcycle helmets, steel subway straps, a 16mm film reel, and a piece of metal. It’s a form Noland used since 1989, but it’s dated 2008.

How’d they get that? In 2009?
A clue might be the donor credit, where it is listed as “Gift of the artist and Helen van der Miej-Tcheng [sic], by exchange, 2009.” Which means the museum traded a previously donated work with the artist. But what? It doesn’t say, and it’s obviously not in the collection anymore. But it’s safe to assume it was a work by Noland herself.
Sure enough, the Walker’s 2006 annual report lists a gift of a 1990 Noland from van der Meij-Tcheng. It was titled Cowboy Blank, made of aluminum and rope.

Cady Noland, L: Cowboy Blank with Showboat Costume, and R: a Cowboy, not blank, with breakfast, both 1990
But a work titled simply Cowboy Blank doesn’t show up on Google anywhere. There is a Cowboy Blank with Showboat Costume, though, an aluminum plate sculpture cut in the silhouette of a crouching cowboy, with a bandanna and an ostrich plume in its cutout holes. The Guggenheim says the cowboy’s aiming his gun, but another variant is flipped and silkscreened with a photo of cowboy eatin’ some waffles. Or maybe it’s Texas Toast. Noland executed the same silhouette in plywood, too, with a basket hanging between its legs.
Forced by no one to speculate, I’d say that van der Meij-Tcheng’s Cowboy Blank was without Showboat Costume or a fork; it had just a rope. And whether it was because it was damaged, a la Cowboys Milking, or it was just not sitting right with her, Noland decided it was not a work she wanted in public circulation. And so she took it back, but only after making the Walker a little something to replace it with.

What even is this? I flipped by it without noticing until now, but Christie’s is selling this Cady Noland photocopy in London this week. It’s actually a trimmed photocopy [7 5/8 x 6 1/8 inches] with the title Tanya, and it’s dated 1989. The estimate is £15,000 – £20,000.

Cady Noland, Tanya as Bandit, 1989, collection: moma.org
At first I figured it was some kind of production document, an intermediate step between the wire service photo of Patty Hearst and the giant silkscreen on aluminum sculpture of her, which is at MoMA.
But as you see, it’s nothing of the sort. The photocopy looks to be at least one generation lower resolution than the sculpture. It’s derived from the sculpture’s source image, a fork in that image’s road.
Maybe this is how Noland explored ideas and form: making copies, and cutting and sizing them into various configurations. Maybe she makes some copies, cuts them, and then recopies the results.
Or maybe it’s a souvenir of some kind. An edition? Who knows? But if you wondered what it’s like in person, I’ve made an edition related to it.
Oct. 17, 2104, Lot 291 | Cady Noland, Tanya, est. £15,000 – £20,000 [christies]
Related: Daphne, as photocopied by Sigmar Polke
Higgs-era White Columns has been making “Xerox print” editions for fundraising since around 2007.

Speaking of Cady Noland,
I’m kind of fascinated by the recently decided set of lawsuits surrounding the withdrawal of Noland’s 1990 work, Cowboys Milking, from a Sotheby’s contemporary day sale in November 2011. Noland had disowned the work under the Visual Arts Rights Act.

When the first suits were filed by the artwork’s consignor, dealer Marc Jancou, against both Sotheby’s and the artist herself, it was not quite clear what the problem had been, though Jancou was clear in his public sentiment that he’d been hurt, to the tune of $6 million, and distraught for 20 million more dollars. It came out in a flurry of countersuits that Noland considered the work damaged, but that was in dispute, too.

But as is often the case, a dive into the filings and documents proves both informative and entertaining. [As a NY state, not federal, court case, all the documents are available for free online. Just search the NY State Unified Courts e-filing System as a guest for Index no. 650316/2012. Don’t think of the endless stream of unlabeled, repeat documents as a slog, but as a legal literary fugue.]

Basically, in April 2011 Jancou [who, btw, I know, and have bought work from in the past] bought back Cowboys Milking from a collector he’d sold it to earlier. Then he turned around and consigned it to Sotheby’s for their Fall sale. It was featured very prominently in the catalogue, and its estimate was $250-350,000. [Jancou’s invoice was submitted as evidence; he paid just over $100,000 for it. He even got a $1,000 knocked off, apparently to cover some conservation work the piece needed. Which turns out to be the central issue.]

Cowboys Milking is a unique silkscreen on a very thin, highly polished sheet of aluminum 4-ft high and 6-ft wide. Holes are drilled into each corner for hanging. The scale of the image and the material make reproductions of it difficult, disorienting, or misleading. [Sotheby’s 2-page spread, above, summarily crops the image to hide a nail hole.] This intake documentation image by Sotheby’s gives the best sense of what it actually is:

When the works went on public view [there were two other Nolands, including Oozewald and Bloody Mess, both 1989, in the November evening sale] the artist went to Sotheby’s to inspect them, and via her attorney, promptly instructed the auction house to withdraw Cowboys Milking, because it “differed materially” from its original state. Federal and NY state law both grant an artist the right to disown an altered, damaged or mutilated work, and to prevent her name from being associated with it, and that’s just what happened, right before the sale.

Sotheby’s condition report declared the work to be “in very good condition overall,” with “light evidence of wear” in the corners and “a crimp in the upper right corner and another to the lower left corner.” They didn’t yet know that these were the result of conservation efforts by the Noland expert Jancou had engaged, who had found the 1/16-in. thick mirrored aluminum to be an unforgiving material. When she saw them, Noland deemed the repairs unacceptable. And ultimately, that was that. As the final arbiter of her work, and the work that’s traded under her name, if Noland rejected it, it really didn’t matter that Jancou or Sotheby’s or even the conservator thought that the wear on the edges was fine, or normal. It was a dealbreaker.

Detail from Sotheby’s intake inspection, a crimp, apparently.

When Jancou found out, he was pissed, though in those early days, the dispute linked the work’s condition to its “authenticity.” In an extraordinary email to his Sotheby’s rep, he wrote,

this is not serious!
why does an auction house ask the advise [sic] of an artist that has no gallery representation and has a biased and radical approach to the art market?

Which prompted internal Sotheby’s email discussion:

Got it. I would say that when the artist, through her lawyer, has questioned the authenticity of works and has threatened to go public with her grievances that we have to take it seriously Would he prefer if we are forced to withdraw it due to potential authenticity issues? Or reading about it in artforum that its [sic] damaged to the point she no longer considers it her work?

By the time he filed his suit, and after Oozewald had sold for a world record $6.6 million and his work hadn’t, Jancou called out the auction house and the artist for inconsistent treatment. Cowboys Milking got pulled for just a couple of insignificant dings, he argued, while Oozewald was cleared to sell, even though it was missing its base. But, which, no.

Oozewald, 1989, ed. of 4, image sotheby’s via artnet

For the other two works for sale, Noland insisted the auctioneers certify that every item in Bloody Mess was accounted for and scattered in its precise spot; and that they include a notice that Oozewald had a mismatched base, and that the artist would provide the buyer with a properly fabricated replacement. These conditions met, the artist permitted these works to be sold using her name. This is not biased or radical market behavior.
Though you’ve gotta admit, it does seem kind of harsh. Was it really necessary to completely disown the work? Noland’s responses to both Sotheby’s and to Jancou’s lawsuit reveal there was more to the story. Turns out the previous owner of Cowboys Milking had already tried to sell it–through Christie’s–and Noland had already inspected it, and deemed it too different and damaged, and had insisted on its withdrawal. Jancou’s purchase came just days after this unpublicized rejection by the artist. Sotheby’s basically accused Jancou of covering up this rejection when he brought the work for sale, a charge the dealer strenuously denied.
[I have no direct knowledge myself, but it’d seem to me that if he really had not been told about the Christie’s rejection, Jancou would have a very solid claim against the work’s owner, and the ronin curator who put the deal together. Yet he’s apparently let these guys off the hook. It makes one wonder. But anyway.]

From Noland’s perspective, it’s all the same. The work she already officially disassociated herself from pops right back up, whack-a-mole-style, a few months later, with evidence of an unsatisfying restoration.
In exerting her prerogative under the Visual Artists Rights Act, Noland’s lawyers sought to prevent anyone, but, seemingly, especially Jancou the work’s current owner, from associating the artist’s name with it in any way, especially in his efforts to sell it. Paradoxically, the legal response also puts any question of the work’s “authenticity” to rest, because in order to assert VARA rights, Noland needed to first authoritatively claim sole authorship of the work.

I’m really going on too long now, but besides the textual and soap operatic elements of the lawsuits themselves, I am now fascinated by the implications of Noland’s affirmative negation of Cowboys Milking, both for the real world/art world it inhabits, and for the object which, for two-plus decades, had been an artwork.

Did anyone who bought, sold, handled, or saw Cowboys Milking over the years expect that its status was dependent on perfectly preserving and protecting its corners and surface? Such care is certainly possible, and art works typically get it in relation to their rarity and fragility, but most of all, to their value. It costs much more and takes much more effort to care for a fragile work, especially of this scale. This luxury commodity decorating your home, which had been cool and edgy, now becomes a burden, if not a menace, threatening to erase your entire investment in it unless you change your life around it. It becomes an instrument of control, infiltrating some of America’s finest homes, and operated remotely by the artist herself.
People talk about Cady Noland’s abandonment of the art world and art making, but this Sotheby’s case shows exactly the opposite: she only has rejected Jancou’s expectations of “gallery representation” and production- & sales-driven discourse, in order to operate entirely on her own terms. She remains highly involved in the presentation of her work, and as the objects she made travel around the world, she engages with them anew, creating new meaning and context.

With the Cowboys Milking decision, every Noland artwork has been imbued with the ominous potential of its own demise. Where they once dreamed of cashing in on their 90s prescience, every owner of a Noland is now reflecting on that time they bumped it with a vacuum, or wishing they’d sprung for the good crate after all. Am I the only one who could totally imagine such an encounter being in total harmony with the bleak degradation and dystopian decline that Noland’s work was ostensibly, originally “about”? By introducing this precarity through the sacrifice of Cowboys Milking, Noland has updated her artworks’ operating system for 2011.

But what of this particular 4×6′ aluminum sheet? What’s to become of it? If an artwork is whatever an artist says it is, then Noland has created the opposite. This is an object an artist has definitively declared is not art. That seems kind of amazing. By testifying to her creation of it, and then disassociating herself from it completely, Noland and Cowboys Milking are now inseparable. Through this rejection, Noland seems to have succeeded in making the holy grail of 1960s/70s artist idealism: a work that cannot be consumed and commodified by the evil market.

Or did she? Is dissociation really the end? Discussing her use of different metals with Michele Cone, Noland once said, “The coolness might infer dissociation, but the mirror effect in some places is to draw you back in after the dissociation.”

Oozewald and Publyck recreated for Cady Noland Approximately

In 2006, Triple Candie staged a controversial retrospective of unauthorized copies of Noland sculptures based on published images and descriptions. None was for sale. But with the disposition of this lawsuit, the exact opposite now seems possible: couldn’t Cowboys Milking remain in the market the way Old Masters do, without attribution? As the work of, say, School Of SoHo, or The Cowboys Milking Master [Mistress]. No one would ever need to claim Noland was connected to the work–thanks to the lawsuit, everyone would already know.

Or maybe Jancou could just keep it, live with it, enjoy it in the comfort of his own home, a beautiful, shiny reminder of the importance of buying art for love, not as an investment. And when guests ask who made it, he can smile and demur, “If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.”

Big Hole, 1994, 90x130cm, apparently did not sell at Christie’s day sale in Nov. 2007. It’s inscribed, “This can be hung in any of four directions” on the back.
I can’t remember where I last saw Cady Noland’s flag, Big Hole, but I remember where I saw it first: at Paula Cooper’s gallery in SoHo, in the Spring of 1994. It says #1 of 1, but I remember there being more than one flag. It was like the 10th most interesting thing in that show at the time, and I didn’t give it much thought, but now…
Maybe I saw it again last fall, on Joshua Abelow’s blog. Which would have been when I was in flag mode, sweating harder about finishing the saga of the missing Jasper Johns Flag painting.
It definitely made me want to start silkscreening stuff on aluminum.
Now about that Johns Flag…
FIFTEEN MONTHS AND FIVE MINUTES LATER UPDATE: LOL, no way, here’s the Gallery Beat crew’s visit to this Noland show. With Joe, Paul H-O and Walter Robinson, plus a cameo by Holland Cotter, and–someone should ask James Kalm if their shitty guerrilla camerawork was his inspiration. But whatever, thanks fellas, it’s the best we’ve got now:

Also, writing here in 2009, Paul H-O says Cady’s still making work. So hope, or whatever the appropriate Noland equivalent is, springs eternal.

I love this 1991 Cady Noland plywood edition, Enquirer Page with Eyes Cut Out Template, even more than the silk screened aluminum Enquirer Page with Eyes Cut Out itself [which is in SFMOMA’s collection, along with Template I].
Lot 140: CADY NOLAND, Enquirer Page with Eyes Cut Out Template, 1991, ed. 5/5, est. $180-250,000 [phillipsdepury.com]