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.
ImageCady Noland, “This Piece Doesn’t Have a Title Yet” (1989). Beer cans and scaffolding are materials that the artist has frequently returned to.Credit...Photograph courtesy of Mattress Factory, PittsburghAfter 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.
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