Cady Noland, SLA Group Shot with Floating Head, 1991. Now on view at Phillips until the New York 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale on Thursday 15 November.
44 years ago media heiress Patty Hearst became a national sensation when members of the obscure guerilla group Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped the 19-year old undergraduate from her Berkeley apartment. Within days of the abduction on February 4, 1974, a congregation of journalists set up camp outside of the Hearst household. For the next two years, tabloid media reported every development of the saga – an ironic twist considering that William Randolph Hearst had pioneered the very culture of sensationalist “yellow” journalism that was feeding off of his granddaughter’s transformation from kidnapped victim to urban guerilla.
Mugshot of Patty Hearst from her 1975 arrest.
This irony was not lost on Cady Noland, whose conceptual practice has centered on the media’s distortion of, and influence on, America’s collective history. Noland created SLA Group Shot with Floating Head in 1991, more than a decade after Patty Hearst dominated the tabloids. With a sly nod to Minimalism, Noland has silkscreened across the gleaming surface of what otherwise be a minimalist, aluminum sculpture an enlarged and distorted newspaper photograph of Hearst and members of the SLA. Noland essentially exploits the silkscreen process of mass production to appropriate a highly charged media image in a manner that positions her as an heir to Andy Warhol.
Andy Warhol, Jacqueline Kennedy III from 11 Pop Artists, Volume III 1965, published 1966
Warhol knew too well that anything could become fodder for the media. Famous and infamous were essentially two sides of the same coin of celebrity. Just as Warhol zoomed in on the media’s portrayal of Jackie Kennedy in the early 1960s, Noland takes us back to the dawn of rolling news. The subject of SLA Group Shot with Floating Head is not merely Patty Hearst, but the instant news spectacle itself that unfolded around her.
“These works stand as…the most potent—and darkest—American pop since Warhol’s ‘Disaster’ paintings of the mid-‘60s.” – Robert Nickas
After kidnapping Hearst, the SLA ordered for all communication with the family to occur via the media, with radio stations receiving taped statements to be published in “in all newspapers and all other forms of media”. Attempting to meet the SLA’s demands for a gargantuan food program, the Hearst family donated a sum of six million dollars' worth of food – with the handouts becoming media spectacle as journalists eagerly filmed the havoc of rioting and looting of the food trucks. A public debate about the nature of the program ensued – Governor of California Ronald Reagan claimed that the program was “aiding and abetting lawlessness” – and ultimately the SLA refused to release Hearst on the grounds that the food donated was deemed of inferior quality.
On April 3, a month after her kidnapping, Hearst announced via a tape recording that she formally joined the SLA and was in total support of their goals and tactics. Twelve days later, she later made her first appearance in public when she was caught on camera standing with a rifle in front of a bank, owned by the father of her best friend, while the group was robbing it. The tables had dramatically turned as victim became accomplice. Press coverage intensified and Hearst was cast as the anti-heroine of a divided America nearing the end of the Vietnam War. Between 1974 and 1976, Hearst appeared on cover of the Newsweek magazine on seven occasions.
The April 29, 1974, cover of TIME
The SLA fled San Francisco for Los Angeles, where six member died during a shootout with police that was broadcast live on national television with the new technology of the mini-cam. Hearst, who had watched the broadcast from a motel room, released her final taped statement three weeks later and spent the next year running from the FBI – and journalists – across the country. The media frenzy around her only intensified after her arrest in September 1975.
Hearst’s trial in the following year captivated the nation and although the jury convicted her guilty for collaboration, many Americans viewed her as a brainwashing victim of Stockholm syndrome. Her seven-year prison sentence was later commuted to two years by President Jimmy Carter, and in 2001 she was granted a full pardon by President Bill Clinton.
Patty Hearst, in handcuffs, being escorted into the Criminal Courts Building in Los Angeles in 1976. (Charles E. Young Research Library, U.C.L.A.)
With SLA Group Shot with Floating Head, Noland looks back at one of the most publicized tabloid stories that set the stage for what has since become an era of instant news ever since the launch of the first 24-hour cable news operation with CNN in 1980. Three years after Noland created this work, the desire for spectacle would reach a culminating point with the arrest and trial of O.J. Simpson, which the press, as with Hearst’s case, popularized as the “trial of the century”. Confronting the viewer with the compulsion in American culture to objectify individuals for entertainment value, SLA Group Shot with Floating Head is an artwork that remains as relevant today as it was then.
SLA Group Shot with Floating Head is a highlight of our upcoming 20th Century & Contemporary Evening Sale on 15 November and is currently on view at 450 Park Avenue.