Cady Noland - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Massimo de Carlo Arte Contemporanea, Milan.

  • Literature


    J. Deitch, ed., Strange Abstraction: Robert Gober, Cady Noland, Philip Taaffe,
    Christopher Wool, Tokyo, 1991, p. 68 (illustrated in black and white)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Cady Noland’s artwork travels along the American Highway, incorporating and ultimately constructing a true homage to her country. Her art serves as an encyclopedic compendium of ephemera, materials, and objects from the nation credited with extolling the very words pioneer and celebrity, often exposing the innate duplicity in these two factions of Americana. Noland reinvestigates just what is at the core of being American and along the way the artist travels across many roads. Take the present lot, a work not titled from 1989, in which four silkscreened images appear in jigsaw arrangement, horizontally and vertically juxtaposed and silhouetted against a sheer, polished aluminum surface.As with her famous Lee Harvey Oswald series, in which the manipulated holes on the surface of the aluminum mimic the famed bullets Oswald released, and inevitably, memorialized in the American psyche, Noland here distills the uberfamous photograph of Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, whose persona grata reached fame after her kidnapping by Symionese Liberation fighters in 1974.The now-stereotypical photograph, taken a few months after her capture by the terrorists, appeared on the cover of Newsweek (cf. Figure 1) and became instantly memorialized in the mind of America, a true testament to America’s fascination with violence and fame.  As Lane Relyea argues, Noland recognizes America’s search for the ‘fated pioneer’, the cherished road that leads to nowhere: “Among the things Noland seems determined yet unable to fully construct is an updated mythology of the frontiersman, shuffling into her jigsaw-puzzle artwork wayward props, stock characters, bits of costume, and written anecdotes pertaining to the Wild West. In the many aluminum panels and sheets of paper heaped into her rooms, she prints pictures of fatal joyrides, of lone cowboys and deserted log cabins; there are texts about the history of funs, references to Vietnam…Each piece of information reads like an outtake from a once ambitious project gone awry, a crusade that marches on zombielike without the idealism that guided it. Noland seizes on two zombie crusaders in particular- in a number of installations Patty Hearst and Lee Harvey Oswald strike confrontational poses, Hearst shown in a black beret, leveling a machine gun in front of a Symbionese Liberation Army banner, Oswald at the moment of his assassination, hunching forward, fists raised like a prizefighter. Both represent implosive centers of attention, broken compasses leading the rebel charge—they’re media figureheads even through they face the camera like deer starting into oncoming headlights. Twisted and two-faced, at once heroes and victims, Hearst and Oswald are action figures whove lost control of their actions,” (L. Relyea, “Hi-yo Silver: Cady Noland’s America,” ArtForum, January, 1993).

1

Title Not Available

1989
Silkscreen black ink on aluminum.
48 x 120 in. (121.9 x 304.8 cm).
This work is accompanied by a photograph signed by the artist.

Estimate
$80,000 - 120,000 

Sold for $289,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York