Hi-yo silver: Cady Noland's America

ArtForum, Jan, 1993 by Lane Relyea

On the road to discover America, our hero makes a quick stop and disembarks from his vehicle, a turbo-charged bird of prey aptly named The Eagle--symbol of freedom as flight, and of flight as both sovereignty and exile. "One small step for man," he says, looking at his boots, "one giant leap for mankind." It's his mystery that makes this character so recognizable: dressed in white, he's the good sheriff, yet he's also a masked man, never removing his motorcycle helmet, keeping its visor down. He's the Michelin Man as a latter-day Lone Ranger--a man on the move, the man on the moon. He's the ultimate Hell's Angel, a model citizen of God's country who roams half in hopes of finding a home in heaven's kingdom on earth, half in fear of succumbing to the desolation in which the fallen land. He stays just long enough to survey this sublime silver frontier, in which he plants an American flag. And as the flag freezes in mid wave, time appears to stop: our cosmic biker stands on the threshold of eternity, yet he perceives only the same nagging contradiction--paradise at once found and lost, a world perched at both the beginning and the end of history, a garden of dust.

So goes the climactic scene from one of this country's all-time classic road movies. Alongside another, in many ways complementary highway epic released only months later, Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, the moon landing headed a decade-long convoy of social crusades and cultural experiments, its mission: to scout the mythic territories the '60s had opened up, to confirm the many recent sightings of the promised land that America has always claimed to be. Yet the reports that came back helped confirm deep-rooted suspicions as much as anything. Faith in the American Dream had inspired the journey, but couldn't make the dream come true; in fact, the nearer it grew the more miragelike it became. The promise of deliverance remained a promise not delivered on, a carrot dangling from the end of a nightstick. "We've made it," space cadet Billy sighs at the end of Easy Rider, to which copilot Captain America replies, "No man, we blew it." It's a fitting finale to a search for the land of opportunity, a search that seems at once culturally essential and inherently doomed, since such a land lies in the future, in what could be, and therefore can never be reached in the present. Which is why the best way to experience this land is to head down a road that never ends, a road to nowhere.

It's down this very road that Cady Noland travels. Since the mid '80s, her installations, sculptures, and wall-bound assemblages have featured seemingly haphazard arrangements of, among other things, a wide variety of transportation equipment--not only car parts (headlights, license plates), but also rubber runners, horse saddles, exit signs, and open gates. In several installations Noland mounts metal pipes waist high between floor stanchions or along walls, as if to suggest handrails, hitching posts, and retail racks. In the corners of a couple of her rooms, entangled four-legged walkers collect like errant metal tumbleweeds. Disparate accessories such as bungee cords and monkey wrenches are often found dumped here and there among small piles of empty beer cans. Everything by Noland resembles an abandoned construction site, as if it hadn't been completed yet. She makes terminal works in progress.

Though a can-do spirit seems to run through all Noland's art, the work runs scared, both away from and headlong toward impending breakdown. Take for example a series of sculptures from 1989, each consisting of a wire basket filled with non sequitur supplies, collected appendages--camera cases, jumper cables--severed from the endeavors they're meant to aid. Each basket appears like a cross between a toolbox and a trash can (the reference to homelessness here is made more direct in an early work from 1986, which employs not a basket but a shopping cart). Though drawing mostly on new, functional hardware, Noland's industry nevertheless seems doomed to failure, in part because she uses only auxiliary items and replacement parts, a vocabulary of temporary solutions and makeshift repairs. She seems intent on fixing something that can never work, staying on the job when there is no job to do. What we're left with is the material expression of hope against hope.

Dominated by things ancillary and portable, Noland's work still conveys a sense of monumentality, of scale and expansiveness. The incomplete networks of handrails, the gates, the occasional units of chain-link and fencing, all combine to recall the horizons and vistas of big-sky country. The installations feel as archaic as they do ephemeral, like vast landscapes seen from the window of a passing car. This is especially true of those installations in which Noland stacks hundreds of Budweiser six-packs along the walls, erecting sheer cliffs at the base of which shorter rows and pyramids of beer cans are ordered. Presented here is an image of overwhelming intoxication and, at the same time, incredible waste, the whole mighty edifice destined to be chugged and pissed away; and, behind that, another image, that of the eroded canyons of the American West.