Cady Noland - Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Thursday, May 16, 2013 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

  • Exhibited

    Geneva, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, on long term loan June 1994 - June 2001
    Bretagne, FRAC Bretagne and Galerie Art & Essai, Cady Noland, March 7 - April 21, 2013

  • Catalogue Essay

    “There is a method in my work which has taken a pathological trend. From the point at which I was making work out of objects I became interested in how, actually, under which circumstances people treat other people like objects.”
    CADY NOLAND, 1990

    Exerting equal influence on Noland and having employed similar materials, Bruce Nauman approached this subject in a more circumscribed manner. In Double Steel Cage Piece, 1974, Nauman presents a cage within a cage. An opening in the outer fence allows the viewer to enter the outer cage, but renders the inner cage inaccessible. The
    reference to imprisonment is fundamental in both Noland’s fence and Nauman’s cage, however Nauman asserts his intentions were more emotional than political, a sentiment that also characterizes Noland’s structure— the ubiquity of the fence implies an intent greater than penitentiary detainment alone. For Noland’s Industry Park does not enclose, but merely draws a demarcation in the existing space, a permeable barrier that nonetheless separates.

    Noland unlike Duchamp and Nauman, reveals some of her intent with the title. Industrial Parks—areas zoned and planned for the purpose of industrial development, often with few environmental safeguards—position the present lot in the cross-roads of the artist’s commentary on American consumerism and capitalism. Yet her comments are not merely sociological. She is forging a new territory for the formal language of sculpture. Industry Park materializes concerns regarding interiority and exteriority that continue to elicit comment. Industry Park is the architecture of social exclusion. It is Noland’s distillation of the march of history, one that divides rather than unites. The silent scream of a chain link fence mimes the emotional and interpersonal separations that we experience. Exerting influence on a new generation of artists, Noland’s work has become a lodestar in contemporary art. This is Noland’s gift, to cast in a new light the unconscious formal structure of our world.

    Cady Noland, the darling fugitive of the contemporary art world, has been a seminal figure for over a quarter century; remarkably in absentia for the last decade. Her works, while gracefully referencing minimalism, aggressively confront the myth of the pursuit of freedom and happiness as America’s founding principle. Referencing consumer culture and mass media via familiar imagery and materials drawn from the mundane world of hardware stores and supermarkets, Noland delivers astute and poetic observations in her tableaus of objects reduced to their basic components.

    Noland’s revelatory aesthetic realism opens a window into the often unseen and unacknowledged forces that shape our world. Industry Park, 1991, is unequivocally one of Noland’s most elemental works–both physically and conceptually. Consisting of a simple steel chain link fence, its ubiquity is essential to its message. In an interview
    with Michèle Cone, Noland states “I like using objects in the original sense, letting objects be what they are.” A direct heir to Duchamp’s contribution of the ready-made as exemplified with his Bottle Rack, Noland one-ups Duchamp’s achievement. “To treat objects like objects is to do something to them — which is not to say necessarily to
    transform them […].” But in Noland’s work we have the opportunity to delve deeper,” do something” more with the objects and in the process reveal more complex meanings.

6

Industry Park

1991
zinc-plated steel chain link fence
100 1/4 x 216 x 3 in. (254.6 x 548.6 x 7.6 cm.)

Estimate
$500,000 - 700,000 

Contact Specialist
Zach Miner
Head of Sale
zminer@phillips.com
+1 212 940 1256

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York 16 May 2013 7pm