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Cady Noland
MUSEUMᴹᴹᴷ FÜR MODERNE KUNST
1.
ON SECOND THOUGHT: What was she thinking?
What was she thinking about Lee Harvey Oswald or Charles Manson, Betty Ford or Jackie O.?
What was she thinking about the old red, white, and blue? About violence? About American history?
What was triggered in her thinking when it occurred to her (if it did) that Clement Greenberg curated both her mother and her father in their first big New York group show, “Emerging Talent,” in 1954, also the year Patricia Campbell Hearst was born—“Patty,” who emerges in the Museum für Moderne Kunst’s astounding survey “Cady Noland,” curated by Susanne Pfeffer in collaboration with the artist, as a soft young girl in a chapel and truncated cheerleader in Untitled (Patty in Church), 1991, and as “Tanya,” a gun-toting, Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive and FBI suspect, propped up like a Cineplex standee in Tanya as a Bandit, 1989 (cf. Nate Rodgers’s 1976 sex romp, Tanya, about a kidnapped heiress who becomes the “ultimate Revolutionary Nymphomaniac,” a “four star general in the war for carnal knowledge”).
The artist was born two years later, in 1956.
If not working through some personal shit and/or allegorical family drama, then was she thinking of a genealogy . . . of morality?
“I shot a Kennedy. What did you do?”*
She’d witnessed a mourning in America.
John Warnock Hinckley Jr., to impress Jodie Foster, decided against aircraft hijacking, or committing suicide in front of her, opted instead to assassinate the president, failed.
What was she thinking about the old red, white, and blue? About violence? About American history?
Was she thinking about the celebrification of politics? Of course she was, from her pointedly dialectical glances backward to Lincoln’s theatrical assassination in Booth—The Big Plunge, 1989, to her use of Patty’s grandfather’s campaign ad for Congress, Untitled (William Randolph Hearst), 1990, to her Betty Ford works, particularly Walk and Stalk, 1993/1994, the off-kilter newspaper caption of which says the First Lady “has a smile and a wave for the corwd [sic] of newsmen and tourists as she leaves sports shop in Vail”; the accompanying picture shows her not waving, her smile more a rictus of perseverance. For her most...