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"New West-Old West," a massive, five-room installation by New York artist Cady Noland at the Luring Augustine Hetzler Gallery, looks like the dregs of a fire sale at a Hollywood prop lot. Walking into the gallery your initial response is dapt to be, "Is this exhibition in the process of being installed?" In fact, one of the most interesting things about this sloppy piece is its vigorous sloppiness.
The art world attracts an unusually high quotient of anal retentive types and most galleries easily merit a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, so we're not used to entering an art space and encountering the sort of mess Noland has whipped up for us. The gallery is littered with all manner of debris including boxes of junk, piles of raw lumber, a broom and dustpan full of trash, discarded beer cans, rubber chickens, flags and animals hides. Mind you, that's just the filler stuff.
The entrance gallery, for instance, houses a massive facade of a log cabin, a theatrical prop Noland rented for this exhibition. Sharing space with the faux cabin is a huge metal structure designed for use on the bed of a big rig truck, a large stairway that dead ends into a wall, and several metal panels emblazoned with the image of Mary Todd Lincoln and text chronicling the history of the Colt gun, among other things. Organizing this baffling set of clues into a coherent pattern of thought is challenging to say the least, but there's no arguing that Noland does a slick job of freeing art from its diminished function as a commodity; there's nothing here anyone's going to go into debt to take home.
Initially "New West-Old West" has a strong visceral power, but on close examination it loses intensity and focus in its attempt to do too much. Ostensibly an inquiry into the mythology of the West, car culture, advertising, sexism, the invasion of privacy as typified...