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Lot 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'
(C. Noland, quoted in M. Cone, 'Interview with Cady Noland', in Journal of Contemporary Art, vol. 3, no. 2, 1990, pp. 20-25).
Executed in 1987, Cady Noland's The Mirror Device is an objet trouvé forming a subversive portrait of American life. Conceived the year before her first solo exhibition at White Columns, New York, The Mirror Device is an early work from her practice, with other examples held in such prestigious museums as The Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenheim Museum, New York, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Regarded by art critic Peter Schjeldahl as the 'dark poet of the national consciousness', Noland's practice exposes the seedy underbelly of the American psyche, and its specific fascination with celebrities, violence and psychopathological behavior (P. Schjeldahl, 'Venice Anyone?', in Mirabella, September 1990, p. 93). In The Mirror Device, Noland flanks a vanity make-up mirror, with a chrome bar, defiling the glossy Hollywood associations with a pair of hand-cuffs and a fluorescent orange flare gun. For Noland, the combination of chrome and mirror draws out relative relationships: 'The coolness [of metal] might infer dissociation, but the mirror effect in some places is to draw you back in after the dissociation' (C. Noland, quoted in M. Cone, 'Interview with Cady Noland', in Journal of Contemporary Art, vol. 3, no. 2, 1990, pp. 20-25). By including the viewer's reflection as her fourth 'object', Noland implicates us in this scene casting us in this culture of celebrity, violence and falsification. In doing so, Noland deploys a quiet warning, presenting contemporary society and culture with stark and sobering clarity.
This work belongs to a series of sculptures and installations that Noland began in the late 1980s examining the dark underbelly of criminality, violence and celebrity. Using found objects, images and texts, Noland transformed the discarded and often overlooked aspects of daily experience into a disturbing portrait of American life in the twentieth century. As she explained, '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' (C. Noland, quoted in M. Cone, 'Interview with Cady Noland', in Journal of Contemporary Art, vol. 3, no. 2, 1990, pp. 20-25). Noland has associated this tendency with psychopathology and in her treatise, 'Towards a Metalanguage of Evil' which was included in Documenta X in 1992, the artist outlines the rules of play in a society where the successful are the psychopaths. It was here that she developed her ideas on the 'mirror device', a tool which she believes is used to 'mollify Y, and render him more pliable to X's manipulations', with X as the perpetrator and Y as the victim (C. Noland, 'Towards a Metalanguage of Evil', in Documenta X, vol. 3, New York 1991, p. 412).
The Mirror Device is both rooted in its potent psychological charge as well as in art history. With an aesthetic vocabulary that integrates strategies historically associated with Pop and Post-Minimialism, Noland has developed a body of work which is distinctly separate from its abstract predecessors of the late 1960s through its host of overlapping allusions.
(C. Noland, quoted in M. Cone, 'Interview with Cady Noland', in Journal of Contemporary Art, vol. 3, no. 2, 1990, pp. 20-25).
Executed in 1987, Cady Noland's The Mirror Device is an objet trouvé forming a subversive portrait of American life. Conceived the year before her first solo exhibition at White Columns, New York, The Mirror Device is an early work from her practice, with other examples held in such prestigious museums as The Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenheim Museum, New York, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Regarded by art critic Peter Schjeldahl as the 'dark poet of the national consciousness', Noland's practice exposes the seedy underbelly of the American psyche, and its specific fascination with celebrities, violence and psychopathological behavior (P. Schjeldahl, 'Venice Anyone?', in Mirabella, September 1990, p. 93). In The Mirror Device, Noland flanks a vanity make-up mirror, with a chrome bar, defiling the glossy Hollywood associations with a pair of hand-cuffs and a fluorescent orange flare gun. For Noland, the combination of chrome and mirror draws out relative relationships: 'The coolness [of metal] might infer dissociation, but the mirror effect in some places is to draw you back in after the dissociation' (C. Noland, quoted in M. Cone, 'Interview with Cady Noland', in Journal of Contemporary Art, vol. 3, no. 2, 1990, pp. 20-25). By including the viewer's reflection as her fourth 'object', Noland implicates us in this scene casting us in this culture of celebrity, violence and falsification. In doing so, Noland deploys a quiet warning, presenting contemporary society and culture with stark and sobering clarity.
This work belongs to a series of sculptures and installations that Noland began in the late 1980s examining the dark underbelly of criminality, violence and celebrity. Using found objects, images and texts, Noland transformed the discarded and often overlooked aspects of daily experience into a disturbing portrait of American life in the twentieth century. As she explained, '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' (C. Noland, quoted in M. Cone, 'Interview with Cady Noland', in Journal of Contemporary Art, vol. 3, no. 2, 1990, pp. 20-25). Noland has associated this tendency with psychopathology and in her treatise, 'Towards a Metalanguage of Evil' which was included in Documenta X in 1992, the artist outlines the rules of play in a society where the successful are the psychopaths. It was here that she developed her ideas on the 'mirror device', a tool which she believes is used to 'mollify Y, and render him more pliable to X's manipulations', with X as the perpetrator and Y as the victim (C. Noland, 'Towards a Metalanguage of Evil', in Documenta X, vol. 3, New York 1991, p. 412).
The Mirror Device is both rooted in its potent psychological charge as well as in art history. With an aesthetic vocabulary that integrates strategies historically associated with Pop and Post-Minimialism, Noland has developed a body of work which is distinctly separate from its abstract predecessors of the late 1960s through its host of overlapping allusions.