Why Cady Noland’s Disabling America Never Sat Quite Right With Me

Cady Noland’s work has never sat quite right with me. Sure, there are the familiar critiques—that her portraits of America, made of Budweiser cans and bullets, don’t feel like her America, since she is wealthy and white. One is that the elusive artist, known for walking away from the art world at the height of fame, felt like an even greater class traitor when she chose Gagosian’s Upper East Side location for a rare show, her second in New York in as many decades. Another is that she mounted the show without seeming to troll blue-chip dealers, the way David Hammons famously tends to. What unsettles me is the way that she incorporates walkers, wheelchairs, and canes into her portraits of American tragedy.

Don’t get me wrong: I loved her 2018 retrospective in Germany so much that I traveled to see it twice—and it was at the MMK in Frankfurt, arguably Europe’s most boring city. But one subway ride to Manhattan for the Gagosian show, which closes October 21, left me feeling unsatisfied.

This show is mostly new work, and as ever, Noland’s red, white, and blue sculptures made of resin and refuse chafe at the contradictions between the American dream and the American reality. There is, though, an untitled walker from 1986, wrapped in a leather strap and bearing a badge that says “special police.” It’s on view alongside sculptures that, pairing bullets and badges, invoke police brutality. Badges abound, but the walker’s is the only one inscribed with the word “special,” that grating euphemism for “disabled.” I can’t tell if the choice was intentional and insensitive, or just blithe and inconsiderate. But for decades, she’s shown assistive devices alongside grenades and can collections, as if she were equating disability with fates as tragic as destitution or death.

Cady Noland: Untitled, 1986.

Part of me was pleased to see mass disablement included as one of the machinations of American neoliberalism for once. Inaccessible healthcare, unaffordable nutritious foods, gun violence, and an environment rife with disabling toxins are eroding American health (and, as the theorist Lauren Berlant argued, preventing our uprisings).

But another part of me saw Noland’s walker stumbling clumsily into a paradox, one that disability theorist Jasbir K. Puar articulated in her 2017 book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability.Puar describes mass disablement and injury as deliberate tactics of policing, writing specifically about the Israeli Defense Force. Then she asks: how do we hold space for rage at this reality alongside our longing for disability pride?

But with Noland, instead of pride, all we get is pity.

Is that pity the artist’s or America’s? As ever, she’s just tracing the impact of the unseen forces of American neoliberalism on ordinary objects, without ever offering clear commentary. But still, she gestures at a bigger, bleaker truth: that the neoliberal state benefits from discourses of empowerment, which conveniently place responsibility on the individual rather than the government. (Remember that our hard-won, landmark legislation—the 1990’s Americans with Disabilities Act—was signed into law by George H. W. Bush, who saw granting rights as a tool for getting more disabled people off welfare.)

But I also wonder to what degree Noland included assistive devices simply because they look like her sculptures already. The walker is shown next to Polaroids of older works rife with grab bars and scaffolding that echo the walker’s aluminum tubing.  

These new works, all crammed into a small space, feel formulaic, as if the artist were cleaning out stuff that’d been kicking around in her studio for decades. (After all, she uses Budweiser cans that, as my colleague Alex Greenberger points out, are no longer in circulation). But the weirdest, and maybe the best, update is that some of the resin blocks now sit on lucite tables, as if the art objects were extensions of fancy furniture. Was that choice about meaning or materials? Here, since it’d be a contradiction to offer class commentary in the form of a luxury good for sale at Gagosian anyway, I like the ambiguity.