“The American dream, which Cady Noland addresses, has become a globalized reality characterized by the glorification of violence, radical individualism, consumption as both stimulus and fulfillment, and conflict in the form of separatism and exclusion.”
Cady Noland’s Beltway Terror is part of a series by the artist centered around a gallows-type structure from which the bodies of executed criminals were hung. These recall the form of Colonial stocks which secured the ankles and wrists of offenders held up to public scorn, which in the context of Noland’s critically-acclaimed, highly conceptual artistic practice implies a mockery of or challenge to American hubris. The freestanding sculpture evokes feelings of intimidation, loneliness, and a sense of dreaded awe towards a historical past, exemplifying the artist's adept exploration of the realities of the American dream and its shortcomings.
As Martha Buskirk has noted, “[Cady Noland’s] subversion of minimalism is particularly evident in sculptures based on historic pillory devices. Along with structures made from various configurations of chainlink fencing, they call forth histories of punishment and containment — and, in this respect, are thematically connected to her blown-up tabloid stories (a different type of public shaming) silkscreened onto aluminum and other surfaces1.”
© 2021 Donald Judd Foundation / ARS
To enhance these effects, it has been noted by curator and critic Bob Nickas how, for another work in the same series, Your Fucking Face, the artist would at times engage with the work by sticking her head, arms and legs through the holes and allow herself to be temporarily imprisoned and viewed in this position by visitors to the show. “Stocks, historically,” Nickas explains, “were a means not only to punish an offender but to publicly humiliate the person. In other works from this period, Noland presented images of politicians who had disgraced themselves or been brought down (most prominently Richard Nixon2)...”
Beltway Terror thus represents one of the central preoccupations of Noland’s highly-respected body of work, that is, she engages in imagery and objects that appear benign in their stark familiarity, while harnessing the mass-cultural vernacular to stimulate suspected emotions and subvert expectations and capture the anxiety inherent to the post-Vietnam era.
1 “Cady Noland’s Pathological America,” Hyperallergic, 11 December 2018
2 “Traces of SoHo Past,” Vice Magazine, 1 March 2010