Cady Noland, Basket of Nothing, 1990. Wire basket with assortment of building tools and materials. 17 x 16 x 32 in. LA MoCA.
Cady Noland’s Basket of Nothing is a loose collection of objects that sometimes sits on the floor of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The essay that follows is mainly ekphrastic, an attempt to describe a work of art that strikes me as carefully designed to resist description. Somewhat more tentatively, this essay is also an attempt to describe the ambiguities of an artistic project that is aimed at withdrawal. I am taken by certain of Noland’s works for their radical, sometimes painful refusal to participate in our ready-made historical and aesthetic framings. In its resistance, Noland’s work is best described as abject, formless, “an act of delivery,” as Yve-Alain Bois put it in his description of George Bataille’s notion of L’informe.[1] And yet there is a project there: an intentionally and carefully composed work of art. This essay is a provisional attempt to describe this project of intentional resistance.
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The easiest way to begin a description of Cady Noland’s Basket of Nothing would be to tick through the various objects that make up this “assemblage”: two rusty shopping baskets, nested together, sit on the ground, filled with an array of objects: a smallish Marlboro sign, a plastic clip hanger (the kind that comes with a purchase from a big-box store), a small bottle of “Neutra Rust,” still in its chip-board and plastic packaging (announcing that it “conquers rust anywhere!”), the remnants of another chip-board package (this one, with its plastic face removed), a narrower, shallower, metal basket, and a range of tool-like objects, littering the lower register of the baskets, the most dominant being two long, metallic items, with red components and prominent handle-like elements.
To begin with such a description feels misguided, however, if not insincere. This is after all, as the title suggests, a basket of nothing. You can name the objects collected there, as I have tried to do, but that brings you no closer to their individual or collective identity. Sitting on the floor, the work stubbornly maintains its lowly origins. It will not rise to the occasion; it may draw your attention, as it did mine when I first encountered it at LA MoCA, but it will not respond in kind. It is that refusal, that turning away, that I find most compelling in Noland’s Basket. It is a turning away, a non-directionality, that I liken to the most radical abstractions of the twentieth-century and I’d like to use Noland’s work, however provisionally, in order to begin to articulate the value I discern in certain forms of abstraction in and as practice.
It is first necessary to acknowledge that abstraction is decidedly not the context in which Noland’s work is typically placed. Counted among a group of young artists coming of age in New York’s East Village in the 1980s, Noland’s practice was featured at the core of what we once called the “postmodern.” Wryly embracing art’s post-historical status, Noland and her peers, such as Steve Parrino, Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum and Richard Prince, were said to have turned their attention, as one curator put it, to the “darker reaches of the American psyche,” producing works of art that uncomfortably mirrored a depthless and excessive culture of consumption.[2] In considering Noland’s Basket of Nothing through the lens of abstraction, I want to resist this tendency to read her work as either a symptom or reflection of late-twentieth-century American culture. In order to do so, it is necessary to look past what the objects are that populate Basket of Nothing and to instead attend to what they do. One of the primary things they do, I think, both singly and pulled together in this particular way, is to deny the viewer. Basket of Nothing requires an observer, even draws an observer, as it did me, but, I contend, it does not respond to her.
I realize, as I say this, that I sound a lot like Michael Fried, whose theory of absorption in opposition to theatricality promotes an aesthetics of disinterest that, as Fried put it, “repudiates” any identification between viewer and work of art.[3] The turn away from the viewer that I understand Noland’s Basket to enact, however, is not a moral imperative applicable to all art. It is too cynically phrased for that, too basely articulated. For modernists like Fried, art’s turning away from the viewer is a testament to its ability to transcend our base, literalist lives and to gesture toward, to act as proof of, another ideal truth that exceeds our all-too-human desires and modes of meaning-making. Basket of Nothing offers no such transcendence.
And yet it turns away. What I’d like to explore is the value of that turn in pointing us toward not a higher meaning, but an other meaning, one that is specifically and, to me, reassuringly, not human. I want to be clear, however, that I also do not find in Noland anything like the post-human, object-oriented ontologies that the so-called “new materialists” seek out and define.[4] What draws me to this work is the manner by which it, as a whole, along with its component parts, refuses to be identified as an “actant” in our world.[5] Which is to say, what draws me to Basket of Nothing is its aggressive powers of withdrawal not just from the “human” but also from any sensible relations whatsoever. As I’ll explain, the work’s refusal of sensible relations is formalized in its being made up of objects designed for human use. Its contents can largely be described as equipment, but equipment which is expired, spent, inert.[6] Such a withdrawal strikes me as an apt counter to the insistence in so much of New Materialism to speak on behalf of the “nonhuman” in order to demonstrate “the active powers issuing from nonsubjects.”[7] Basket of Nothing refuses what for me is the mistaken kernel at the heart of so many object-oriented theories: what Jane Bennett, in a very different light, refers to as “human hubris.” The nonhuman agency that New Materialists struggle so insistently to describe for their human readers is one that, to return to Bennett, “circulate[s] around and within human bodies.”[8] For all its object-oriented rhetoric, New Materialism is, in the end, aggressively human-oriented, “motivated,” as Bennett says “by a self-interested or conative concern for human survival and happiness […].”[9] Noland’s Basket promises something else entirely: a lack of animation, an end to action, and, most aggressively, a refusal to matter. Again: Basket of Nothing is not directed toward the viewing subject; it is a strangely careful construction of withdrawal from that subject. This is another possible departure from New Materialism. For, as I’ll explain in more detail, Basket of Nothing seems to me to be a deeply intentional object, carefully construed by the human-subject who made it. That intentional configuration, however, does not seek the world.[10]
The “work” put into something like Basket of Nothing, the facture of the thing, can be difficult to identify as such. The items seem carefully placed in order to appear as though they were not intentionally assembled and yet there are other, more positive signs of intention. The one that gets me most is the clothing hanger clipped to the top of the Marlboro sign. An empty gesture to be sure, but a gesture nonetheless. One can’t help but look for other signs of intentionality—are the red objects concentrated in one place? Was red a theme? Why two baskets and not one? Are these random configurations, the whole thing perhaps a found object, or are these carefully chosen arrangements, composed, which is to say meant? The work raises such questions, which are embedded in its appearing (at least somewhat) composed, but artfully redirects those questions.[11]
That redirection might be read as a radical refusal of intentionality and a cultivation of something like Roland Barthes’s notion of a “third meaning.” For Barthes, the “third meaning,” which he first glimpses in Sergei Eisenstein film stills, is a “signifying accident,” a particular “trait,” that gestures toward a meaning outside of or oblique to informational or symbolic meaning and which does not necessarily have a clear content or purpose.[12] The detail, such as the over-powdering of an actor’s face, “outplays meaning” even while remaining within the field of signification. Barthes characterizes the third meaning as a kind of signification that escapes intended meaning and resists made structure. Not objectively given, it emerges out of a willful mis-reading (or a “mutation of reading”). That the third meaning is a function of viewer reception, however misguided, is made clear in Barthes’s insistence on reading Eisenstein’s films through the medium of the still—a “quotation” from the narrative structure of the film. Barthes’s third meaning, this is to say, is the result of an act of reading that is located, as is his theory of the punctum, in the idiosyncratic response to random traits captured by a technological apparatus. But Noland’s basket is too reticent for this sort of understanding—there is no “obvious meaning” out of which an “obtuse” meaning is capable of being generated. Noland’s work does not move enough into the field of signification for it to have any meaning at all, let alone an obtuse one. In this regard, Noland’s work is much more in-line with Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s notion of the aesthetics of impoverishment—there is no unintended meaning in such work because the work “[f]ails to represent (either meaninglessness or meaning).”[13]
There is, in fact, a moment in Barthes’s description of the obtuse meaning when he gestures toward just such a blockage: in his own “oblique” mention of Georges Bataille’s essay “The Big Toe,” Barthes states that this lowly body part “situates…one of the possible regions of obtuse meaning.” But the big toe is not simply obtuse according to Bataille. It is not meaning arrived at via other means. Rather, the big toe is base. That is, it does not begin in formulated concepts only to veer off into newly productive modes of meaning making. It is that which precedes meaning and must be overcome in order to achieve any meaning at all. “Opening [one’s] eyes wide…before a big toe,” according to Bataille, means seeing the base origins of our most transcendental thoughts and desires. This is no oblique, implied or sublimated meaning that finds expression via other means, but an origin: a physical reminder of the dumb origins that all thought aspires to transcend. For Bataille human content is produced out of this very effort to ascend from the “obscure baseness,” which provides “a firm foundation to the erection [the standing upright] of which man is so proud.”[14] The toe, that is, might be obscured by our desire to see “human life … as an elevation” and it might figure obliquely, as it does in Barthes’s essay, in our elevated rhetoric that tends always, as Bataille said, “in favor of that which elevates.” But it is in fact always present and necessary—the base foundation to our ideals, the excrement that ensures our further appropriations. It is crucial, then, to understand—pace both the New Materialists and the structuralists—base meaning as meant. An intentional act, but one that is not, as it is for Fried and his followers, aimed at “the sharable intelligibility of human deeds,” as Robert Pippin puts it.[15]
Sitting on the floor, filled with discarded objects, including that unopened bottle of Neutrarust, which, un-grasped, is impotent to stay the further decay of the baskets in which it has come to rest, Basket of Nothing, like Bataille’s big toe, provides a confrontation with base matter, contributing, in this way, to what Bataille called a “base” or “intransigent materialism.” Noland’s careful arrangement succeeds in showing us not matter transformed or in vital conversation with other matter or matter ready-to-hand, but “base matter,” which is “external and foreign to ideal human aspirations,” refusing “to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from such aspirations.” As a work of base materialism, it is not the objects themselves that resist our “ideal human aspirations,” but Noland’s configuration of them. Noland herself is a base materialist, invested as an agent in a refusal of art’s ascent.
That Noland’s works are intentionally composed is signaled by the fact that Noland is a notoriously shrewd monitor of her works’ preservation and display. She has attempted to de-authorize several works that she insists were damaged or incorrectly displayed by careless registrars, curators, and dealers.[16] One can’t help but wonder what it is exactly that Noland is protecting? What is the artistic vision that she’s guarding and to what purpose? What I’d like to propose is that she is protecting the carefully crafted refusal of these heterogeneous objects to cohere into a meaningful unity. This resistance goes against the generic assumptions embedded in the assemblage form, which is typically presented as obtaining a unity through authorial intervention: which is to say, by being assembled. As art historian and curator John Elderfield claimed, through the manipulation of “heterogeneous” materials the assemblage artist crafts a “unity,” submitting these materials to her will.[17] Noland’s assemblages strike me as carefully constructed in order to resist just such a unity. Despite the fact that art historians and critics insistently read her work as assemblages of socially resonant objects, most often finding references to violence, masculinity, and nationality there, I find that her best works maintain a stubborn refusal to be stitched into a social narrative. They utilize materials that could obviously be read as resonant, but those materials are made, through Noland’s intervention, resistant to our ambitions to make meaning of them, to “appropriate,” in Bataille’s terms, even the most abject discards of our struggle for ascent.
Which returns me to my characterization of Noland’s Basket of Nothing as a work of abstraction. Such a characterization could be viewed as a refusal of the very base materiality that I’m claiming the work strives for: the earliest abstract artists aimed at obtaining abstract ideals in two and three-dimensions in order to transcend all material limits. This was of a piece with European artists’ desire to put into the world not representations of nature or illustrations of philosophical ideals, but their equivalents. To paraphrase Kandinsky, the abstract work of art does not replicate, reflect, or reference the world; they create a world. Bataille’s definition of base materialism very specifically refuses all those abstractions that he associated with idealism. As such, the deeply Hegelian aspirations of the “first” abstractionists, who were striving for an ideal unity in their works, should be regarded as directly opposed to what Bataille characterized as the heterogeneous and unclassifiable nature of base matter. However, Bataille does acknowledge that base materialism itself—that is, the project of describing base matter and, in particular, the heterogeneous nature of base matter, the study of which he termed heterology—is necessarily a process of abstraction. For any effort at classifying truly heterogeneous matter, of rendering it concrete through description and making it an object of knowledge, must be avoided. “Heterology,” Bataille states, “is opposed to any homogeneous representation of the world,” opposed “to any philosophical system.”[18] As such, any “envisaging” of “objective heterogeneity” must necessarily unfold in the abstract.
This is the mode of abstraction in which Noland works. Her own interventions are directed not at knowing, classifying, or—to return to the art of assemblage—transforming matter, but, rather, toward the preservation of matter’s heterogeneity, or at least, gesturing toward such a preservation, which may, in the end, prove impossible. In a manner that may seem to contradict everything I’ve said about Noland’s refusal to create socially resonant unities out of these diverse objects, Noland does seem drawn to particular kinds of objects. The objects that repeat themselves most often in her assemblages are broken tools, walkers, pipes, barriers, canes, fences: materials that point to the limits of human action. Basket of Nothing, for example, is full of tools—demonstrated by their ready-to-hand design—that evoke the human hand even as they withdraw from it. One way to describe the simultaneous gesture toward and withdrawal from the hand in Noland’s baskets is as “non-figurative,” a term used, in the discourse of visual art, interchangeably with “abstraction.” Noland’s works are non-figurative not only in their eschewal of representation, but also in the operation by which the figure is evoked only to be cut off, rendered impotent, brought low. It’s worth recalling here that Bataille described the big toe as the “most human part of the body,” in that it most distinguishes our morphology from the ape’s. The ape’s “toe” is more like a thumb, Bataille contends: it is a grasping and tool-like foot. Whereas our toe remains non-functional, driven into the mud, ignominious, terrestrial, “real.” The broken, retreating tools that fill Noland’s baskets, the canes and walkers and her abiding interest in stockades, all deny confidence in the body’s erection, pointing instead toward the fall that marks every individual’s end: the fall back to earth, which our un-grasping big toe never left. In returning to earth, we fall out of the world; in falling out of the world, we fall away from meaning.
Noland’s Basket of Nothing formalizes this fall. It is not a reassurance of something beyond our limits, but, rather, assurance in our limits and, as such, that we humans are not the limit. This, I suppose, is New Materialism’s promise though it has phrased that promise in such a way as to be deeply inarticulate at times. The objects that comprise Basket of Nothing do not matter and that lack of mattering points to the ways abstraction can stand apart from, as opposed to alongside or above the human.
[1] Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 18.
[2] Christian Rattemeyer, “Cady Noland,” in Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 397.
[3] Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 173.
[4] See, for example, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
[5] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
[6] I mean to use “equipment” here in a manner akin to Heidegger’s in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings: From Being in Time to The Task of Thinking, David Farrell Krell, ed. (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 143-212.
[7] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, ix
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., x.
[10] The idea of not seeking the world is in part inspired by Lauren Berlant’s recent lecture “On Being in Life Without Wanting the World (Living with Ellipsis).”
[11] For a discussion of composition and intentionality see Howard Singerman, “Noncompositional Effects, or the Process of Painting in 1970,” Oxford Art Journal Vol. 26, No. 1 (2003), 127-150. For a discussion of the intentional avoidance of composition see Yve-Alain Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-Composition in Its Many Guises,” in Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1992).
[12] Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein stills,” in Image Music Text, Stephen Heath, trans. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978).
[13] Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 14.
[14] Georges Bataille, “The Big Toe,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Allan Stoekl, trans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 20.
[15] Robert Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 64.
[16] See Andrew Ruseth’s “Cady Noland Works, and a New Disclaimer, Appear at the Brant Foundation,” Art News (http://www.artnews.com/2014/11/10/cady-noland-work-and-a-new-disclaimer-appears-at-the-brant-foundation/). The disclaimer added to the Brant’s work reads: “”Because Ms. Noland have [has] not been involved with the chain of provenance with many of my [her] pieces, there are more situations like this show which place demands on her time and the artist’s attention to ensure proper presentation of her art work (including its representation in photographs), than she has time or capacity to be involved with. She reserves her attention for projects of her own choosing and declined to be involved in this exhibition. The artist (or C.N.) hasn’t given her approval or blessing to this show.”
[17] John Elderfield, Essays on Assemblage (Studies in Modern Art) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992).
[18] Bataille, “The Big Toe,” 98.