A Rare Jess Portrait and a Shocking Cady Noland: Stories Behind the Byron Meyer collects ion
“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.”
The fantasies, failures, and contradictions of America gaze unflinchingly back at the viewer in Cady Noland’s Cowboy Eating with Shoulder Hole (1990), a haunting emblem of the fractured American mythos. Few artists have captured the psychological undercurrents of American identity as incisively as Cady Noland. Working in the late 1980s and early 1990s—a period defined by the rise of tabloid celebrity, political spectacle, and the commodification of dissent—she forged a visual language of power, alienation, and control. In the present work, Noland lays bare the myth of the American Dream, exposing the unsettling dissonance beneath the gleaming surface of its most cherished symbols. Through her dystopian vision of Americana, she reveals how familiar icons of heroism and freedom also encode narratives of violence, failure, and loss. Oscillating between rugged individualism, performative bravado, and unexpected vulnerability, Cowboy Eating with Shoulder Hole becomes both elegy and indictment—a piercing meditation on the romanticization and decline of American identity.
One of the most enduring and provocative figures within Noland’s visual lexicon is the cowboy—the ultimate emblem of an industry-fabricated cultural construct, stripped of its true historical roots in animal herding and refashioned as a performance of American masculinity. Mythologized, glamorized, and commodified by Hollywood Westerns, television serials, and Marlboro advertising campaigns, the cowboy evolved into a potent yet hollow signifier: a cipher for individualism, stoicism, and violence, and an avatar of expansionist ideology in the collects ive American imagination. In Cowboy Eating with Shoulder Hole, Noland deftly complicates this charged symbol. She portrays not the virile outlaw or defiant gunslinger, but a man caught mid-meal, spoon in hand—an image of awkward vulnerability rather than heroism.
By displacing the cowboy from his mythic pedestal, Noland subverts the very ideals he embodies, exposing the constructed nature of masculinity and the fragility beneath its façade. As critic David Bussel observed, “Noland reminds us that as the brokers of a multitude of rights and wrongs, the media is now able to point a scrupulous finger at that politician, movie star or celebrity who has transgressed our tacitly defined and protected rules of moral conduct… Anyone can be made into a hero or villain because minor celebrity is just another disposable object of mass consumption.” (David Bussel, “Review: Cady Noland at Paula Cooper Gallery,” Frieze 17, June 7, 1994, online) Through this lens, Cowboy Eating with Shoulder Hole becomes a mirror of the collects ive American psyche—revealing the ways in which mass media and image-making manufacture, circulate, and ultimately erode the nation’s cultural ideals.
"The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was one of the first great champions of Cady Noland's work. A curator there named John Caldwell loved Cady's work, and many people in the community got interested in Cady very early... This piece was in Byron's apartment, came prominently into the living room. So it sort of snuck up on you... I think Byron just liked that sense of being startled."
While Noland has worked across multiple motifs and media throughout her celebrated practice, the silkscreen-on-aluminum works remain her most incisive medium. In these, she investigates figures and images that have infiltrated and redefined the shared consciousness of the United States. For Noland, metal carries a potent symbolism: its industrial durability connotes the seeming permanence of the cultural structures she critiques, while the punctures and ruptures she inflicts upon it suggest both literal and metaphorical wounds. These perforations—at once recalling bullet holes and the sacred stigmata of Christ—embody a sense of violence and psychic schism, articulating the fracture of the American Dream under the weight of its own contradictions.
The reflective surface of aluminum, meanwhile, implicates the viewer, merging their image with that of the wounded cowboy. “About the metal… the coolness might infer dissociation, but the mirror effect in some places is to draw you back in after the dissociation,” Noland has remarked. (The artist quoted in: Rhea Anastas and Michael Brenson, eds., Witness to Her Art, New York 2006, p. 156) By folding the viewer into the work, Noland transforms the act of looking into an act of complicity, compelling participation in her forensic examination of American identity. In Cowboy Eating with Shoulder Hole, she exposes how mass culture has packaged and sold the psychic terrain of the United States, its paranoia, violence, fear, and patriotism alike, as consumable spectacle.
