MORNINGS ARE FOR CEASE-AND-DESIST LETTERS, afternoons for rebuffing the advances of the great museums of the world. Conspiracy theory is Cady Noland’s lifeblood, refusal her modus operandi. Difficult, reclusive, idle and industrious, forsaken by her vocation (for how long now?), yet still ferociously committed. Noland—we mythologize art’s mad widows—would be certifiable if she were not simply right. The world today—if you’re fool enough to shed your survivalist armor, to look up from your navel and out from your bubble—is enough to drive you crazy. Unless, like the crazy in the Oval Office . . . you’re crazy!
Trust me—trust Noland!—everything is connected. Take, for instance, the supermarket shopping cart: anodyne by conventional reckoning, and yet (am I crazy?) an object as perfectly of a piece with her carceral normal as walkers (also benign?), cyclone fencing (far less so), and
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