John P. Murphy on J Noland

Thank You For Being A Friend..., 2011, La-Z-Boy loveseat, 7 seasons of The Golden Girls, Television

[Image description: A photo of the corner of a gallery space with white walls and a gray floor. In the center of the image is a television, sitting atop a wooden cabinet, with a still from the sitcom Golden Girls on the screen. In the still, four women clutch each other while looking to the right with apprehensive expressions. Red beer cans are strewn around the gallery floor. Extending into the frame from the bottom of the image are two pairs of legs laying on a recliner footrest. The figure on the right wears blue jeans and brown shoes, and their light-skinned left hand is pointing toward the beer cans. The figure on the left wears brown house slippers and has a bright orange and yellow blanket on their legs.]

A little over fifty years ago, Tom Marioni presented The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art at the Oakland Museum of California. Marioni invited his friends to drink beer with him at the museum after hours, and then displayed the empty bottles, chairs, and tables in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. It was a pioneering work of relational aesthetics: art grounded in experiences rather than objects.

For the past decade, San Diego-based artist J Noland has been drinking beer with friends and making art, often simultaneously. In 2011 he staged Thank You for Being a Friend at Helmuth Projects, taking inspiration from Marioni and the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who said in an interview that he wanted to make art “for people who watch The Golden Girls and sit in a big brown La-Z-Boy chair.” Noland took this as a mandate, installing himself in a La-Z-Boy in the gallery and binge-watching ninety hours (seven seasons) of the sitcom in “a lazy man’s act of endurance and indulgence,” as he put it. The gallery remained open, night and day, for friends and visitors to drop in, crack open a beer, and join the viewing marathon. 

Noland’s work is playful and provocative, cerebral and scatological, and generally licenses intoxication in one form or another. We are roughly the same age and both hail from the Midwest, so I recognize the raw material of his work: the bowling alleys, beer cans, bb guns, and tailgates that comprised the requisite rites-of-passage for a white midwestern male born in the 1980s. Noland does not mock these objects and rituals so much as discover in them forms of misplaced yearning and sublimated spirituality: Elmer Gantry on peyote hunting for sin and salvation in the post-industrial Rust Belt. The folksy fun and games are also totems of addiction, insecurity, toxicity, and despair. It is a sort of via negativa—accessing the sacred through the crass castoffs of middle Americana: a trash-littered path walked side-by-side with intoxicated friends. 

Flea Bar, 2014, wood, hardware, framed poster, Caliphone 420K, John Mellencamp records, Budweiser, bar stools, industrial pendant lights

[Image description: The photograph is divided into two halves, an elevated upper room lit by bright lamps and a basement level below filled with green light. A ladder on the left side connects the two floors. On the upper level, a crowd of people fill the space, some figures standing around a table covered in beer cans. In the basement, one figure stands next to the ladder, another lifts a beer can upward, and two figures run out of the frame towards the right.]

For his undergraduate thesis at the University of San Diego, Noland filled the campus gallery with seven tons of sand, built an altar, and summoned a divine experience through silence and fasting. After graduation, Noland was among the tight-knit cohort that developed Helmuth Projects, the experimental gallery and project space in Banker’s Hill that closed in 2019. It was at Helmuth that Noland—by this time enrolled in the University of California San Diego’s MFA program—staged Thank You for Being a Friend and Shooting the Shit (2011). The latter invited participants to drink beer and use the empty cans for bb-gun target practice. For Flea Bar (2014) he installed an underground saloon beneath Helmuth where visitors could sip cold Budweiser and listen to John Mellencamp records, perhaps unaware they were in a space that evoked the Pueblo kiva, a circular subterranean room used for spiritual ceremonies. 

What do a rattlesnake and a limp dick have in common? 2014, moonshine, etched glass bottles, western diamondback rattlesnake heart

[Image description: Two clear glass bottles sit on a round wooden surface. The taller bottle on the left has a gold screw top and narrows at the neck. The faint outline of etched letters is barely visible on its surface. The smaller bottle on the right is flask-shaped, with a plastic red screw top. Both are filled with a clear liquid and have a fleshy, brown object resting at the bottom.]

Budweiser and rattlesnakes have regularly featured in his search for the sacred within the profane. In What do a rattlesnake and a limp dick have in common? (2014) Noland distilled Budweiser into moonshine and infused the spirit with a rattlesnake heart—a folk remedy for impotence. This is Noland’s practice in miniature: distilling crude raw material into a more essential “spirit” or essence, while undermining conventional notions of masculinity. The jokey title is part of his homespun, hallucinatory aesthetic—bringing seemingly unlike things into disorienting combinations: shit and chakras, mysticism and dick jokes, low comedy and mystic visions. 

Suburb, 2014, snake terrariums, southern pacific rattlesnake, red diamondback rattlesnake

[Image description: A white wall with two square, glass-covered recesses within it. Both interior spaces are approximately two feet deep. In the recess on the right, the walls are peach stucco and a green garden hose is coiled on top of a bed of red rocks. In the recess on the left, the walls are paneled wood. A house plant and a white lamp in the shape of hands praying both sit on a small wood coffee table. A snake is barely visible on the floor underneath the table.]

In Suburb (2014), a pair of snake terrariums, rattlesnakes slither into the antiseptic spaces of modern suburbia, reminders of something chthonic lurking beneath the sanitized surfaces. The role of snakes in Noland’s work recalls the trip taken in 1896 by German scholar, Aby Warburg, to the American Southwest, where he witnessed a snake dance of the Hemis Kachina in the Third Mesa village of Oraibi. Twenty seven years later Warburg delivered a famous lecture on the so-called Serpent Ritual, arguing that the snake represented “both the inner and outer demoniacal forces that humanity must overcome.” The demons belonged to Warburg and European civilization, however, not to the Pueblo tribes. In the wake of the First World War, Warburg suffered a series of nervous breakdowns and was diagnosed with manic depression and schizophrenia. He delivered his lecture on the snake ritual to prove he was sane enough to be released from a sanitorium.

Suburb (details), 2014, snake terrariums, southern pacific rattlesnake, red diamondback rattlesnake

[Image description: Left: A view of the left recess in Suburb. It has wood paneled walls and a small wood coffee table, on which sit a leafy house plant and a white lamp in the shape of hands praying, which is plugged into an outlet on the wall. A small brown snake is curled on the pink carpet under the table. Right: : A close-up view of the right recess in Suburb, which includes a rattlesnake curled on a coiled green hose, all on top of jagged brown rocks. The snake’s scales bear a geometric pattern in brown, pink, and white.]

Noland is interested, in other words, in what these kinds of misappropriations reveal about the appropriators. His use of snakes has nothing to do with an “authentic” Native symbolism; it is a degraded afterimage, a form of unreliable narration. It functions more like the rattlesnake roundup in Harry Crews’s nightmarish 1976 novel, A Feast of Snakes (Noland let me borrow his copy)—a symbol of the writhing, malevolent, and poisonous undercurrents in our toxic culture, even as it holds out some shimmer of utopian possibility. The disturbing video Daddy’s asleep, he don’t know what I’m doing (2018) features deteriorated footage of Pentecostal preacher Glenn Summerford handling snakes; it is a haunted transmission from the underworld recorded just before Summerford went to prison for attempted murder. Noland’s work often straddles the thin, ragged line between deviancy and divinity—in the process exposing how flimsy our constructions of the “normative” really are.  

Daddy's asleep, he don't know what I'm doing, 2018, video, 6 min. and 51 sec.

[Video description: A grainy, low-quality video of a light-skinned man standing in an interior space and handling a brown snake. The video is slowed down and frequently stops and starts, giving the man’s movements a jerky quality. Glitchy white lines run across the bottom of the screen. The man takes the snake out of a box, holds it up to show the people in the room, and moves it around in his hands. For the last twenty seconds of the video, the screen is black. There is a low, ominous whooshing sound throughout.]

If Noland has been exorcising demons, more recently he’s picking up good vibrations. In 1956 psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term “psychedelic,” or “mind manifesting,” to describe the properties of hallucinogens. (Three years earlier Osmond had supervised the mescaline trip recounted by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception; the title comes from William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”) “Psychedelic art” may conjure visions of swirly Sixties concert posters, but the same period saw its own version of relational aesthetics. Noland carries on the work of the Diggers and The Merry Pranksters, those anarchic avant-garde troupes that blurred the line between art and life, pursuing ecstasy and vision through a Rimbaudian “derangement of the senses.” The Merry Pranksters spiked punch with acid during the Acid Tests while the Diggers installed a large yellow picture frame, the Free Frame of Reference, in Golden Gate Park: those who stepped through it were served free food.  

Noland treats the gallery as a space where normal laws or expectations of human sociability can be suspended. He bartered illicit items laid out on a yellow tarp for his final exhibition at Helmuth, Higher Powers (2018). Yellow, the color associated with the Solar Plexus Chakra, tied together a constellation of totemic pieces including Beacon (2018), a light fixture from a Moravian church reclaimed from an antique mall in Indianapolis—transcendence on the trash heap.

A Kind of Saturnalia, 2019, installation

[Image description: An installation in a gallery with white walls and a gray floor. Various-sized TV monitors are stacked in a pyramid in the right corner. Most show an aqua screen, but one shows a person at the beach. A large conch shell sits on top of that monitor. Two more stacked monitors, also showing aqua screens, sit in the gallery’s left corner. In the middle of the back wall hang two navy blue squares of a fabric, which have large and small white circles on them. Below the fabric, a row of small white vases sits on the floor against the wall. In the center of the gallery floor is a set of concentric white circles, most painted but one formed with remnants of crushed white ceramic.]

A Kind of Saturnalia (Best Practice, 2019) took the ancient festival of Saturn as its springboard—a period of revelry and drunken debauch that overturned society’s conventions. The centerpiece of the multimedia installation was a game Noland invented: place a ceramic vessel in an orbit and try to break the vessel on the return swing of a pendulum. At the opening Noland served as master-of-ceremonies—part spirit guide, part riverboat gambler—with visitors placing bets and competing to break the vessel. The shattered vessels (cosmic sacrifices) created constellations of “star dust” in the central orbit. The atmosphere was raucous and celebratory, an ad hoc community bound by those ever-popular pastimes (drinking, betting, and breaking things) sanctioned by the pursuit of beatific bliss.  

So what did an artist whose practice is based in experience do during a pandemic? Noland busied himself with making beeswax candles. They are natural air purifiers, mitigating the effects of dust, mold, and toxins in the air. They burn a bright, golden flame and emit a faint scent of honey. He sent them to friends so they could enact shared rituals across boundaries of time and space. They belong on a continuum with his previous work: Magic can be spun from dross; the sacred can only be accessed indirectly, through the materials to hand: beeswax, beer cans, reruns of The Golden Girls—and through the friendships made along the way. 

John P. Murphy is an art historian and the Hoehn Curatorial Fellow for Prints at the University of San Diego.