Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Cart Full of Action
Cady Noland American
Not on view
The title, Cart Full of Action, is at odds with the sculpture itself: an industrial cart, scarred by use, into which an assortment of found automobile fixtures and accessories—hubcaps, a side-view mirror, and cleaning supplies—have been piled in a seemingly haphazard fashion. If the cart promises action at all, it is that of a shopper walking down an aisle or a drifter collecting items along a street. The automobile is an icon of American culture, a symbol of both prosperity and excitement, not to mention virile masculinity. Noland, however, makes of it something other: dissected into parts that amount to no conceivable whole, the car figured here is alluring, perhaps, but impotent, dysfunctional, full only of unrealized potential.