Off the pedestal or out of the frame, quiet art whispers and sometimes disappears.
By Marya Roland
Restrained, simple, humble, quiet – these are attributes of a current trend in visual art that focuses on the environment and society, rather than on the artist or even the art work itself. This "quiet art" is often environmentally and socially conscious. Its "eco" aspect can be oblique, as for example when recycled or found-objects and materials are used. Sometimes it makes a direct effort to heal, improve and restore.
Quiet art doesn't sit on a pedestal or in a gilt frame. It doesn't announce itself and its creator with a bullhorn, the way some art does. Take Damien Hirst's "For the Love of God," for example, a human skull encrusted with 8,601 (ethically sourced!) diamonds. Or "Oval Buddha," an 18 1/2-foot-tall, over three-ton, gold-leafed, self-portrait as a Buddha. Such pieces may possess conceptual depth and formal and technical merit. Unpretentious they are not.
Quiet art, like almost everything modern or contemporary, has roots in Marcel Duchamp’s early 20th century "ready-mades." When Duchamp presented a bicycle-wheel or a urinal as an art object, he rocked, as well as mocked, art conventions. Things haven’t been the same since. Ready-mades evolved into found objects, and now even the object in "art object" is optional. Today's descendants of Duchamp’s revolution have moved far beyond their roots.
Recently, quiet art has appeared in exhibits from New York to Western North Carolina. In New York, a funky 2008 show at the New Museum for Contemporary Art on the Bowery was called "Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century." It was filled with assemblages of unassuming, cast-off, everyday objects like Rachel Harrison’s "Huffy Howler," made of polystyrene, cement, Parex (a synthetic stucco), wood, acrylic, bicycle, black handbags, rocks, gravel, brick, artificial fur, metal pole, a photo of Mel Gibson and binder clips.
At the 2008 Whitney Biennial many of the artists used similarly plebeian materials - cinder blocks, plywood, 2x4’s, plastic, plaster - not as under-structures for art but as the art. Charles Long's elegant, Giacomettiesque sculptures, for example, were based on keen observation of form in nature - the form of bird droppings, to be precise – and made of Los Angeles River debris encased in plaster. Fritz Haig's "Edible Estates" transformed front lawns into vegetable gardens.
Closer to home, Mel Chin is a well-known "quiet" artist now living in Western NorthCarolina. Like Duchamp, Chin challenges conventional ideas about art and its boundaries. He may be most famous for "Revival Field," an ongoing work begun in 1990 which uses plants to remove toxic metals from a section of the Pig's Eye landfill in St. Paul, Minn.
In "The Fundred Dollar Bill Project," Chin’s latest, an apparently simple, humorous children’s project is linked with science, health and social issues. The project is paired with Operation PayDirt, in which scientists are developing plans for cleaning up New Orleans’ dangerous, lead-polluted soil, at an estimated cost of $300 million dollars. To lobby for Paydirt’s plan, its proposal and three million "Fundred dollars," faux hundred dollar bills illustrated by children and adults across the U.S., will be presented to Congress in late 2009.
Like many artists today, Chin crosses and blurs traditional definitions and demarcations between art media, art and science, social concerns and life. The tired old enigmatic question, “Is it art?” might be posed. Understandable, perhaps, since Chin not only dissolves the precious art object from the Fundred Project but also himself as the artist at center of its creation.
Although living locally, Chin works nationally and internationally. More homegrown, "The Raw Space Project" in Sylva in March 2009 was developed by Marie Cochran, a mixed-media artist who teaches at Western Carolina University, and Sylva painter Greg McPherson.
The project shared the predominately "unmonumental," informal aesthetics of the New York shows. By contrast, however, it was both site-specific and quick-and-dirty. Installed for about a week in an unused part of a former hotel owned by McPherson, the project involved 15 artists who had two weeks to create installations in the space. After selecting a room, a few of the artists used materials and objects already at the site. This allowed the inherent, uncontrived qualities of object and space to emerge.
In "Your Move," Sylva sculptor Richard Conn did four simple yet sophisticated actions to create his installation. He placed a door found at the site on a hand-truck facing a chair, put two rusted door hinge s flanking four screws on the chair, placed a spool of twine near the door and swept the small hotel guest room immaculately.
Thoughtfully setting up elementary relationships between objects and room, Conn not only allowed us to see their natural appeal, he created a subtle narrative
with tension. Who left these objects? Should one move the hardware, put it on the door? Or move hardware, sit, and just look at the door?
Britney Carroll from Sylva declined to do an installation in any one room in favor of such a subdued, decentralized piece that some viewers may have missed it. For "Penetration," she selected numerous small elements, parts of the actual building that interested her, and painted them red. Things we normally ignore - molding, screw heads, the head of a hinge pin - slowly appeared if we were alert. With its uncomplicated subtlety, the piece put us on notice: what else might we be overlooking or missing in this building, elsewhere, and in life?
And that’s just the point. Quiet art is quiet.
Away from The Raw Space Project, Guthrie's recent body of quiet art is composed of drawings inspired by the small sculptures he makes of materials and objects he finds on the banks of the Tuckaseegee River flowing through his back yard. He has been influenced by an obscure subfield of biotechnology called biomimetics, the study of biological systems as models for designing and engineering materials and machines.
"Icebreaker IV. crush & melt," which he dates "August 13, 2027," is a good example. It looks like a page from the notebook of Captain Nemo or another mad scientist. For each biomechanical component of the drawing that mimics nature, such as the icebreaker’s “ice claws” (visualize crab claws), there are handwritten explanatory notations, in this case, indicating portals and passenger areas. When "Icebreaker IV," the drawing, is placed next to "Icebreaker II," a sculpture seven inches long, made of rusted metal debris and claws, we are delighted to see how this small, river-spawned assemblage could inspire such “scientific” vision and design.
 
This spring Parker created three kudzu works installed throughout Western Carolina University's Fine and Performing Arts Building. The simplicity and grace of one of them, "In This Space," belied its implicit violence. Sinuous kudzu vines floated through space and poked through walls, while holes surrounded by powdery debris appear to have exploded through the floor. From some of the holes, vines emerge as if shot from a gun.
"Invasiveness Contained" exhibited the same visual restraint and insinuated energy. Parker applied black silicone blobs ordered in militaristic groups of three to the exterior and interior walls and floor. Embedded in the blobs were kudzu vine stubs. Often one mass splayed outward, as if hurled against the wall. These visual outbursts and the kudzu itself are cues that Parker is expressing much more than abstract visual relationships.
"Family Gallbladder" was named for the organ that assists digestion, and it is slightly more overtly personal. Parker clipped the kudzu vine arcing in and out of the room’s walls to "within an inch of its life" leaving only a few stubs here and there. The Pepto-Bismol pink space vibrated with color and muted humor. After seeing the title and the shade of pink, we feel the family’s indigestion.
In an installation this past April in her studio titled "Oppression Suppression Detachment," Parker moved a step closer to exposing the veiled unease in her previous work. The artist juxtaposed furniture and other household items retrieved from her mother with live, growing kudzu. (She spent months trying to cultivate kudzu indoors. Harder than one might think; the weed requires just the right amounts of temperature, humidity, and light to sprout.)
Drinking glasses filled to the brim with water were placed in two tiers on a drop-leaf table. Under the table in an aged, open suitcase was a footstool. Beneath it all, a lace tablecloth spread like a rug attempted to define - or more likely, contain - the piece’s limits. At the time of the installation, the kudzu vine, sporting green leaves, had risen from the suitcase and begun to twine between the glasses.
The objects from Parker’s childhood each had a psychic energy even as the mutable kudzu, with its own vibration, began to burgeon. The effect was comforting hominess mixed with impending disaster. Any moment those lovely glasses could fall, break and/or spill their contents. The implied threat of the kudzu is, as all Southerners know, that it will overwhelm and destroy. Parker’s and Duchamp’s "ready-mades" share the coolness of mass-production. Parker’s objects, however, carry the force of her personal experience and history, exactly what Duchamp sought to eliminate. The "quiet" qualities of the works of Chin, Guthrie, Conn, Carroll, Parker and others lie in their materials, found, humble, and renewable, and not necessarily in the artists’ intent. Their work points away from consumption by patron and artist, from the overblown and self-important, toward a simple, restrained, unpretentious art, graced with innate respect for the earth. Though quiet art is subdued, its impact can be thunderous.
Marya Roland is a sculptor and associate professor of art at Western Carolina University.
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