How to Identify Quiet Art

Cemetaries are the physical embodiment of quiet art. In Austin, I lived near a tiny, overgrown graveyard. The cemetery was flanked by a car dealership, an apartment complex and a Walmart; all of it at a busy and loud intersection. Yet when I was inside the gates, tripping over settled ground and toppled headstones, I realized noises were subdued, as if soundwaves travel differently in the liminal space of a graveyard. I was entirely alone with the seventy-odd people interred there and, aside from me crouching to squint at aging headstones, nothing happened. By any extrinsic measurement, my visit was boring, but I was not bored: I was experiencing quiet art.

Nothing “happened,” but everything felt different. I gravitate towards and find value in quiet art. As a voracious reader, I am most likely to encounter quiet art in books. On occasion, I find instances of this un-genre in movies. The one that comes to mind is A Ghost Story, written by David Lowery and which premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The movie has a minimalist aesthetic: there is very little dialog; no action driving the plot forward; no color-drenched vistas. By my very rough, unscientific estimation, the protagonist spends 98% of the movie wearing a ghost costume consisting of a sheet with two holes cut in it for eyes. Most of that time, the ghost is simply watching as life moves on about him. As a poltergeist, he is underwhelming. My favorite part of the movie is when he sees another ghost in the window of a neighboring house; the tiny bit of dialog between the stranded spirits is a nice antidote to the near silence of this seemingly soundtrack-less movie. The banality of their short conversations is funny but also sorrowful, because what they say indicates that, in Lowery’s fictional world, not even death brings profound understanding.

Hangsaman, a novel by Shirley Jackson, is the gold standard of a quiet art novel. Jackson balances the inertia of the plot with the malleable introspection of the protagonist. In comparison to commercial thrillers, “nothing happens” in Hangsaman: no car chases, no action scenes, no conspiracies for the heroine to uncover. Much like A Ghost Story, the absences are what propel the story. Quiet art happens within the observer just as much as it happens on the page or screen.

In A Ghost Story, viewers are never given the answer to what is on the piece of paper. Similialrily, Hangsaman does not answer all of the questions it raises, and this is what makes it such a powerful read. The unanswered questions in Hangsaman are central to the reader being absorbed into the protagonist’s mindset and, by absorption, emotionally invested in the story. To be clear, leaving questions unanswered is not the same as leaving dangling plot points; bad structure is sloppy, not inspiring. In addition, the questions left unanswered must be judicious in number and selective in artistic reasons for not providing full closure.

Jackson’s Hangsaman is the inspiration for my novel, Aulisyn. I wanted to try writing quiet art. This novel, though, was not a good fit for the technique. There is action; it is more subtle than explosions or car chase actions, yet the story has “things happening” left and right. There is an insidious conspiracy. Unlike A Ghost Story or Hangsaman, Aulisyn is dual timeline, a structure unsuited to quiet art.

NOTE: Aulisyn is pronounced AWES-len or AWL-ess-en; like my name, this title is a bit cagey when it comes to American English pronunciation.

Do you have any suggestions for quiet art movies or books I should check out? Is there a book or an artist that resonates for you by leaving somethings unsaid in the text? Does quiet art frustrate you?

As always,

-erzsebet

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