The Quiet Album

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1990 banner
Dimensions: 148 x 400 cm. (58.3 x 157.5 in.)

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Edition 14 of 40. Signatures on the lid of the original white box

The Quiet Album is a 1990 work by Albert Oehlen, Mayo Thompson, and Werner Büttner. Ostensibly an album, information about the project is scarce. The album is listed in the 2012 Red Krayola Index.

In 1995, the German radio program Popalphabet listed The Quiet Album with the rest of The Red Crayola's discography. Later that year, the American fanzine Puncture wrote that it was "described by Thompson as a picture of the band [...] printed onto parachute silk. There was no album per se."

The Story So Far, the band's 2004 biography, explains that the album "comprised a banner showing a black and white reproduction of a photograph of [the group] life-size, singing with their faces pressed against the closed windows of Oehlen’s Porsche Targa parked in the snow in Hamburg. It was a limited edition, came in a white box modeled on The Beatles 'White Album,' and sold out immediately."

On October 30, 2021, a banner matching the description above sold at auction for €2,400. The banner was in a white box numbered 14 of 40 with signatures from all three. The seller was apparently only able to decipher Oehlen's signature and was likely unaware that is an "album."

Interpretations

• "The Quiet Album" is a pun on The Beatles' "White Album". In the early 2000s, Oehlen released two albums with his brother Markus under the name Van Oehlen—a pun on Van Halen.
• According to his biography on AskArt.com, "Oehlen's Porsche [...] was permanently parked outside his studio because he never learned how to drive."
• In 1982, Martin Kippenberger and Oehlen created "Capri bei Nacht" ("Capri at Night"), one of a series of Kippenberger works based on the Ford model. It was a brown Ford Capri painted with a mixture of brown paint and oat flakes, with a bumper sticker that read "Kenner trinken Württemberger" ("Connoisseurs drink Württembergers"). According to The Art Story, the coating parodied Joseph Beuys' "Braunkreuz" ("brown cross") paintings done in a specific shade of brown as well as Anselm Kiefer's paintings incorporating tactile materials like straw and flowers.

Image gallery

• 
  Albert Oehlen print dated 1989 that contains the same photo