Collection Study
Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2000

Text by Harry Burke
September 2015

Untitled is a painting by poet, artist and writer Etel Adnan (b. 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon) from 2000. It is painted in oil on canvas, and its unframed dimensions are 22.9 x 30.5 cm. The work was acquired for the David and Indrė Roberts Collection in December 2014 from Calicoon Fine Arts, New York, having been loaned for an exhibition at DRAF, Curators’ Series 7. A Special Arrow was Shot in the Neck (13 July–2 August 2014) curated by Vivian Ziherl and Natasha Ginwala.

The painting is part of a large series (thousands of drawings and paintings) of works by Adnan representing Mount Tamalpäis, known as ‘Mount Tam’, which is a peak in California, United States, often considered symbolic of Marin County. Visible from the windows of her home, since 1960s Mount Tamalpais has been an immutable reference point, compositional agent and an enduring presence within Adnan’s painting. The mountain is captured in swiftly-executed strokes, rendering its geological body in vibrant colours. Adnan’s 1986 book, Journey to Mount Tamalpäis is a meditation on the relationship between nature and art. Mount Tamalpais has since the nineteenth century been a popular subject in California landscape painting.

Throughout Adnan’s oeuvre land- and sea-scapes recur as compositions of persistent being and political endurance, marking essential presences within a poetic contingency. Adnan’s major literary works include the renowned Sitt MarieRose, 1977 (a novel set before and during the 1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War), The Arab Apocalypse, 1989, and Seasons, 2008. Her work has been included in dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, Germany, 2012) and the Serpentine Gallery Map Marathon (London, 2010).

Study

Etel Adnan is a Lebanese-American poet, writer and artist who lives in Paris. Inspired to paint by a colleague, Ann O’Hanlon, at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, where she taught Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics from 1958, her popularity in the fine art world (it swoons at her) rises in her eighties, aided by the inclusion of 36 of her untitled, abstract canvases in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany.

A favorite thing I’ve seen at DRAF so far is CAConrad & The Future Wilderness: A Performance and Workshop on March 14, 2015. What really stuck in my mind is the story of the naming of Yosemite, which in indigenous language means 'they are killers'.

August was a struggle
September was a struggle
October was a struggle
November was a struggle
December was a struggle
January was a struggle
February was a struggle
Jun was nice.

Etel Adnan lived near Yosemite; Mount Tamalpais is near Yosemite. Corina Copp writes about color. Ariana Reines writes about the world. Martine Syms writes the colour purple. People in love, everywhere.

On Crete poem
U put the “Ex” in text, jeez.

In May the art world goes to some parties and some openings.

In June 2012, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev opens dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany. Aside from showing, celebratedly, paintings – small abstractions that the artist had been working on since the 1950s that were hung, about head height, on the white gallery walls, and one larger painting, placed horitzontal on a low (shin height) plinth – the gallery ceiling is HIGH – Etel Adnan also publishes a short text as part of the 100 Notes / 100 Thoughts notebooks series commissioned by dOCUMENTA

(13) Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev to coincide with the 2012 exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and published by Hatje Cantz. Number 6/100, Adnan’s argues that the lack of affection for nature in our culture leads (has lead) to ecological catastrophe. What is affection, what is nature, what is culture, we –the earth– know catastrophe. Love is the lack with which we address this, or rather, the positive force that invents itself in face of this lack.

- I think text is successful when at any point it could finish and you would be ok, so too love.

- Like, you have to understand that just when u are getting in to this love it’s over, and that’s what made it so good. You have no right to having it back.

- Love, like text, doesn’t owe u, nothing. Adnan speaks in the language of colour, and the colour of language, and the nature that makes (us) love.

Planet Earth is old news. It’s the house we are discarding. We definitely don’t love her. We almost believe we don’t need her. Because the price for the love that will save her would reach an almost impossible level. It would require that we change radically our ways of life, that we give up many of our comforts, our toys, our gadgets, and above all our political and religious mythologies. We would have to create a new world (not a Brave New World!). We’re not ready to do that. So we are, very simply, doomed.¹

¹ Etel Adnan, The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay, p.6

[A house]

In his 2015 book Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation, author Jeff Scheible, assistant professor of cinema studies at Purchase College, State University of New York, argues that some of the primary impacts of digital media upon language are occurring in the realm of not so much language as punctuation. Language ≠ punctuation, but still language can = punctuation.

His argument runs roughly as follows:

- With the emergence of digital media, the roles of textuality in media culture have undergone a series of shifts. - Punctuation was invented with the invention of printing press, and expresses certain nuances (for example, breath) that are lost in the shift from oral to printed media. - Punctuation signs are, we might say, reading tools, not writing tools. - Yet in the period of the emoticon, the sms, and the dot-com boom, punctuation underwent, itself, a shift – from structural to aesthetic phenomenon.

- No longer on the margins of language – even, on touchscreen devices, not relegated to the edges of the keyboard, but simply an alternative keyboard – punctuation is thrust into the limelight as a (just one?) primary site of language’s contestation – Indeed, in the example of emoticons and other pictographic developments in contemporary language, by which we communicate using punctuation as text, text can be thought of less as cerebral and immaterial code, and more as affective and radically plastic image. We write using punctuation as well as read using it.

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The image with which Scheible begins his book is that of the Human Rights Campaign logo: the equals sign.

On March 26, 2013, 2.7 million (120%) more Facebook users than usual (over a million a day) updated their profile picture. A majority of these updated it to a red and pink version of the HRC logo. The equals sign was rendered image, before being rendered avatar. The equals sign no longer represented a fundamental objective equality, but rather it represented some sort of transcendent – everyone is equal – yet accumulative – this movement is growing – equality.

Of course, not everyone is equal – to say so is to negate materially deterministic factors such as class, race and gender. But every typographic sign can be made into an image that represents a person.

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Why not put a poem in an art gallery. Why not put an artwork in a chapbook. Why put a poem in a book, at all. As punctuation leaves the page, so too do words follow, and we recognise the mobile mutability of the page, too. If text becomes an image, why can’t it become an object. Why draw borders and how.

What’s a poem if you can’t live in it.

The first time I travelled to New York I saw Etel Adnan’s paintings in the New Museum. These are paintings that don’t exist without airplanes.

In solidarity with the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962), Etel Adnan stopped writing in French: the language of her colonists, although her mother tongue. In a sense, the movement of the philosopher into painting is an attempt—one which, like every foray into language, is bereft, incomplete—not to abandon language, but to move from text as we traditionally understand it and into something closer to pure image. Yet, just as her work and life bridges the Arab and American worlds, leaving, yet being drawn back, attempting to find a radically critical voice against the problems and potentials of both, so she bridges text and image. “There is no possibility for the possession of colour” – Adnan, 1986.

One could say this in solidarity with the war made between the world and love. Another conflict she translates.

In Beirut, the You Stink protests go on, against the on-going trash crisis and government corruption. Love, language, colour, which do you try to possess more?

Scraping on paint in thick, viscous layers – scraping on the earth, the sky and the soil (I mean soul), she is constructing a language of the world, a language of colour and material, in unity. Once text has become an image, it need no longer resemble text. This paint is the literal action of creating a new world. It is, nonetheless, one that looks like the old.

Which is to say, where does language end and the world begin.

Etel Adnan not only moved beyond (without ever fully abandoning) her mother tongue, but she moved beyond (without ever fully abandoning) the form of her mother tongue, the form of her language, too. As we tumble into increasingly pictographic communication (if we tumble), or if we begin to build bridges beyond (even if we cross them to come back again) modernity’s textual conventions, so too we might start to realise Adnan’s lifelong statement that this transition is a political move.

Texting on your phone. Your fingers are dirty, and your loved one not around.