{"id":40157,"date":"2012-10-18T15:04:31","date_gmt":"2012-10-18T19:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=40157"},"modified":"2012-10-18T17:13:57","modified_gmt":"2012-10-18T21:13:57","slug":"sea-and-fog-the-art-of-etel-adnan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/18\/sea-and-fog-the-art-of-etel-adnan\/","title":{"rendered":"Sea and Fog: The Art of Etel Adnan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Etel Adnan wasn\u2019t there. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for her to travel these days,\u201d Photi told me. Too bad, I thought. She is an iconic Lebanese-American cultural figure and I had hoped to meet her. She was also missing out on the impressive turnout in her honor in New York\u2019s Lower East Side.<\/p>\n

I had arrived just as the reading had started. The tiny gallery was packed, and I had to squeeze my way through the many bodies. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, an art critic, was already speaking. I was surprised she was there. She lives in Beirut; I lived there once. So did Etel. Etel and I were both born there, albeit forty-five years apart. And we were both there during the fifteen-year Lebanese Civil War (she, here and there; me, throughout much of its first ten years). Etel wrote the defining novel about that war, in 1978. It\u2019s called Sitt Marie Rose<\/em> and is based on the true story of a woman who was kidnapped and killed by the Christian Phalangists for her support of the Palestinian cause. The Phalangists were one of innumerable militias during the war; they ruled East Beirut, where I, a daughter of two Palestinians, lived. The book was translated into dozens of languages and is regarded as an important contribution to Arab feminism.<\/p>\n

Kaelen was holding Etel\u2019s new book, Sea and Fog<\/em>, in her hand. It\u2019s a book of prose and poetry that had just been released by Nightboat Books, a small, independent press from Callicoon, New York. It was originally written in English, Etel\u2019s first language these days. She penned it in California, where she has been based for decades.\u00a0(Etel also spends part of the year in Paris.)<\/p>\n

At Callicoon Fine Arts, the small, independent gallery where we were standing, Photios Giovanis, the gallery\u2019s owner, was showing Etel\u2019s paintings. I had never seen Etel\u2019s art in person before. Until very recently I didn\u2019t even know she was an artist. I only knew her as a writer. As Kaelen spoke, I swiveled left and right, trying to get a glimpse of the works, but there were too many heads in the way. \u201cWhenever I\u2019m hanging out with a group of artists in Lebanon and Etel comes in, everyone is like \u2018Oh, here\u2019s Etel.\u2019 She\u2019s a very influential figure,\u201d Kaelen, said. Kaelen hangs out with Lebanese artists often. She knows the Lebanese art scene very well. She writes about it for publications like Bidoun<\/em>, Frieze<\/em>, and Artforum<\/em>. I don\u2019t, in fact, know where Kaelen is from. But she writes great articles about Lebanese art. They almost all have the same theme: Lebanon is an insane, unruly, unstable place\u2014but it has great artists.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s all true. The people that Kaelen usually writes about are my age; they belong to what\u2019s known as the \u201cPost-War Generation.\u201d Their work is often \u00fcber-conceptual and is about the fifteen-year war (1975-1990) that they grew up in. History and memory are recurrent themes. I met many of them when I was going back and forth to Beirut, in the late nineties. I don\u2019t go there much these days, but many of them come to New York now; they show their art here so I get to keep up with their work.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure how often Kaelen comes to New York. I know her only by name. It\u2019s not clear to me if she just happens to be here and could participate in the reading for Etel or if she came especially for this event. But she is certainly a good person to talk about Etel. She can attest to her stature for Lebanese artists, for one thing. She was also just at dOCUMENTA (13) where Etel\u2019s paintings were shown and wrote about Etel\u2019s participation in that event for\u00a0Frieze. <\/em>(\u201cHer work is really at the heart of Beirut’s artistic and literary avant-garde (in my opinion),\u201d Kalen later told me.<\/p>\n

The works she showed there were, as I could see once the reading finished and the crowd thinned, very similar to the ones she was exhibiting at Calliccoon\u2014small, exhuberant landscape abstractions, made out of a series of colorful, geometric shapes painted with a palette knife. I thought that Etel, who turned eighty-seven recently, only started to paint recently or that her art was only now beginning to gain attention. It\u2019s not so, she told me when I contacted her by e-mail (she didn\u2019t want to be interviewed by phone). \u201cI am painting since 1959,\u201d she wrote. She got her start because someone told her she should practice what she preaches. \u201c[I] was in California, teaching among other courses, one in philosophy of art. So the head of the art department wondered how I can teach such a course without practicing painting. She gave me crayons and bits of paper, and I started doing little works, and she said I didn\u2019t need any training, that I was a painter. So I kept going.\u201d<\/p>\n

Etel said she\u2019s been showing her work in Lebanon and elsewhere, \u201con and off,\u201d ever since. But the recent show at the Galerie Sfeir-Semler, an influential gallery that shows the likes of Lebanese-American Walid Raad (who is having a concurrent show at Paula Cooper right now), in Beirut, in 2010, seems to have been a turning point. The \u201cgallery, which has a place in Hamburg and one in Beirut, asked me if I would show there,\u201d Etel wrote. \u201cI said yes. Happily.\u201d This show led to her being chosen for dOCUMENTA (13). \u201cIt happened that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of dOCUMENTA (13), came to Beirut the day before the opening, saw my works, and offered that I join Documenta in 2012. I have to say that I was very very surprised.\u201d<\/p>\n

She went to Kassel where she participated in several lectures for the writer\u2019s residency program. Around forty of her works were arrayed on the walls of the documenta-Halle gallery and her debut filmmaking effort, Motion (2012), a 90-minute collage of scenes she shot in New York in the 1960s, was also shown there. dOCUMENTA also featured two new books by or about Adnan: The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay<\/em>, volume six in dOCUMENTA (13)\u2019s slim notebook series and a monograph of Adnan\u2019s art with interviews by Christov-Bakargiev and Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as an entry by sculptor Simone Fattal, Adnan\u2019s longtime partner and founder of the avant-garde Post-Apollo Press, based in California. \u201cdOCUMENTA (13) has been an enormous experience,\u201d Etel told me. \u201cSomething the likes of which I had never witnessed. It was like an art fair, a voyage through the world, and an open university, all this, and more, all at once. Unforgettable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Etel\u2019s paintings have a different sensibility than her writing. Her prose suggests a world of brutality and chaos. Her art has a cheerful, sunny disposition. \u201cHer writing is as fiercely complex and political as her paintings are serenely spare and personal,\u201d Kaelen wrote in Frieze<\/em>. At the reading Kaelen repeated a quote Etel once said about her writing and art. \u201cI write what I see, I paint what I am.\u201d To me, she wrote: \u201cMy writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing. But in general, my writing is involved with history as it is made (but not only) and my painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n

She says that she does not paint regularly. There are periods when she writes, and others when she paints. \u201cI can draw, though, once in a while, when I am involved with a work of writing,\u201d she wrote. \u201cUsually, I am a compulsive person, and I need, some times urgently, to paint … Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid, at least in my case.\u201d Arab art has little lineage of its own. Much of the work being made there in the last half century is rooted in Western art movements. When asked about her own influences, Etel says: \u201cI have a great love for some painters in particular: Malevich, Klee, Kandinsky, Delacroix, in contemporaries, Agnes Martin, Polke …\u201d<\/p>\n

I had brought up Nicolas de Sta\u00ebl as an obvious point of reference in her work. \u201cI love Nicolas de Sta\u00ebl particularly, and my work can remind people of him,\u201d she wrote. \u201cBut looked at attentively, our works are not similar at all. There is the fact that he used a palette knife, and so do I for my oil paintings, and the palette knife forces you in a way to apply large sections of color on the canvas. It is the opposite of a brush (which I use for inks and watercolors).\u201d At dOCUMENTA (13) her palette knife was shown in a display case along with a series of objects from Beirut\u2019s National Museum, burnt and fused when militiamen in the early 1970s turned the museum into a fighting post.<\/p>\n

But one work that Etel has done which is instrumental to fellow Arab artists is drawn from her own heritage: an accordion-like book on which she has hand-written a series of poems in Arabic then added colorful markings on each page. Kaelen said that this work was a thrilling discovery for her. In a Frieze<\/em> essay about what inspires their art, Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige named Etel as a person they admire. \u201cAmong other things, what struck us were Adnan\u2019s notebooks made of Japanese paper, the pages of which she fills with writings in Arabic,\u201d the husband-wife duo wrote. \u201cThe writing resembles pictures, because she copies sentences and poems in a language she has barely mastered and in which, in fact, she does not actually write. This greatly moves us. Her gestures inhabit a language that becomes drawing, like a re-created language that nevertheless refers to an exile within one\u2019s territory and, beyond, to a deep interior exile.\u201d<\/p>\n


<\/a>Adnan, who, like me, is not fully Lebanese\u2014her father, a Damascus-born Syrian, was a high-ranking official in the Ottoman army; her mother, a Greek, grew up in the city of Smyrna, which was burned in 1922\u2014studied in a French school in Beirut, and French was her mother tongue. In the late 1940s, she went to France and stayed in Paris for about three years. In 1955, she set off to the U.S. where she studied for a spell at Berkeley and Harvard before taking on a job teaching philosophy at the Dominican College of of California in\u00a0San Rafael. She returned to Beirut in the early seventies to head a cultural journal, left again, but kept coming back even after the Civil War broke out in 1975.<\/p>\n

Her writings about Beirut are seminal. \u201cBeirut is humiliated,\u201d she wrote in the novel Sitt Marie Rose<\/em>, which, though published only three years into the war, concisely captures the experience of living there throughout the many years of fighting\u2014for children and adults. \u201cShe suffered the defeat; she’s the one who lost. She’s like a dog with her tail between her legs. She was heedless to the point of folly. She gathered the manners and customs, the flaws and vengeance, the guilt and debauchery of the whole world into her own belly. Now she has thrown it all up, and that vomit fills all her spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Etel about Beirut, our torrid city of birth. I wrote: \u201cWhat are your impressions of Beirut at the moment, politically and culturally? And what is your current relationship to the city?\u201d She replied: \u201cYou ask me about Beirut. That\u2019s like opening a world. No answer is possible. It\u2019s a place alive in a special way, with great artists and creative young people, it is a hedonistic place, it\u2019s full of political tensions, and it is, urbanistically, a disaster. It\u2019s solid, yet fragile, rooted in history and yet precarious, adventurous and very conservative … it\u2019s supremely interesting, and maddening. Worth a trip.\u201d I didn\u2019t tell her I was from there. But her words summed up the place accurately, resonantly, and beautifully.<\/p>\n

Nana Asfour is a New York\u2013based art writer and critic.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Etel Adnan wasn\u2019t there. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for her to travel these days,\u201d Photi told me. Too bad, I thought. She is an iconic Lebanese-American cultural figure and I had hoped to meet her. She was also missing out on the impressive turnout in her honor in New York\u2019s Lower East Side. 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