ON READING ETEL
I once knew someone who approached The Arab Apocalypse, Adnan’s seminal poetic work combining text and symbols, through a combination of gesture and recitation. They drowned, (downward gaze; an outward linoleum slide), the sun solar boat led them to the horizon, (stacked arms; a serious visage). Fat human faced pig never dimmer yellow sun (eyes closed, miming prayer to a fluorescent god). Albeit accompanied by an unintended humor, there was, and remains, something entirely permissible about this expanded interpretation—this physical reading. Somehow, the erratic arm movements, the slides across the room added coherence. Indeed, the impulse to shift between interpretive modes when engaging with Adnan’s work has to do, I think, with its multiplicity, at times both within individual works and across her oeuvre. In her text works, such as the Arab Apocalypse, it is as if Adnan is searching for the limits of comprehension in poetic form, requesting a symmetrical effort from her readers; while her visual works—her paintings—seem to convey more directly. However, in the aggregate, these paintings, which at first seem to telegraph their subjectivity clearly, (usually, scenes from nature), hold a complexity as they also seem to be an exploration around the possibilities of developing a new language—one chiefly concerned with emotion.
The paintings on recent display at the White Cube Gallery in New York, alongside two leporellos and several woven tapestries, are together, a rigorous and consistent syntax. They behave like a language, successfully conveying a feeling of marvel and joy. Vivid color is scattered across the polished concrete in a way that fills this void with optimism and deference to form; a hopeful respite from Madison Avenue’s grey towers. And yet, in relation to her poetry, the gaiety in these paintings is corrupted by an ennui, if dread of equal measure. Through Adnan’s work there is a suggestion that whatever emotional revelation is possible in art is found in a space between uncertainty and comprehension. To this end, I wonder if to engage purposefully with Adnan and a body of work concerned with the possibilities of language and the ambiguities of emotion, is to also comply with a more flexible, a less certain system of artistic exegesis.
Indeed, even her most “direct” art defies conventional interpretation. The paintings from this exhibition have no signifying museum text beneath them. They are nameless hunks of color affixed to the pristine interior walls of a quintessential white box gallery. Here, the typical impulse to search for meaning by way of text is complicated by its vacancy. In this uncluttered presentation, the works are forced to interact, almost the way words in a sentence might, with each carrying some definitional weight. In an interview with Bomb Magazine from 2014, Adnan says that “Images are, in one way, what we receive, but they are also, the tools with which we think” (Adnan and Robertson, 103). Clearly, Adnan imparts a greater utility to her paintings, not as knowing objects the way Guerrnica (for example) might instruct around war, but perhaps as divining ones in their orientation toward emotional conveyance. Through this perspective, the inclusion of wall text might impinge on each painting’s role in relation to the other. Put simply in a separate interview, Adnan says, “An abstract painting is like music, which doesn’t really call for a title—we say ‘sonata’—and abstraction is visual music,” (Adler and Adnan, 8). Here, perhaps Adnan is rejecting the concept of the search for meaning in abstraction the way, universally, music is afforded.
Adnan was the daughter of a Greek Christian mother and a Syrian Muslim father. She spoke Greek and Arabic and French and later, in her professorship, a department head told her, “Everyone can paint, just as everyone can speak” (Adler and Adnan, 7). Indeed painting became yet another language. Famously, the artist whose multi-cultural upbringing no doubt shaped her fluid perspective on art making and language once wrote in her essay, To Write In a Foreign Language, “I didn't need to write in French anymore, I was going to paint in Arabic.” Here, there is a suggestion of not only political rebellion, but of cross pollination; that works from one medium inform the process of another; a submission that perhaps, it is all language. In the presence of her colorful mountain ranges, I wonder whether Adnan’s sensitivity to language permits a sort of diversity in expression. What is obvious is that Adnan’s understanding of the conventional behavior of certain media shapes her work. In the earlier example from the Arab Apocalypse, the symbols are like visual interruptions which slow the pace of the poem; they augment the experience of reading. Similarly, her leporellos, which are accordion-like books, impart a durational quality to painting. They are almost literary in their superficial presentation, yet painterly and abstract in their content. However, the way they are presented at the White Cube: behind glass like unfurled tombs from an archeological dig, the heavy black ink swatches over pale clouds of colors, “ZZZ, = = =, www,” shapes the perspective one takes toward them as objects, perhaps of information to be decoded, more than simply, “paintings.” This referentiality from one medium to another offers a clear insight to Adnan’s understanding of the ways that imagistic containers shape a behavior.
To Roland Barthes, language operates in a way that is “arbitrary and conventional” (Duncan and Duncan, 18). It is a relational system of signifiers (the text) and the signified, (the concepts). In A Barthes Reader, Barthes describes the effect of the Eiffel Tower as “It attracts meaning the way a lightning rod attracts thunderbolts,” (Barthes, 238). To Barthes, this structure of Paris, the tower, is a text for the city to become visible. Mapping this notion onto Adnan, her abstractions—these landscapes of emotions—become a text through which human experience is illuminated. Her principle tool in achieving this is color. Adnan, perhaps by virtue of her ethnically and culturally rich upbringing, is advantaged in her awareness of emotional experiences and imprecision of language. The way translation reaches its limits and often becomes a poetic act, Adnan’s visual works refer to this liminality between various languages and their expressive potentials. Through her colors, there is a syntactical program that directs the viewer to the feeling of “outsideness,” of being in the valleys and mountains of California and her youth in Beirut. But they are not depicted with the “emptiness of meaning” of the Eiffel Tower; rather, through their eroded realism or presentness, a new language of color is revealed; a new meaning is suggested. In The Pleasure of the Text Barthes refers to a boring, necessary and effortless prose as the prattle, (Barthes, 9). Here I wonder if the realist counterpart to Adnan’s sensuous color might be the direct, automatic and desaturated photographic landscapes from today’s editorial journals.
In that same text, Barthes asks, “How can a text, which consists of language, be outside languages?” (Barthes, 30). Can a painting which consists of painted matter be outside of painting? There is something about these works, their simplicity, their lucidity, that becomes reified in the context of her violent upbringing; of a Beirut infiltrated by the visual presence of war, inflation and political uncertainty. In a text around the Mass Moca exhibition of Adnan’s paintings, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie characterizes the work as, “deceptively tranquil,” a description that bodes, to my observation, not with the landscapes, but with the patterns of De Stijl lozenge style works less concerned with geometric precision as perhaps human intervention. One painting on display in the White Cube features a bright red square near the optical center. It is surrounded by shades of yellow and taupe and one long azure rectangle like a timid sky. From a bird’s eye, this is a series of buildings. But on a more emotional level, these larger areas of color suggest enclosure; they lock the red cube into place. It is a deeply frustrated painting despite an optimistic chromatic scheme. Here I wonder if this red cube is like the experimental heart center of Adnan, a woman conscious of language’s political implications. This painting, in contrast to the more organic mountain ranges, rivers and valleys from her time in California, constitutes her early explorations with light and form, and saliently, her advanced understanding around language itself. I wonder if this read might be impossible without the context of her poetry. What feeling arises in the presence of this painting—its, □ and ▭ and ▨—without the backdrop of horror? Given the time in which this piece was created, this red center could indeed be Lebanon’s encroaching independence. It could be the collective consciousness of a guilty French populace around their Syrian occupation. This red cube could be Adnan and other female professors teaching philosophy and art history in the 1960s, entrapped by male pedagogical dominance. I couldn’t help but to place myself within this red square, near the optical center of Manhattan trying to parse the visual messages before me.
Adnan says that during the Vietnam era, she began to “militate against the war,” (Adnan and Adler, 14), moved like many by the programmatic images of horror, or what Sontag refers to as the “quintessential modern experience,” (Sontag, 14). What’s interesting is the emotional valence of her work; the distance between her written and painted pieces and how one, the poetry, seems to elucidate schematic horror, while the other, the painting, rejects it entirely. In other words, her painting resists the mediation of these types of images, insisting instead on admiration for the natural world. However, its conceptual proximity to her poetry posits, I think, a fragility. In her poem, Spreading Clouds, for example, Adnan writes, “I wanted to sing new operas to the Sierras over the dead bodies of the Flower-Children but it ended in shrieks and silences.” This work like other of her poetic verses confronts like a blunt object strike, the abject ecological conditions of the modern era. In the same poem, “My friend went to Nicaragua and learned a kind of weather, she can’t live away from a certain season, the season of her love… 500 years of Spanish inquisition did not crush the language of the wind.” Indeed, there is a confluence between her works in the recognition of nature, despite their emotional divergence.
To Barthes, a landscape is more than a physical space. It is a text with signifying elements; something to be read. Too, I think the landscape to Adnan is something divine. Later, Barthes would outline his notion of the Myth, or that in which, “contingency appear(s) eternal,” (Barthes, 254). There is no certainty in language as there is no certainty in the landscapes of today’s world. Adnan’s paintings present this environmental contingency as her poems reflect on the damage that has been done to them. In this way, her works are enmeshed, each necessitating the other to fully cohere the underlying purpose. While tension between intent and effect is foundational to abstract art, it is in the sacrifice of conventionality that this deeper meaning, the emotional and, in the case of our planet, political, language is transmitted. To Adnan, it is all language as it is also all landscapes and therefore, all emotion. I am thinking here of the motivational quote from the professor at her college, “Everyone can paint, just as everyone can speak,” but indeed, not everyone can do these things like Adnan.
WORK CITED
Adnan, Etel, and Lisa Robertson. "Etel Adnan." BOMB, no. 127, Spring 2014, pp. 102–107. New Art Publications. JSTOR, .
Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen. "Etel Adnan." 4Columns, 3 Dec. 2021,.
Adnan, Etel. The Beauty of Light. Nightboat Books, 2023.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2004.
Duncan, James, and Nancy Duncan. "Ideology and Bliss." The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations, edited by John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan, Routledge, 1989, pp. 27–47.
Barthes, Roland. A Barthes Reader. Edited and with an introduction by Susan Sontag, Hill and Wang, 1982.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1975. Monoskop,. Accessed 10 Mar. 2025.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Média Diffusion, 2015.