First things first, Galerie Lelong’s exhibition of Etel Adnan’s works on paper is on view for two more days, so get going.
I’ve been listening to Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s interview about Adnan on Bulaq, the podcast of Ursula Lindsey and M Lynx Qualey (ArabLit editor), and right around 24:00 Wilson-Goldie turns the question back to her book-centric hosts, to ask what they think the complicatedly multilingual Adnan meant by her statement that she “painted in Arabic.”
I would love to know more of the context in which she first said that. Wilson-Goldie, Lindsey, and Qualey talk about Adnan’s shifts from writing in French to English as her perspective and contact with French and US colonialism changed. But also how her return to Lebanon in the 1970s included a mutual embrace with the new Arabic poetry communities of the day.
I can absolutely see the appeal of a painting language that did not carry with it the political baggage, while also making an affirmative assertion of solidarity. Or maybe that characterizing painting as a language separate from the ones she used for writing helped justify it, or at least made it make sense within/alongside her multi-faceted, text-based practice. Or maybe it just gave her the psychological and linguistic space she needed for a personal expression. I’m trying to think of many novelist/poets who were also recognized for their painting, but ngl, my head is not primed for unfettered rumination on poetry today [noon]. Wonder why.
In any case, I feel like I have to rethink my understanding of Adnan’s work a bit precisely because I’d always read it—or seen it presented— as being an Arabic-inflected modernism being subsumed into the larger modernist project. And I have to consider that that could be just how it looks from my perspective in the distended belly of that empire.
[listened to the end of the podcast update: OK, so Adnan had various complex takes on what it meant, and why she did not, in fact, learn Arabic. And I wonder what it means that this was the language she analogized to her painting.]
Etel Adnan on Paper: 1961-2021 runs through Apr 5, 2025 [galerielelong]
Bulaq | Etel Adnan: ‘I write what I see, paint what I am’ [sowt/bulaq]
Whoops, missed Etel Adnan centenary show at White Cube [whitecube]
ArtSeen | Ann McCoy on Etel Adnan [brooklynrail]