Yellow sun. Orange sun. What has she done? At first glance everything seems so ho-hum. Etel Adnan in All Her Dimensions is not an exhibit that grabs your attention like other work in the same building. You may hate or love performance Mona Hatoum, for example, or find Manal Al Dowayan’s project on Saudi teachers is too narrow, but at least they elicit a visceral reaction.
With Adnan, there’s nothing to offend or excite: no human shapes, no bifurcated animals, no female genitalia. All these have been present and offended members of the public in recent examples of public art in Qatar. Only endless empty landscapes: yellow, orange, red, and green. The primary colors appear again and again in unmediated, unrelenting, unapologetic repetition in effect creating a visual blindness. “Sweet,” you might murmur to a friend. “I don’t get you,” someone said hovering over a Josephesque tapestry.
Etel Adnan doesn’t mix her paints, you see. The oils come out of their tubes and onto the canvas. Her angles, her shapes, her instinct feels like my three year old on a Saturday morning: carefree, oblivious of the fact he should be interesting to warrant an entire floor of the Arab Museum of Modern Art.
On the surface her art is sweet, even feminine, acceptable to the public Islamic register. Her pleated, accordion fold leporello are playful; the Arabic poetry inscribed upon on them borrowed for Adnan, long an exile of the Arab world, has lost fluency in her mother tongue.
At the tune of 50,000 USD a canvas, these are worth much more than the thumb tacked paintings in my children’s playroom.
The price tag makes you take notice, if the landscapes or black and white sketches do not. You do some digging. Adnan’s strength, many argue, is as a writer who dabbles in painting. 89 years old, a lightening rod for her politics, she is a feminist Lebanese American writer, filmmaker and activist. Her private life, illegal in most Middle Eastern countries, is private in the exhibit itself; an interesting move to support alternative lifestyles while at the same time covering it.
A wall of quotes in English, Arabic, and French illuminates Adnan’s politics: “I tell myself that it would be better to let loose a million birds in the sky over Lebanon, so that these hunters could practice on then, and this carnage could be avoided.” Perhaps this is why the relentless, endless landscape: empty of humans who can wreck so much violence.
Regardless of the reason, you’ve spent this much time thinking about her. Which in itself says something.
