Soleil sur le Mont Tamalpais, Etel Adnan, etching, 2016
‘Return with me into this space between earth and sky, which is black despite the light, which is cold despite the warmth. We are going to live in it.’
– Etel Adnan, ‘The Account of the Future’
The time being, writes Lauren Berlant, is an imagined time people (‘we’) share with each other. Like ‘we’, it is a ‘stand-in for an idea of a shared sense.’ Being together somewhere, ambiently or in presence. The relational mindspace of distorted time zones that is the internet, or the high stakes of relating in the same actual room. The time being, writes Berlant, is different from the historical present. We do not share a historical present just because we are alive at the same time because the historical present is relative to situation. Sometimes it’s good to be in the same actual room but when we leave the room our lives are worlds apart. Or, our lives are worlds apart so we will never sit in the same actual room.
There are many rooms, and many of the rooms do not have interconnecting doors, or even windows large enough to peer into. The windows may not be at eye-level; you would have to stand on tiptoes to glimpse something of within; you would need a ladder, or a crane, or a spade to dig into the earth; a burrow, a tunnel, a cave. Many humans are not prepared to find something to stand on in order to perceive the situation of another. Many do not have the time, the strength, or the will to find a tool to dig.
Most of the time, though, seeing into other rooms is not labour intensive. Opening up a screen, you can flick from room to room, window to window, and view or learn or even feel something of others’ worlds. Relate, without them knowing, or not. All those historical presents. There are worlds out there and you can’t look away but you do look away because just looking is not helping and you have one life to be lived and it is here.
Admitting you still dream well. Derelict holiday complexes where it’s the end of the world or almost but there is looted coffee. A grill or a gate that you have to push diagonal metal slats in a code to get through; there’s a city at night nested down a steep hill on the other side. Tree trunks in a choppy sea you step on to cross with an old friend, talking platitudes while wide butterflies swoop and dip their wings in the water. The deep black space at the back of the best sex close to the bright bright death. Looking out the window. Leaving the room.
‘In place of a world, there is the disorganized and proximate texture of the everyday. There is the particular body. There is this room.’ This is Hannah Black in 2017 on the collapse of conceived realities. And here is Etel Adnan, in 1973, when things also seemed to be collapsing: ‘What remains? The account of a space that has yet to be born, a square space, like a bed or a clearing, and windows.’
Like the situated movement between social life — the life of society or life in the club — and singular people in Hannah Black’s work, there is a reassuring flow in Adnan’s writing between various scales of present crises or historical presents. Working through the Algerian War of Independence, the war in Vietnam, and the Lebanese Civil War, she traces arcs of time beyond, but located within, herself. Time’s meaning is not found within the Gregorian calendar or Greenwich Mean Time, or left to the dividing hands of a clock, rather it runs elementally from the ‘violent joke’ of the past to ‘the warm mists of the future.’
Capitalism makes us measure the world in small units, Angela Davis reminds, separating up our selves. I detest the accumulation of achievements at the end of a calendar year; I check myself from week to week and times the purpose of seven days by fifty-two. In Etel Adnan’s writing I find the conviction that – past the pressurized present, besides the churn of political regimes, and beyond the slip of old economies into their correct fate of decline – longer cosmologies and collectivities can and do exist. If I do not want to extend my conception of future through reproduction, it is yet possible to share a faith that there are many other futures lying beyond the small settlement of familial life. That there is much time being, if you keep yourself undivided.
Adnan writes about the weather, not like little British small talk, but as catalysing heat or mood-changing damp: ‘the eternal sun has worked like a siren on my brain. […] The dust has filled my nails. […] Cockroaches run over my paintings, […]. It is a pregnancy of bad omen.’ She knows that the winds change, and then they change again, bringing in their gusts the bird of the future with an olive branch or a dead insect in its mouth. ‘Time: lemon crushed by a wheel grating under funerals.’ Future: ‘Four lines, a solar cross, a wheel, the universe beginning in the sands, under a black tent, with benign scripture.’ Adnan’s time being is that of sweat, the sparks of sex, aching bones, and paint: she paints – like humans 10,000 years before her in the Cave of Beasts or the Tassili n'Ajer in the Sahara had also painted – forms out of whose colours the will for dusky futures may be born.
This text was originally written for 3049, a publication produced by patten on the occasion of their exhibition at Tenderpixel, London, January 2018. This version was read at the event ‘Common Wages / Common People’, part of the Berlin Art Prize, September 2018.
Sources
Etel Adnan, ‘The Account of the Future’ and ‘In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country’, in To Look at the Sea Is to Become What One Is
Lauren Berlant, ‘I went back 2 the violent room for the time being’, Supervalent Thought, April 2016
Hannah Black, ‘New World Disorder’, Artforum, February 2017
Angela Davis in covnversation, WOW, Southbank Centre, March 2017