Trisha Donnelly opened a new exhibition at Matthew Marks in New York at the beginning of November. As always with the artist, it has been presented with minimal explanation and few images, so visitors are encouraged to make sense of everything as best they can. This is not easy as it sounds, because as the art writer Martin Herbert once observed, adding yet another layer of mystification to Donnelly's reputation, ‘hers is a chess-playing act, one of timing and artfully mobilised viewer psychology’. She works in a variety of media, creating enigmatic installations that are intended, according to another commentator, to create doubt, confusion and wonder, and there is often a theatrical or performative element in the art that holds everything together. At her first major exhibition opening in 2002, at Casey Kaplan in New York, Donnelly arrived on the back of a white horse and delivered a speech, supposedly Napoleon’s declaration of surrender. Everything she has done since then has been coloured by that event. To some, her inscrutable art is magical and bewitching; others find it pointlessly arcane and wilfully obscure.
It would not be unfair to say that when I worked with Trisha Donnelly at the Douglas Hyde Gallery about a decade ago, it wasn’t an especially easy experience for either of us, although everything ended up well, and the exhibition was very good. As I recall it now, the show included photographs, works on paper, sound, a video, and at least two forms of sculpture, one of them being a mass of greenery cut from pine trees and hung, drooping, over the balcony. Although undervalued and overlooked at the time, the exhibition's best moments were memorable and beautiful.
One of the photographs, small, monochrome, and called ‘The hand that holds the desert down’, depicted part of the Great Sphinx in Egypt. Its effect was dependent on the unexpected mental spark that was struck by the title, and although unremarkable visually, it succeeded in inverting expectations in an interesting way. It didn’t occur to me then, although it does now, that there is an intriguing connection between that image and the life of the unconventional explorer and writer, Isabelle Eberhardt, to whose work Trisha introduced me at the time. Eberhardt, born into a peculiar family in Switzerland of Armenian, Russian, and Jewish extraction, travelled to North Africa with her mother, became a Muslim, learnt Arabic, dressed as a man, travelled extensively and wrote evocatively about her experiences. She died at the age of 27, the victim of a freak desert flood.
Eberhardt’s book entitled ‘Dans l’ombre chaude de l’Islam’ (‘In the warm shadow of Islam’) has been described by a biographer as ‘one of the strangest human documents that a woman has given the world’, and while this is probably an exaggeration, it conveys something of its odd and powerfully exotic flavour. It is understandable that a masculine disguise was indispensable for her travels and integration into Arab and nomadic life, but her increasingly unconventional and unpredictable behaviour infuriated the colonial French, as it did some of the Arabs, one of whom attempted to assassinate her. Sharon Bangert, who has translated some of Eberhardt’s writings, puts the matter vividly and with a touch of humour when she remarks: ‘We would be less shocked if she had behaved consistently, as a man in a man’s world. If she had lived a careful, scrupulous, celibate life: the perfect man, the perfect Muslim, the perfect mystic - she would be tolerable. But she is maddening… The disguise we want her to wear is the one we all hide behind: the veil of predictability’.
Eberhardt enjoyed nostalgia, and as Bangert writes, ‘one could almost say she was most at home in homesickness. With her first glimpse of a new land she anticipated her eventual departure, when the place would be transformed from merely real to an ideal'. She could be sentimental, and in 1901, during a stay in Marseilles, she reflected on the past, as she so often did, with passionate lyricism: ‘When I lacked nothing materially, but lacked everything intellectually and morally, I was often gloomy, endlessly cursing life while having no real knowledge of it. It is only now, in the midst of a destitution of which I am proud, that I acknowledge life as beautiful and worth living’.
At about the same time as I began to read Isabelle Eberhardt, I came across the music of the Ethiopian nun, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. They are linked by a few coincidences as well as their pronounced willingness to reject cultural expectations. The daughter of a wealthy and respectable family in Addis Ababa, Emahoy was sent to boarding school in Switzerland at a young age, where she began to learn to play violin and piano. In the 1930s, on her return to Addis, she became a bright young woman, independent and headstrong, who enjoyed her car and parties; moving in influential circles, she once played and sang for Emperor Haile Selassie. When the Italians invaded Ethiopia, her life changed. Emahoy was sent back to Europe but soon went back to North Africa; later, at the age of nineteen, she turned away from all she had known and became a nun in a remote country monastery, where she gave up her music. In time, though, she embraced it again, developing an idiosyncratic style that was a unique cross between western classicism, ancient Ethiopian modal church chant, and jazz. Now well into her 90s and living in an Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem, Emahoy continues to play the piano and compose when she has the opportunity to do so. Her music is intimate and refined, its unconventional timing and rhythms reflecting a complex sensibility and a determined yearning for harmony.
https://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/exhibitions/2019-11-08_trisha-donnelly/
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/11/feminize-your-canon-isabelle-eberhardt/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08mb1ft