She discovered something important while observing these
regularities, a way to lend order to the world. Upon returning from her
first visit to New York, she noted: "I’ve created something by messing
something up. Destruction becomes construction. (…) My systems are
numerical concepts that work as progressions or reductions, like musical
themes with variations." She expressed these systems in numerical phrases
and signs and saw that her numerical concept could be expanded ad
infinitum. She countered the chaos of the possible, the upset of the past
with the smooth order of her numerical notation, which to this day has
remained a strictly regimented daily routine for her.
Hanne
Darboven, 21 x 21, 1968, Deutsche Bank Collection
For
the work New York Room (1967), she exhibited a selection of her
first constructions and number pages together with the table on which the
drawings were made. Since then, her serial concept has thrived on an
internal, cogent logic that creates a precise number of variations arising
in an objective manner the moment the respective parameters are
established.
"She had a small group of drawings with her which she
showed me. I was struck by the originality and depth of the work (...).
The scope and elegance of this work and thinking is something one never
forgets," as Sol
LeWitt recalled his very first encounter with the young artist two
years ago. Her extremely reduced works, which excluded all metaphor,
corresponded perfectly to Sol LeWitt’s ideas. The influential American
artist and long-time friend of Darboven’s, whose theoretical work Paragraphs
on Conceptual Art founded the new movement in 1967, had
contributed a completely new discourse to the art world, which up until
that point had been exclusively focused on the individual work of art. His
emphasis on process formulated the essential difference to the similarly
constructive approaches of his Minimalist colleagues Donald
Judd or Carl
Andre, who were more result-oriented. LeWitt postulated a clear task,
an experimental, quasi-scientific investigation whose methodical approach,
when executed precisely, could bring about a result that was as surprising
to the artist as it was to the viewer.
Sol
LeWitt, Lines in 4 directions (superimposed Yellow), 1971,
Deutsche
Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
His
emphasis on process formulated the essential difference to the similarly
constructive approaches of his Minimalist colleagues Donald
Judd or Carl
Andre, who were more result-oriented. LeWitt postulated a clear task,
an experimental, quasi-scientific investigation whose methodical approach,
when executed precisely, could bring about a result that was as surprising
to the artist as it was to the viewer.
Donald
Judd, Untitled, 1961-1978,
Deutsche
Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
"Art
is a mixture of concept and discipline," Hanne Darboven has stated
soberly. In 1968, she discovered the date as a universal element and made
it the theme of her calendar drawings. At the same time, she created the
first sketches for the Gregorian Calendar in New York, which she
made available to the Deutsche Guggenheim for an edition. She found her
main subject in the endless variations on writing and calculating time,
which she continues to work on to this day with obsessive intensity and
scrupulous accuracy. In her artistic system, the date can be written out
or replaced by numerals: hence, the 8th of February 1996 can be written as
8/2/96 but also as the equation 8 + 2 + 9 + 6 = 25, or as a conglomerate
of boxes, or, finally, in her wordless handwriting comprised entirely of
waves of repeating u’s. The artist usually adds historical themes to these
"daily computations," systematic dissolutions or densifications of days,
weeks, months, years, decades, and centuries each of which embodies an
analysis of the concept of passing time.
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Hanne Darboven,
Konstruktionszeichnung, 1966, Deutsche Bank Collection
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As a chronicler of time, her numerical systems combine the
calendar’s subdivisions with the temporal sequence of history. Like a
cartographer who sets out to measure the ocean and then proceeds to scoop
the water out cup by cup, the artist approaches the phenomenon humbly,
albeit systematically. She fills what seem like endless series of pages
with her own sense of time’s essence. When framed, the pages cover the
walls of entire rooms in an allover, suddenly giving concrete expression
to something that otherwise merely passes on and is lost.
Her
colleague On
Kawara also counts the days, but they are his days, which he has been
making Date
Paintings of since 1966. Each painting was made on the exact day
whose date it bears. Together, this ongoing work group is called Todays
, of which the artist has painted 2,000 to date. The manner in which the
date is written refers to the location in which the artist happened to be
when he made the painting – the month is written in the language of the
country. In addition, the artist counts out the days of his life and send
his friends postcards at irregular intervals that say "I am still alive,"
which demonstrates what On Karawa is really interested in, namely life and
death, or to be more precise: his life. His art represents nothing more
than the fact that On Karawa has lived, a modest factual statement, even
if we share time and life with him in the here and now.
Hanne
Darboven in her studiohouse, 2005
Photo:
© Michael Danner
Hanne Darboven works
against loss by reconstructing time through the enduring act of writing
combined with the incorporation of important personalities and everyday or
historically exceptional events. For the latter, the artist usually
consults her 1973 edition of the Brockhaus
Encyclopedia or excerpts from the weekly news magazine Der
Spiegel. Beyond that, she often likes to quote generously from
passages of selected works of literature, philosophy, and history, such as Goethe,
Bismarck , Sartre,
Fassbinder,
or Schwitters,
and augments them with collaged images and snapshots, increasingly also
with sculptures, handcrafted objects, and knickknacks. In this manner,
each element in placed in a concrete cultural historical context; when
confronted with the sheer volume of the written time piece spanning the
walls of the exhibition space like a kind of skin, however, they take on
an almost ridiculous quality. For what is the moment, really – even in all
its importance – in comparison to an entire epoch?
Hanne
Darboven, Untitled (an Kaspar König, 7.2.1994 heute), 1994,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
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