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Hanne Darboven, Buchgeschichte
(detail), 1972, Deutsche Bank Collection
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Today, Hanne Darboven is considered to be more than just a
key figure of conceptual art, but rather one of the most important German
artists alive. Beginning with an abstract, highly conceptual approach, she
has succeeded in inscribing not only time into her comprehensive works,
but in expanding it with her own subjective commentary. Perhaps because
her writing contains no legible letters, the curves seem to communicate
something about the artist’s state of mind. The script’s regularities and
aberrations make up the tension of this writing work, which places
endurance and energy above inherent meaning. The script resembles a series
of seismographic curves or sound waves, a rhythmic up and down of the
line, as though it were nothing more than the power of habit that demands
that time be written out and filled with numerals or with music in a
"total abstraction of art."
The images, wicker donkeys,
or goats she adds to her installations merely provide an initial aid in
orientation to tickle the memory; then, as relatively indeterminate
fragments, they fall prey to the ineluctable regularity of the flow of
time.
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Hanne Darboven, Buchgeschichte
(detail), 1972, Deutsche Bank Collection
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It is precisely this routine, performed in a rigidly
observed, self-prescribed working rhythm, that the artist implements to
contract or expand time’s volume like a rubber band, filling entire walls
or compressing it into little boxes or charts of columns and sums. Her
installations of innumerable written and framed pages can be recognized
immediately; their intrinsic aesthetic oscillates between the predictable
and the unpredictable. Once again, the inconstancy of the present reveals
itself in this flicker: it is only the ongoing daily writing ritual that
is capable of saving "today," even if only for the moment in which it is
written.
Ship to shore
Hanne Darboven: Do you read me?
Lawrence
Weiner: I read you loud and clear
The writing does not fill a void
The
writing enters into a world filled with many things
The writing from
the first stroke is a fait accompli
The writing is today We write
therefore we are
Dear Hanne - Lawrence Weiner, NYC, 2004
Translation:
Andrea Scrima
[1]
[2]
[3]
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