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Espace Sculpture

Hanne Darboven Writing time John K. Grande

Concours ESPACE/CRITIQUE Numéro 17, automne 1991

URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/944ac

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Éditeur(s) Le Centre de diffusion 3D

ISSN 0821-9222 (imprimé) 1923-2551 (numérique)

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Citer cet article Grande, J. K. (1991). Hanne Darboven: Writing time. Espace Sculpture, (17), 29–31.

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Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ V* run ID Hanne Darboven Writing lime John K. Grande

ESPACE 17 AUTOMNE /FALL 1991 29 Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, and accompanied by music composed by Darboven In Quartett 88 (1988), we again see a centrepiece May 18-lune 13,1991 and Friedrich Stoppa, thisexhibition does not imme­ that offsets the walls of transcribed annotations, an Hanne Darboven's current show at diately shock but steadily progresses to give a feeling antique manikin of a woman intended to represent the Ydessa Hendeles Art Founda­ of claustrophobia, of being overwhelmed, oppressed "everywoman" from the past but whose arms and tion in Toronto, her largest ever in by a history that is more tawdry, less heroic than the fingers are missing. Dressed in Victorian undergar­ North America, seemscuriously out one we would like to believe in. Being a very real ments with her hair tied up in a bun and enclosed in of time with our times. Her art is condensation of the daily routines and de rigeur a glass exhibition case, this woman is meant to be a based on recording notes and com­ monotony of Darboven's daily transcriptions, it stenographer but looks more like a exhibit from a piling ephemera on a day-to-day becomes an epic work of minimalist biography. The Museum of Civilization. Amid the notes and name­ basisover decades. She usesdiaries compacting of trivial data into serials orders has a less scripting encased in frames, photos of this and year books as the forum for her Proustian flair that makes each of these pages of manikin, "the human equivalent of the now obso­ work to prod uce page u pon page of chosen memory material and information seem to lete Burroughs adding machine", occur at regular highly detailed notations in her own erase the very traces of the past from which they intervalsalongside sporadic photos of Virginia Woolf, handwriting that use numerical originated. The calendar is merely a working tool. Gertrude Stein, Marie Curie and Rosa Luxembourg, codings, «because they are so Marcel Proust's comment that the past is «some­ each of them atypical women who led difficult lives. steady, limited, artificial. The only where beyond the reach of the intellect, and unmis­ The word heute (today) is inscribed at the bottom of thing that has ever been created is takably present in some material object (or in the each page, then crossed out. 1 the number.» sensation which such an object arouses in us), The most immediately overwhelming work in the The hundreds of framed pages though we have no idea which one it is. As for that show is Existenz (1989), which draws on 22 years from Darboven's diaries that we object, it depends entirely on chance whether we of Darboven's meticulous diaristic notations (1966- see on view, many of which have come upon it before we die, or whether we never 1988). 2, 261 panels range over all available space 3 her address and phone number at encounter it» could as easily be applied to the on the walls of this large exhibition room reaching the top of their pages, leave us present and future in Darboven's ontological hotel up to fifteen feet in height, from the first cover of the looking at their subjects only to find for the mind. diary to the last page of the last. Each frame contains they are ontological objects. Yet Acting as her own curator, Hanne Darboven has a photo of two pages of Darboven's diary appoint­ Darboven's method, her personal had the actual installation space adapted to her ments. Phone numbers, references to major political system is not simply a serial mys­ explicit instructions, with doors being removed, and historic events, and even the maps and conver­ tery, a philosophic enquiry into the awnings being placed over skylights to alter the light sion tables common to diaries are reproduced. The ontology of beingness. Like a hu­ and space of the Hendeles Foundation. Requiem fur sheer volume of material, the impacting of such a man machine she uses a method of Mr. Oppenheimer (1985) which was exhibited at literal method of depicting the passage of time, adding dates to arrive at other op­ Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1990, the first explodes our sense of reality. In the centre of the posite numbers, (for example 23/9/ work one encounters on entering the exhibition, has room stands a curiously ironic stuffed goat, one of 89 becomes 23 + 9 + 8 + 9 = 49). an assemblage of musical instruments placed on a many Hanne Darboven has had over the years, each Personal jottings written in German pedestal in its centre: a piano, horn, drum, accor­ named Mickey. Another piece in the show, Notation are included, then separated from dion, and zither. In front of this, on a music stand is (1989) is a 49 page transcription of Darboven's the typeset contextual text by the an original watercolour Self portrait depicting Max Quartet Opus 26. word Gedankenstrich(e) or Oppenheimer, (a Viennese Secession painter whose Now 50 years old, Hanne Darboven was born in dash(es). These constructed pages life at Auschwitz was prolonged by playing in the Munich in 1941. She came to New York in 1965 at have their leftover spaces filled with concentration camp orchestra) naked from the waist the age of 24 and although she knew almost no-one, daily writing, a nonsensical script up. By using seemingly official elements in the framed she was already working on systems, black dots on that resembles the action of written diary documentation pages - notations, addresses, white board and graph paper works in a larger scale script without alphabetical rubber stamps that cover the exhibition walls right to covered with words, numbers, dots, and geometric signifiers. Darboven's attack is on the corners of the room in this self-styled hommage lines. This highly self-referential form of art became, the near religious, habitual associa­ - Darboven presents us with passive, external veri­ for her, a necessity that gave her own daily life a tion we have with letters, scripts fications of personal identity that fit neatly into an balance through its working structure and method. and numbers. The language of script encyclopaedic formalism whose language typifies Some of these systems she fabricated were based on becomes a paraphrase for the lan­ the hermetic codes of the minimalist ideology. All music and through a complicated method of con­ guage of art. Like religion, it has its that we see interspersed at intervals along these triving numbers she made musical notations that own formalities, hierarchies and framed pages is names, cryptographic writing, a self were in her own words serious, not serial. Indeed, symbolic associations. She states, portrait of Darboven and photos of Oppenheimer's her form of art was so dense that the critics Lucy «I write and don't describe and I do portrait that repeat at standardized intervals. We Lippard and John Chandler then stated they, «satu­ like to write and don't like to read.»- sense the oppressive feel i ng that real ti mes or h istory rate their outwardly sane and didactic premises with Comprising 11 installations (one can never be entirely evaded and these images act a poetic and condensatory intensity that almost 4 of which will be shown in 1992) as a kind of synthetic conscience. We do not like to amounts to insanity». Throughout the 60's recognize this kind of mimetic afterthought in arera Darboven's art was grouped with that of the concep- where the superficial image supercedes any real tualists as it extemporized its more human charac­ experience, however tragic or painful. The truly teristics, passing effortlessly from the intellectual to Hanne Darboven, Existenz, 1989. 2, 261 mournful component of this work is in the fact that the sensuous. Sol Lewitt became her friend and sheets. Ink and photographs on paper. it continues to bear witness to the continuity of time minimalist mentor during this period. His now fa­ 29,7 x 21 cm each. Collection Ydessa by displacing it, compacting it and condensing Hendeles Art Foundation. Photo: Robert mous essay Paragraphs on Conceptual Art appear­ Keziere. references. As we listen to the near Gregorian aus­ ing in the summer 1967 issue of Artforum, clearly --«— terity of one of Darboven and Stoppa's musical expressed his vanguard views on conceptualism: Hanne Darboven, Quartett 88, 1988. 745 compositions being piped into the gallery, we are «In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most sheets. Ink, photographs, offset lithography. reminded of Theodor Adorno's lamentable com­ important aspect of the work... The idea becomes a 42 x 29,7 cm each. Collection Ydessa ment that after the Holocaust there could be no more machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not Hendeles Art Foundation. Photo: Robert poetry. Keziere. theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it

30 ESPACE 17AUTOMNE/FALL1991 Hanne Darboven, Existenz, 1989 (detail). Collection Ydessa Hendeles Art 1 M Foundation. Photo: Robert Keziere.

end of all traditions, and the an­ inn thropological concept of art, the expanded concept of art, social art as the precondition for all capabil­ FI ity»' itself now seems redundant. Our future vision of art has sur­ passed any ideational, anthropo­ T~r logical or social definitions. An n entirely new basis for expression must be found. Its meaning will be rTï defined by the material and physi­ n cal limits of life itself. Hanne Darboven's work be­ comes one of the way stations, a guiding memento out of this world of the past, of a past view of art. Her art is an extemporal timepiece that embodies the ideational spirit of conceptualism. In some future age is involved with all types of mental processes and it little more than a brief stopping place, the rest we we will be able to think of her art, is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence leave behind not as ashes but as material we have standing outside all these current on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.»5 Carl Andre's lost. Darboven, instead, includes all, and it reverses developments, like a knowing wit­ vision of art, summed up by his comment that, «A the process. This makes her art less one that imparts ness, who sees the beginning be­ man climbs a mountain because it is there; a man historic information, instead one that describes a fore the end, the end before the makes a work of art because it is not there»5 ,was also human dimension in an astonishingly impersonal beginning, and plays with time. '"• influential to Darboven's search. At one way. As such it is a continuation of a process attitude point,exhausted from doing her notations she even to art, one that denies the material's metaphoric 1 Hanne Darboven, quoted in Lucy R. hand copied 500 pages of Homer's The Odyssey, in potential and leaves only the art in art. It is her Lippard, FromtheCrater,(NewYork:E.P. the same scale as the paperback book she was personal system, one that seeks to mechanize the Dutton, 1976), p. 187. working from. personal, to employ what Robert Morris once called 2 Lucy Lippard, Overlay; Contemporary Hanne Darboven's present show arrives at an «controlled chance... to remove taste and the per­ An and the Art of Prehistory, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 96. uncertain moment in the world's future, one in sonal touch by co-opting forces, images, processes, 3 Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, trans. C. K. which no hermetic codes seem to work any more. to replace a step formerly taken in a directing or Scott-Moncrieff (London: Chatto, 1929; 7 Like a bereft legacy arriving to haunt us after the deciding way by the artist.» N. Y.: Random House, 1928), p. 61. demise of its equally bereft successor -post-mod­ In an era when we no longer are sure exactly what 4 Chandler, John & Lippard, Lucy R., The ernism - or a daunting tribute to one of the most inspiration really is, we must question what a re­ Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 . London 1968. tenacious followers of conceptualism, it all now sponse to art really is. Traditionally, when inspired 5 Lippard, Lucy R., Deep in Numbers . seems almost an antiquated notion. Mario Perniola, by a work of art, we had a feeling of empowerment, Artforum, no.2 (October 1973), p. 39. an Italian esthetician who teaches at the University of a manipulative control of our senses. Inspiration 6 Perniola, Mario, "Critical Reflections", of Rome writes, «Conceptual art was the end point suggested a kind of quantum leap of faith as to what Artforum, XXIX, no. 10, (Summerl991), of a trend that had been operative for some time: the we were experiencing instead of a gradual, slow p. 104. 7 Morris, Robert, "Some Notes on the Phe­ loss of the object, the annulment of sensual percep­ moving transformation from the normal to a more nomenology of Making", Artforum, no. 7, tion, the reduction to a minimal essence, are all holistic state. Nietzsche's definition of inspiration, (April 1970), p. 65. rooted in Romanticism. I say "end point": there has, which he described after writing Thus Spake 8 F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Clifton of course been art since Conceptual art. But the Zarathustra, that «The notion of revelation de­ P. Fadiman, in The Philosophy of movements that have followed it - appropriation, for scribes the condition quite simply; by which I mean Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1927), p. 896. example - have remained in the territory of meta-art. that something profoundly convulsive and disturb­ 9 Heiner Stachelhaus, loseph Beuys, (New In fact, they merely confirm art's narcissistic ten­ ing suddenly becomes visible and audible with York: Abbevi I Ie Press, 1991 ), pp. 67-68. dency to close itself off to whatever lies outside it. »6 indescribable definiteness and exactness. One hears 10 Concurrent with this exhibition Rizzoli - one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who International Publications is releasing a As we spend time looking at the works in this limited edition facsimile reproduction in gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, show, we recognize an artist whose very icono- book form of an original artist's project by 8 clasm assaults our notions of standard time, embod­ inevitably without hesitation» - seems the very ba­ Hanne Darboven titled Urzeit/Uhrzeit. ies Marshall McLuhan's description of typographi­ sis of our old dualistic vision of what art and our Each of the 250 copies is signed by the cal man, and takes a playful backward glance at world once were. It was this notion of good and evil, artist on the title page, which aloso con­ and right and wrong, imbued with hierarchical tains an original drawing by Darboven. Marcel Duchamp's Three StandardStoppages. These Price $1500. U.S. This will be the first in ideas and words are visual symbols in a material religious and political overtones that formed the a series of artist's book projects con­ cosmology and not expressions of a higher philo­ basis of the world we now seem to be leaving ceived by Cosje van Bruggen. Other art­ sophical ethos. behind. The need for art to explain an idea no longer ists who will create original projects for the series include: John Baldessari, We all repress or are repressed by doubts about has the same relevance as it once did. Likewise, Joseph Beuys' vision of, «the threshold between the Elsworth Kelly, Sol Lewitt, Claes our place in the universe. Much of this has to do with Oldenburg, Dorothea Rockburne, Edward traditional concept of art, the end of modernism, the our private notions of what time is. For us it can be Ruscha and Cindy Sherman.

ESPACE 17 AUTOMNE /FALL 1991 31