Art I like - Hanne Darboven

Most of  Hanne Darboven's work consists of numbers - calculated through complicated additions or multiplications with calendar dates, hours and days of the week. The abstract principle of pure quantification replaces traditional principles of pictorial or sculptural organization and/or compositional relational order. The Konstruktion, a mathematical operation involving the addition of the numbers that specify a date (day/month/year), is the basis for Darboven's aesthetic project. The system was developed as early as 1968 and served to introduce time into Darboven's graph paper drawings.

The sheer volume of her work, the obsessiveness, is impressive. (Her practices have been described as allegorical by Craig Owens, one of postmodernism's central theorists.) Her concern is with history, the daily passage of time and the larger cycles of years and centuries. Some of her work has been translated into musical scores. 

"I only use numbers because it is a way of writing without describing" said Darboven. "I choose numbers because they are so steady, limited, artificial. The only thing that has ever been created is the number. A number of something (two chairs or whatever) is something else. It's not pure number, and has other meanings." Later she said, "I use no forms of expression."

Quartett 1988, 1988...is an imposing grid of 745 drawings/writings which chronicle the days of the year 1988 within the context of a historical examination of four great women: Madame Curie, Virginia Woolf, Rosa Luxembourg and Gertrude Stein.

She uses other durational spreads: Existenz 66-88 (Existence 66-88), 1989, draws on 22 years of Darboven's personal datebooks beginning in 1966 and concluding in 1988. 2,261 panels photographically reproduce the artist's leatherbound appointment book one two-page spread per photo.

But it is this quieter work that most interests me - it looks like an example of asemic writing - a place where writing and drawing merge - but this writing is a spatial measure of temporal duration; the blank rows of script are carefully counted to mark time just as the numbers do.

Darboven speaks of her procedure as "writing":  "I both write and draw...because 'no more words' is a writing process, it's not a drawing process. The writing fills the space as a drawing would." In addition to numerical forms, Darboven marks time with a handwritten, lower case "l" which appears as a regularized yet cursive loop repeated over and over and called "daily writing."  In replacing words with abstract rows of up-and-down strokes, Darboven invokes text but eliminates meaning, description, and narrative.

"The word Gedankenstrich(-e) ("dash(es)"), repeatedly inscribed in Darboven's volumes, serves as a pause, as a transition from one form of writing to another (e.g., from the printed to the handwritten), or as a coda to a filled page. The rhyme with Pinselstrich(-e) ("brushstroke(s)") brings to mind Conceptual Art's transposition of perceptual phenomena and linguistic morphemes: a painterly mark tranformed into a written signifier" (so it says here).

The numerical drawings and daily writing of blank script use language-based signifiers in a way that is different from ordinary communication. "Her effort to present material signifiers as figural and visual marks in themselves is a rejection of their function as mere symbols encasing or designating an object or concept. In this way, Darboven's writing aligns itself with "poetic language" as it was defined by the Russian Formalists and later [1975] elaborated by Julia Kristeva". As I understand it, Kristeva said that in poetic language significations and meaning can be out of synch; in radical poetic experiments, this can destroy syntax and lead to a "semiotic disposition" - a distinctive mark, sign, imprint. Rather than being set adrift  (as with insane jibberings), the semiotic processes "set up a new formal construct: a so-called new formal or ideological "writer's universe," the never-finished, undefined productions of a new space of significance." Poetic language "posits its own process as an undecidable process between sense and nonsense, between language and rhythm..., between the symbolic and the semiotic."

Darboven lived in New York 1966-68, the time of Minimalism and Conceptualism, then returned to Hamburg; she died in 2009. Her work was not confined to numbers and writing. In the late 70s she started to use objects and photographs to reference history and society - a synthesis of private record and social memory. In Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 (1980-83), Darboven's numerical indices are part of a stream of ready-made imagery taken from published material. The piece has 1590 pages of visual montage and text in identical frames, covering exhibition walls in a floor to ceiling grid. Nineteen objects tied to everyday life, art and to German history complete the installation.