German Conceptual artist Hanne Darboven offers an intriguing combination of cool Minimalism and curio-shop chic. Beginning in the mid-1960s, her “daily writing” took the form of journals, letters, and jotted numbers, dates, and doodles that she arranged into a series of grids and store-bought day planners, organized via basic systems of calculation: 9 x 11 = 99 is the title of one major work on view here, from 1972. The walls of three rooms at the Camden Arts Centre were covered with framed sheets of paper containing the handwritten dates, numerical systems, and serial inscriptions typical of Darboven’s work. The exhibition took place against a similarly repetitive musical sound track played on loop throughout the space, the somber organ music she composed for the work 24 Gesänge opus 14, 15, a, b, 1984, using her own coded date-number-note system. Striking a deliciously discordant note in the show was the presence of Darboven’s scuffed wooden drawing desk in the first room, an object that unexpectedly foregrounded the messy and material act of making, allowing us to see the stuff of everyday life seep back into the Minimalist white cube. A music stand supporting a lace-trimmed rococo fan similarly cast the wall grids into sharp relief, while in the middle room was displayed Appointment Diary, 1988–98, featuring pages of a calendar depicting garish stills of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films contrasting with the loopy cursive marks that rhythmically fill the lined slots allotted to individual days and months.

The imposing desk was from Darboven’s studio in New York, where she lived between 1966 and 1968. During this time she struck up close friendships with artists including Sol LeWitt, with whom Darboven shared what Mel Bochner dubbed a “serial attitude.” Darboven’s arrival in New York coincided with a pivotal moment in the shift away from the Minimalist object toward the so-called dematerialization of the artwork. For Bochner, the serial attitude was synonymous with a mode of subjectivity understood as solipsistic. Yet as this exhibition makes clear, the matter of the world was never far from Darboven’s mind: Postcards and photos, fans and found objects infiltrate and highlight the absurdity of her ostensibly systemic process, combining to document the lived experience of time’s passing.

Indeed, there are many small pleasures to be derived from Darboven’s work; I found them, for instance, in slowing down to notice the pressures and pauses, the mistakes and slips that are the product of the handmade line. The pinpricked sheets of paper in Darboven’s 1966 series “Perforationen” are powerful examples of this pronounced materiality. Encapsulated in this small exhibition was Darboven’s central idea: that time, and even history, can be rendered on a scale that is grand or modest, universal or personal, real or imagined, material or conceptual. As visitors worked their way around the exhibition, reading, calculating, looking, and listening, they became, in Lippard’s words, “involuntarily absorbed” by Darboven’s practice of marking time. The pleasures of that absorption continued long after the final chords were played.

—Jo Applin