Hanne Darboven
For decades, the German Conceptual artist Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) lived with her mother in Hamburg’s Harburg district. It was there that she made Fin de siècle—Buch der Bilder (End of the Century—Book of Pictures), 1992–93, a sprawling piece that lent its title to a recent exhibition of the artist’s work at Petzel. The installation was inspired, in part, by a 1923 edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s volume of poems Das Buch der Bilder (1902), which is his least recognized text, perhaps owing to its ostensibly scattered selection of short lyrics, dialogues, and interior monologues. One wonders what Darboven’s dear Mutter made of the dispersed elements in Fin de siècle—Buch der Bilder—from her daughter’s repetitious inscriptions of words and numbers executed in her undulating idiosyncratic script, to the hundreds of often prewar objects she amassed—and then documented via black-and-white photographs that were systematically organized into gridded wall-size tableaux and spiral-bound notebooks for display. I suppose we’ll never know, but I suspect she found it all a bit . . . strange?
Darboven’s massive endeavor comprises three major elements. Most prominent are the 520 framed “working sheets,” as the artist called them, which present “day calculations” on graph paper. Here, she recorded various dates between 1988 and 1989, using words and numbers for the former year and numerals for the latter. Take JANUARY 7, 1988, which is spelled out as SIEBEN EINS ACHT ACHT (seven one eight eight), and written sixteen times. Under each set, Darboven printed HEUTE (today), to mark the passing of the moment. (It’s a gesture that always reminds me of On Kawara’s telegram series of 1969–2000, “I Am Still Alive.”) Next, there are forty-two “picture panels,” reproduced from an earlier series, “Bilddokumentation” (Picture Documentation), 1978. The artist divided these images—mounted onto paper, labeled, and numbered—into three categories: GESCHICHTE (History), INTELLEKTUELLE ENTWICKLUNG (Intellectual Development), and TECHNISCHE ENTWICKLUNG (Technical Development). Near the upper-right-hand corner of each composition, Darboven added a second image of one of the objects, such as a miniature toilet, from her collection. A small green card affixed near the second picture bearing her studio’s stamp serves to underscore the artist’s role as both author and administrator of this project. Finally, a group of fifty-four albums offer photos of Darboven’s notes and objects from her studio with her day calculations, as well as transliterations of the computations into musical scores. Encased in vitrines, the red-and-white patterned backing papers of these tomes reproduce the decorative cover from the edition of Rilke’s book owned by Darboven. The albums are each subdivided into two parts and further subcategorized into two subchapters: The ordering system was lifted from Rilke’s collection.
Though we are told Darboven’s art is all about “time,” it’s just as equally about her, and about the ways in which the subjective and objective connect and disconnect. Or, as she wrote in one panel: Die Geschichte findet von selbst, das ist die Gesehichtszeit—[Evolution]—; Geistige Geschichte, Technische Geschichte} waser Mensch getanhat:—wechselseitige beeinflussing—Mensch und Maschine (History takes place by itself, that is historical time—[Evolution]—; intellectual history, technical history} what humankind has done:—mutual influence—man and machine). After a two-year stint in New York in the late 1960s, where she hung out with some of the high Conceptualists of the day (Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, et al.), Darboven moved back to Germany and began creating a kind of art that stressed a cold forensic examination of her country’s destructive past. In Fin de siècle—Buch der Bilder, she was looking back at the past hundred years (at least) with a suitably shrewd eye. As she once said in an interview, “I remember as a child all the bombs falling on Hamburg in World War II. After the Hitler regime we had to live with the terrible consequences and these have always been with me and are present in my work.” The artist’s motherland became a kind of motherless place for her and countless other Germans—so perhaps Darboven’s own mother didn’t find her work very strange after all.