Hanne Darboven: Today Crossed Out by Coosje van Bruggen

(From the catalog) Hanne Darboven’s constructs are about the transience of life, the inevitable passage of time. Even the most ingenious ideas become obscure over the years unless they are saved from oblivion and repositioned in a contemporary context. The present determines whether the past is still alive, but perspectives on the past shift according to the needs of the times. Today our present feels as endangered as the past. We become further disoriented in our spatio-temporal relationships as countless historical fragments float randomly out of context, burying us deeper in amnesia and heightening our sense of loss. In defiance of this loss, Darboven has set up constructs of time in writing. She includes selections of the small, factual details of life as well as its important events. Her lifetime experiences are condensed into personal jottings—“facts about humanity that move me”—which alternate with quotes from literature, history, philosophy, and science, or entries from the 1973 edition of the Brockhaus encyclopedia. The quoted passages are often complemented by visual documentation in the form of snapshots on the subjects of history , intellectual development, and technological advances, such as the first porcelain toilet bowl. Through the accretion of these miscellaneous artifacts, contrasting primitive with mechanized time (Ur/Uhrzeit), Darboven builds up a context for her own rendering of time. Usually the word “ Gedankenstrich(e) ” or dash(es) serve as a separation between the typewritten contextual text and her handwritten constructs. Tautologically and emphatically crossed out with a line, this personalized em-dash allows for “no more words.” The leftover space on the page is often filled with “daily writing,” a script in the rhythm of writing but without its alphabet. As rising and falling strokes traverse the lines on the page, the lines cross out the flow of writing, signifying termination. Proust wrote, “The time that is ours to use each day is elastic: the passions that we feel dilate it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills it . . . ” Darboven’s constructs of time stretch it, shorten it, and occupy it. In triggering the viewer’s memory through one of her images, she draws on the past and illuminates the present. Precisely through force of habit, with her persistent daily creation of visual fragments of writing, she attempts to obstruct human numbness and forgetfulness. Time, however, cannot be regained. Fragments of seconds, days, months, and even overlapping centuries can be secured day by day through the ritual of daily writing and the reification and localization of time in the space of the page. But the changing dates are a record and a reminder of time passing. Irrevocably, tomorrow will turn into today, or “ heute, ” which Darboven will write as a word on the page only to cross it out, signifying time spent. When Hanne Darboven graduated from the Hochschule für bildende Kunste, in Hamburg, West Germany, in 1965, she already felt the weight of the past so strongly that she needed to break with it completely. That year, she left the Old World for New York, to which she has returned many times since. Her journeys back and forth between Hamburg and New York reflect a desire to shift perspectives, to juxtapose differences, to be both outsider and insider, to simultaneously preserve culture and history and free herself from their implicit burden. This desire is crystallized in such residual works as Ansichten ’82 and “ . . . 85” (Views 1982 and . . . 1985). During her first stay in New York, in a small apartment on East 90th Street, Darboven first developed Konstruktionen, linear constructions of numbers executed in pencil on graph paper. Later, in February 1968, back in Hamburg, she wrote: I built up something by having disturbed something: destruction becomes construction. Action interrupts contemplation, as the means of accepting something among many given alternatives, for accepting nothing becomes chaos. A system became necessary: how else could I in a concentrated way find something of interest which lends itself to continuation? My systems are numerical concepts, which work in terms of progressions and/or reductions akin to musical themes with variations. If these numerical concepts allow continuation, they can also be extended to infinity .The artist humanizes a potentially overwhelming limitlessness by establishing the daily practice of number writing to which she still adheres. The date, as fixed in the Gregorian calendar, is one of our systems of recording and measuring time. But Darboven uses the calendar to personify time. She may write out the date in full, or she may replace it with numbers. January 1, 1988, for instance, can be written 1/1/88. These numbers themselves can be translated into a program of linked units each consisting of one upward and one downward stroke: for example, 1 plus 1 plus 8 plus 8 equals 18; 18 can be expressed by one row of ten units and a second of eight, with the Arabic numerals 10 and 8 at the end of the respective rows. Reduced to sound, these numbers can also be transformed into musical notations on the page. Innumerable variations on these formulations have appeared in Darboven’s work over the years. Although the pages of daily conforming to a particular underlying mathematical system, within each page and within each line of each page, every stroke is different, evoking the emotive unique moment in which it was written. Difference and sameness are the work’s : lifeforce. Recurring rows of up-and-down strokes fill each daily page, taking them over. In replacing words with abstract handwriting, Darboven eliminates syntax and literary meaning in favor of energy and duration. The illegibility of the characteristic script becomes secondary to its vitality as it moves steadily on from line to line in an undulating motion, a melodic or atonal flow analogous to phenomena such as echoing sound waves, or receding and advancing tides. Hanne Darboven scribes graphs of time in time. A static spatial construct is overlaid with dynamic temporal one. In some projects this is provided by logarithmic graph paper, which is divided into sets of ten lines that incrementally increase in height, simultaneously indicating expansion as well as contraction. The result is familiar but alien. In conventional terms, it is almost anti-aesthetic in its repetitive plainness. “I both write and draw,” the artist has said, “because ‘no more words’ is a writing process, it’s not a drawing process. The writing fills the space as a drawing would. It turns out to be esthetic, but that wasn’t my first aim.” These graphs of time are both predictable and unpredictable. Page upon page of writing, each unique yet each like the other, may seem as monotonous as everyday life can be. Th, repetition resembles Gertrude Stein’s use of repetition, to stretch out the present and make it endure. Stein liberated words from their usual treadmill and recast them as plastic entities: “Once started expressing this thing, expressing anything there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis...It is exactly like a frog hopping he cannot ever hop exactly the same distance or the same way of hopping at every hop.” Similarly, Stein wrote that if you listened intensely to people saying the same thing over and over again, eventually “you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them.” This could be the perfect description of Darboven’s upward and downward strokes, and of her use of numbers and musical notes, which rise from one to nine and then fall, only to start again. In one of Darboven’s Ein Jahrhundert (One Century) pieces, the repetitious rhythm echoes Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (eine rose ist eine rose ist eine rose) nearly causing time to stand still. But the line is preceded by the remark “ blumen verblumen” (flowers wither), and followed by the formulas “ 1 ist 1 ist 1”( 1 is 1 is 1) or “ eins ist eins ist eins” (one is one is one) or “ eins plus eins ist zwei ist eins zwei, etc. ” (one plus one is two is one two, etc.). Darboven continues “ ich beschreibe nicht—ich schreibe” (I don’t describe—I write). Her work always has its basis in reality, the actual time it takes to do the writing. And that writing has grown much larger than herself; it has become a proof, one of “write, write or die,” in the words of the American poet H.D. For only the process of continuous daily writing, the prolongation of the present through repetition, will secure today from being crossed out by the passage of time. 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