For decades, German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) lived with her mother in the Harburg district of Hamburg. This is where she did End of century—Buch der Bilder (End of the Century—Book of Pictures), 1992-1993, a sprawling piece that gave 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 due to its conspicuously scattered selection of short lyrics, dialogues and interior monologues. One wonders what Darboven is expensive whisper made up of the elements dispersed in End of century—Buch der Bilder—from her daughter’s repetitive inscriptions of words and numbers executed in her idiosyncratically undulating handwriting, to the hundreds of often pre-war objects she amassed – then documented via black-and-white photographs that were systematically organized into wall-sized grid charts and spiral bound display notebooks. Guess we’ll never know, but I suspect she kind of figured it all out. . . odd?
Darboven’s massive effort has three major elements. The most important are the 520 framed “working sheets”, as the artist called them, which present “daytime calculations” on graph paper. Here she recorded various dates between 1988 and 1989, using words and numbers for the first year and numbers for the second. Take JULY 1, 1988, which is stated 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 still reminds me of On Kawara’s telegram series of 1969-2000, “I’m still alive.”) Then there are forty-two “picture panels”, reproduced from a earlier series, “Bildokumentation(Picture Documentation), 1978. The artist has divided these images – mounted on paper, labeled and numbered – into three categories: GESCHICHTE (History), INTELLEKTUELLE ENTWICKLUNG (intellectual development), and TECHNISCHE ENTWICKLUNG (Technical development). Near the upper right corner of each composition, Darboven added a second image of one of the objects, such as a miniature toilet, from his collection. A small green card affixed near the second photo bearing the stamp of her studio highlights the role of the artist as both author and administrator of this project. Finally, a group of fifty-four albums features photos of Darboven’s notes and objects from his studio with his calculations of the day, as well as transliterations of the calculations into musical scores. Encased in glass cases, the red and white patterned backing papers of these tomes replicate the decorative cover of Darboven’s edition of Rilke’s book. The albums are each subdivided into two parts and subdivided into two subchapters: The ordering system was removed from Rilke’s collection.
Although we are told that Darboven’s art is about ‘time’, it is just as much about time and how the subjective and the objective connect and disconnect. Or, as she wrote in a sign: Die Geschichte findet von selbst, das ist die Gesehichtszeit—[Evolution]—; Geistige Geschichte, Technische Geschichte} waser Mensch getanhat:—wechselseitige beeinflussing—Mensch und Maschine (History unfolds by itself, that is, historical time -[Evolution]—; intellectual history, technical history} what mankind has done: – mutual influence – man and machine). After a two-year stay in New York at the end of the 1960s, where she associated with some of the great conceptualists of the time (Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, et al.), Darboven returned to Germany and began to create a kind of art that emphasized a cold forensic examination of his country’s destructive past. In End of century—Buch der Bilder, she looked back at the last hundred years (at least) with a suitably discerning eye. As she once said in an interview, “I remember as a child all the bombs falling on Hamburg during 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 homeland has become something of a motherless place for her and countless other Germans – so perhaps Darboven’s own mother didn’t find her work very strange after all.
