Save the Date: Hanne Darboven

What’s that? You say you feel your life slipping by, undocumented and unheralded? Could be worse.

 

Beginning in the late 1960s, the German artist Hanne Darboven began a daily written record of her life, but “Dear Diary” it isn’t. Scientific and musical notation collide with numbers and impenetrable snatches of handwritten words in Darboven language of one, which she developed — as she told Artforum in 1973 — in pursuit of “a way of writing without describing.”  (It was a bit early for HTML code, but she could have tried her hand at political speeches, we suppose.)

Two of Darboven’s early works, newly acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum, use equations based on the digits of the date: In Darboven’s formula, October 31, 2008 would be 10+31+08=49K.  From there, Darboven works through punishing numerical sequences in a seeming attempt to quantify time itself.  Her 138-page “00-99=No1-2K-20K” is handwritten; for the 147-page “27K-No8-No26,” she used a typewriter. If she made a typo, you can bet she would notice — but would anyone else? – Chris Klimek