Hanne Darboven
Hanne Darboven, Sand, 1979, 456 sheets A4, ink on glassine paper, only handwriting
Hanne Darboven was born in 1941 in Munich, Germany. Following a brief episode as a pianist, she studied painting at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künst in Hamburg. Between 1966 and 1969, she lived intermittently in New York City, after which she returned to her family home in Hamburg. Darboven has participated in numerous international exhibitions including Documentas 5, 6, and 7 in Kassel, and the 1982 Biennale of Venice. She also has had numerous one-person shows in Europe and North America, including major presentations at the Ydessa Hendeles Foundation, Toronto, in 1991, and in Hamburg and Eindhoven in 1992. Hanne Darboven died on March 9, 2009 in Germany.
"Hanne Darboven's rigorously methodical oeuvre is based on the idea of programmes, invoking a "personal numerology" and protocols of addition, inventory, and rewriting, which bring it withing the orbit of Conceptual Art. All the more so because she makes use of material including filing sysemts, photocopies, graph paper, etc., which lend her exhibitions a powerfully documentary and graphic look. The system of the Coded Indices which she developed in the late 1960s - graphic transpositions of impressions mixing personal interpretation with an analysis of economic and political realities - is based on an essentially cumulative intent which says a great deal about her detemined relationship to time and about the way she capitalizes and organizes it in serial sets, which she makes on the basis of a strict programmatic technique. So it is with the six books that she produced in 1969, in which she uses a method to graphically encompass the "one hundred indices of the century".
In her great fondness for systems, she has invented one which she applies to rewriting literary texts, as she has done both with Homer's Odyssee andcertain writings by Heinrich Heine and Jean-Paul Sartre. "My materials are the paper and pencil with which I draw what I have thought up, I write words and numbers, which are, for me, the simplest ways of jotting down my ideas." This applies to the set of 456 handwritten sheets of paper, dated 1979, relating to the word Sand, different definitions of which she took from the German Volksbrockhaus encyclopaedia. A way of experiencing and even depleting language and meaning, while lending them another dimension and another breadth, at once material and plastic. In this sense there is a sort of dynamic prospensity at work in Hanne Darboven's approach, which stems from a compilation and fast-forwarding of time."
(From catalog by Salomon Foundation, 2008)
"Hanne Darboven's rigorously methodical oeuvre is based on the idea of programmes, invoking a "personal numerology" and protocols of addition, inventory, and rewriting, which bring it withing the orbit of Conceptual Art. All the more so because she makes use of material including filing sysemts, photocopies, graph paper, etc., which lend her exhibitions a powerfully documentary and graphic look. The system of the Coded Indices which she developed in the late 1960s - graphic transpositions of impressions mixing personal interpretation with an analysis of economic and political realities - is based on an essentially cumulative intent which says a great deal about her detemined relationship to time and about the way she capitalizes and organizes it in serial sets, which she makes on the basis of a strict programmatic technique. So it is with the six books that she produced in 1969, in which she uses a method to graphically encompass the "one hundred indices of the century".
In her great fondness for systems, she has invented one which she applies to rewriting literary texts, as she has done both with Homer's Odyssee andcertain writings by Heinrich Heine and Jean-Paul Sartre. "My materials are the paper and pencil with which I draw what I have thought up, I write words and numbers, which are, for me, the simplest ways of jotting down my ideas." This applies to the set of 456 handwritten sheets of paper, dated 1979, relating to the word Sand, different definitions of which she took from the German Volksbrockhaus encyclopaedia. A way of experiencing and even depleting language and meaning, while lending them another dimension and another breadth, at once material and plastic. In this sense there is a sort of dynamic prospensity at work in Hanne Darboven's approach, which stems from a compilation and fast-forwarding of time."
(From catalog by Salomon Foundation, 2008)