Hanne Darboven
06 Mar - 14 Apr 2012
HANNE DARBOVEN
Wunschkonzert, 1984
6 March - 14 April, 2012
Klosterfelde is pleased to announce a series of concerts on Hanne Darboven’s drawings and scores Wunschkonzert from 1984. On four Saturdays during the exhibition, the cellist and composer Augustin Maurs interprets the Opera 17 a, b and 18 a, b. The concerts take place on the occasion of the exhibition “John Cage and...” Visual artist – influences, inspirations in the context of the project A Year from Monday at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Both Daboven’s and Cage’s work have been a strong influence for the international Concept Art since the end of the 1960s.
Hanne Darboven was the great chronicler amongst the concept artists. During the forty years of her life’s work, she was consistently concerned with (re-) presentation of time. Based on the early diary-works and sketches from the New York years, 1966-68, she soon developed her own system of notation by means of which she put years, decades, and centuries on paper. The ‘daily arithmetic’ consisting of checksums came to replace the year’s calendrical progression according to a complex and challenging mathematical logic. Her paperwork comprised rows and rows of ascending and descending numbers, u-shapes, grids, line-notations and boxes – the panels of framed pages covered walls and rooms, creating architectures of time. Political, poetical, historical and biographical themes, however, were always integrated also – a tight interleaving of life and work characterizes Hanne Darboven’s specifically subjective point of departure that distinguishes her from other exponents of minimal art of her generation. Her collections of source material amounted to shelves full of folders, to complete musical pieces composed from notes derived from her system of mathematical constructs. Thus, with Darboven visual arts increasingly approach literature and music. In her work, time becomes thinkable not as linear succession, but rather as a synthesis of past, present and future.
Adopting musical ways of movement and repetition, Wunschkonzert ,1984, was conceived against the background of musical compositions emerging since 1980. It was shown at Documenta 2002 as a collection of loose pages in folders and presented at Klosterfelde for the first time framed in its entirety in 2009. The title refers to the Sunday afternoon musical request programme of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk radio station where felicitations are transmitted also. The work subdivides into Opus 17 a and b and Opus 18 a and b, both consisting of 36 poems respectively, facing each other on the four walls in the exhibition-space. Every poem comprises of six pages including a title page on which a greeting card (for the occasion of a Christian confirmation) has been collaged. Here, reverse rhythmical movements of increasing and decreasing rows of numbers define the system, while the checksum values are either represented in digits and line-notations (17a, 18a) or by means of digits entered into a grid (17b, 18b). Hanne Darboven: ‘My systems are numeric concepts that work according to the laws of progression and/or reduction in the manner of a musical theme with variations.’ The same year as she finished her monumental series Wunschkonzert, the artist wrote the scores, originally for a solo double bass.
Hanne Darboven was born in 1941 in Munich and died on March 9, 2009 in Hamburg-Harburg.
Wunschkonzert, 1984
6 March - 14 April, 2012
Klosterfelde is pleased to announce a series of concerts on Hanne Darboven’s drawings and scores Wunschkonzert from 1984. On four Saturdays during the exhibition, the cellist and composer Augustin Maurs interprets the Opera 17 a, b and 18 a, b. The concerts take place on the occasion of the exhibition “John Cage and...” Visual artist – influences, inspirations in the context of the project A Year from Monday at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Both Daboven’s and Cage’s work have been a strong influence for the international Concept Art since the end of the 1960s.
Hanne Darboven was the great chronicler amongst the concept artists. During the forty years of her life’s work, she was consistently concerned with (re-) presentation of time. Based on the early diary-works and sketches from the New York years, 1966-68, she soon developed her own system of notation by means of which she put years, decades, and centuries on paper. The ‘daily arithmetic’ consisting of checksums came to replace the year’s calendrical progression according to a complex and challenging mathematical logic. Her paperwork comprised rows and rows of ascending and descending numbers, u-shapes, grids, line-notations and boxes – the panels of framed pages covered walls and rooms, creating architectures of time. Political, poetical, historical and biographical themes, however, were always integrated also – a tight interleaving of life and work characterizes Hanne Darboven’s specifically subjective point of departure that distinguishes her from other exponents of minimal art of her generation. Her collections of source material amounted to shelves full of folders, to complete musical pieces composed from notes derived from her system of mathematical constructs. Thus, with Darboven visual arts increasingly approach literature and music. In her work, time becomes thinkable not as linear succession, but rather as a synthesis of past, present and future.
Adopting musical ways of movement and repetition, Wunschkonzert ,1984, was conceived against the background of musical compositions emerging since 1980. It was shown at Documenta 2002 as a collection of loose pages in folders and presented at Klosterfelde for the first time framed in its entirety in 2009. The title refers to the Sunday afternoon musical request programme of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk radio station where felicitations are transmitted also. The work subdivides into Opus 17 a and b and Opus 18 a and b, both consisting of 36 poems respectively, facing each other on the four walls in the exhibition-space. Every poem comprises of six pages including a title page on which a greeting card (for the occasion of a Christian confirmation) has been collaged. Here, reverse rhythmical movements of increasing and decreasing rows of numbers define the system, while the checksum values are either represented in digits and line-notations (17a, 18a) or by means of digits entered into a grid (17b, 18b). Hanne Darboven: ‘My systems are numeric concepts that work according to the laws of progression and/or reduction in the manner of a musical theme with variations.’ The same year as she finished her monumental series Wunschkonzert, the artist wrote the scores, originally for a solo double bass.
Hanne Darboven was born in 1941 in Munich and died on March 9, 2009 in Hamburg-Harburg.