Below is my review of the current exhibitions by Hanne Darboven and Raphael Hefti at Camden Arts Centre, an edited version of which is in the next issue of Frieze magazine here.
"Refusing the curatorial convention of the two-person show, Camden Arts Centre’s staging of simultaneous solo exhibitions nonetheless generates points of resonance and echo between artists paired. The recent coupling of the late German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven with the young Swiss artist Raphael Hefti was no exception, not least since (remarkably given Darboven’s almost half-century career) it was the first UK solo exhibition for both artists. An unlikely match at first glance, Darboven and Hefti’s work develops from sustained engagement with process, procedural techniques or methods repeated over time. Both adopt seemingly logical, technical, even routine means of production but then pressure these beyond their habitual limits until they fold or buckle, yield under the strain. Hefti’s is a nascent material investigation that attends to the potential of mistakes and misfires within commercial manufacturing processes, moments of productive error that result in material behaving unexpectedly, against intended function or utilitarian demands. Replaying the Mistake of a Broken Hammer (2011) repeated Hefti’s experience of accidentally interrupting the process of hardening steel, willfully rendering three large steel rods fragile as glass. Subtraction as Addition (2011) consisted of seven propped panels of toughened museum glass, treated (again and again) to a chemical process designed to limit undesirable reflection. Hefti’s over-application of this process inverts its original intention turning the glass mirrored and opaque, a palette of exquisite and ever-changing dawn and dusk hues. Within his work, standard factory methods are swerved towards aesthetic enquiry.
Darboven’s practice is one of adopting, yet somehow resisting the logic of various systems or structures. Whilst numbers figure within her work, mathematics itself is eschewed. Writing is undertaken as a form of not writing, her act of ‘writing writing’ preempts subsequent performing writing practices where as Della Pollock states, ‘writing as doing displaces writing as meaning’.[i] Darboven’s work has been described as marking or doing time performed through the act of daily writing. However, unlike other life-work projects (On Kawara, Roman Opalka) Darboven’s endeavour seems less about the chronological passage of life/time witnessed by and within practice, as a critical enquiry wherein time itself is considered material to be looped and folded, stretched and frayed. The exhibition presented a chronological sample of Darboven’s methods and working vocabulary, from her early mandala-like interventions on graph paper (Perforationen, 1966) and rehearsing of cursive script (O.T. [Endlosschriftschwünge – Studie zu "7Tafeln II"] 1972) to the acoustically pervasive 24 Gesänge opus 14,15 a, b (1984) in which she converted her numerical drawings into a musical score whose rhythmic variations were then played on an organ. Darboven often borrowed the calendrical form of diaries, year-books and work plans as a found template or grid through which she weaves the experience of multiple and conflicting temporalities. For example, Appointment Diary (1988/98) took an American Film Institute desk diary as its underpinning structure, its linear chronology already interrupted and punctured with film dates, the births (and deaths) of innumerable directors and actors. Darboven creates further slack and elasticity through her simultaneous filling and emptying of its time; its pages scored day after day with cursive handwriting, interpreted variously as the looping repetition of ‘I’ (of ‘present-ness’) or of ‘U’ (‘und’ – the accumulative promise of ‘and … and … and …’).
The experience of Darboven’s work can be overwhelming: even the moderate 305 drawings of 9 x 11 = 99 (1972) felt dizzying and impenetrable, a shimmering field of dense numerical calculations and indecipherable scrawl. The work tested out various permutational methods that would later come to characterize her work, including the formulation of the cryptic ‘K’ (Konstruktion) value, based on a cross-sum adding together a date’s constituent parts (e.g. 23.9.71 = 23 + 9 + 7 +1 = 40). The use of such organizing principles within Darboven’s practice does not generate a logic that can be rationally explained rather she produces a surplus of order that borders on the disorderly or irrational. Her example might well have provoked Sol LeWitt’s oft-cited sentence on conceptual art, ‘The logic of a piece or series of pieces is a device that is used at times, only to be ruined’.[ii] In some senses, the curators over-played the human endeavour of Darboven’s labour, presenting her drawing desk and writing implements as potential entry points into her very complex and involved (involuted) oeuvre. However, whilst the critical potency of Darboven’s practice rests in its resistant incomprehensibility or opacity – its refusal to be easily interpreted or explained – the deficit of engagement with her work in the UK perhaps suggests that some introduction of this kind might still be deemed necessary."
Emma Cocker
Emma Cocker
[i] Della Pollock, ‘Performing Writing’ in The Ends of Performance (eds.) Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, (New York: New York University Press, 1998) p.75.