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Kalendergeschichten 212 drawings in 53 frames (4 drawings per frame, stacked vertically) collage, ink, silkscreen and ball-point pen on paper in artist frames each: 153/4 x 113/4in. (40 x 30cm.) Executed in 1975. PROVENANCE Galerie Ascan Crone, Hamburg. Karsten Schubert Ltd., London. Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York. EXHIBITION London, Karsten Schubert Ltd., 'Hanne Darboven - Kalendergeschichten', 1975. London, Richard Salmon Gallery, 'Hanne Darboven - Kalendergeschichten', Sept. - Oct. 1990. London, Richard Salmon Gallery, 'Sequence - Hanne Darboven, Gilbert & George, Joan Key, Martyn Last, Richard long, Jonathan Parsons, Stephen Prina and Andreas Ruthi', August 1997. New York, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 'Alighiero Boetti, Hanne Darboven, Sol LeWitt', Jan. - Feb. 1999. NOTES The German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven is perhaps the most important representative of Minimal and Conceptual Art in all of Europe. During an extended stay in New York in the late 1960s, she became acquainted with a number of artists working in the same genre. Among her closest friends at the time was the American conceptual artist Sol Lewitt, who later explained in a treatise on conceptual art: "Conceptual art doesn't really have to do with mathematics, philosophy, or any other mental discipline. The mathematics used by most artists is simple arithmetics or simple number systems. The philosophy of the work is implicit in the work and it is not an illustration of any system of philosophy." (S. LeWitt, in: 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art', in: A. Legg (ed.), 'Sol LeWitt', New York 1978, p. 166). For Hanne Darboven, this meant experimenting with visual perception, that is to say, with discovering ways to make perception (the perception of time, the perception of space, etc.) conscious and visible. She frequently employs the tenants of Minimalism, namely clarity of form, logic, standardisation and order, to make the viewer truly and rationally conscious of the passage of time. Since the late sixties, Darboven has focused more than anything else on serial drawings that investigate and decode time as an integral element of cultural and historical, as well as highly personal, processes and developments. Her work is based on the concept of the calendar as a graphic measurement of time, that is to say, as a tool, which makes time visible and thus tangible. For 'Kalendergeschichten' (Calendar Stories), 1975, she incorporates the pages of a common tear-off calendar into a preconceived system of graphemes. The number of frames corresponds with the 53 weeks in a year (and thus contradicts the common misconception that a year is made up of only 52 weeks, since 365 days actually results in 52 weeks and one day). She subsequently divides the days not into weeks, but rather by days, from 1 to 365, into 212 groups of four days each, with each group being separated from the next by its own wooden frame. The printed pages of the tear-off calendar, as well as the use of a rubber postal stamp with the German word 'Drucksache' (Printed Matter) underscore the fact that temporal systems are merely human constructs and not part of any natural order. Each day is then given its own additional numerical code derived from the sum of the individual digits of the respective date, i.e. 27 June (19)75 = 2 + 7 + 6 + 7 + 5 = 27. At the same time, the artist makes the viewer aware of the weight of time through the sheer number of calendar pages and frames. A room-filling installation, 'Kalendergeschichten' surrounds us as the viewers with the physical presence of time, and makes us aware of our place with time and space. To conceive of a full year is one thing, to see it graphically represented by the pages of a calendar surrounding us on all four walls from floor to ceiling is entirely different. Here, time becomes imposing and daunting. We feel its weight all around us. At the same time, we seem to control it through the systematic ordering of the year into months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds. But, like nature itself, mankind can only profess to control time, since it is, in the final analysis, something intangible and thus something we can never truly grasp and comprehend. As in many of her works, Darboven makes conscious references here to the German literary tradition. In 'Kaldendergeschichten', she refers to the tradition of so-called 'Calendar Stories', especially those of Joh. Peter Hebel in the 19th century and Berthold Brecht in the 20th century. Characteristic of the typically German literary genre of 'Calendar Stories', which recount short, popular tales of everyday occurrences, is their stylistic homogeneity, which is reflected in the work of Hanne Darboven through the systematic ordering of the standardised pages of the calendar. Narrated time and real time - the time the artist required to complete her work - are one and the same. Nevertheless, her abstract yet personal, hand-written (and thus highly individual) entries function as a kind of counterbalance to the traditional temporal system of the Gregorian calendar, which for centuries has left its mark on European culture.
