Image & Narrative , Vol 10, No 2 (2009) 174 Hanne Darboven. Cultural history 1880-1983
Jan Baetens
Dan Adler
Hanne Darboven. Cultural history 1880-1983 London: Afterall Books (published by MIT Press) ISBN: 978-1-84638-051-8 (cloth)
978-1-84638-050-1 (paperback)
The ‘One Work’ series published by After All is devoted to in-depth analyses of single projects by singular artists (it includes for instance a study on Chris Marker’s La Jetée), although not in the traditional ‘close reading’ sense. The aim is more to offer studies with strong methodological and theoretical underpinnings and a great openness to the broader field of contemporary art and culture. Dan Adler’s work on Hanne Darboven’s Cultural History 1880-1983 (a work realized during the period 1980-1983 and now part of the Dia collection in New York) is an excellent example of this approach. It will prove extremely helpful not only to those interested in Darboven, a key figure of post-conceptual art, but also and perhaps even more to all those who are confronted with basic questions on world-making and the production of meaning through serialized –but therefore not necessarily narrative– images.
Darboven’s work, which is technically speaking an ‘installation’, gathers and mixes various kinds of documents, ranging from ready-mades and autobiographical documents to found and crafted visual representations of various origins (popular culture, art history, historical events and figures, etc.). Its main medium, although the whole installation can be labelled as ‘multimedia’, is photography, presented on huge walls in uniform boxes that often imitate the format of the double spread of a book. Its most salient characteristic, be it for unprepared viewers or for specialists of contemporary art, is that it resists homogeneous interpretation – a difficulty that may explain the scarcity of critical scholarship on Darboven’s work.
What we find in Dan Adler’s study is a thorough, well informed and very clearly written discussion of the various questions that may arise when seeing this work and the various methodological tools at our disposal for trying to answer them. In all
Image & Narrative , Vol 10, No 2 (2009) 175 cases, Dan Adler appears to be a very gifted teacher, very scrupulous in constructing the questions he wants to comment and very cautious in the answers he proposes. Nevertheless, the modesty of his reading, which does not have the ambition to invent a totally new way of seeing, is deceptive, for what Adler proposes is really refreshing. He brings together a wide set of references and insights which he manages to explore in a non-polemical stance. Adler offers a lot of perspectives on Darboven’s work and has the great elegance not to discard any as less ‘correct’ than others. It is this multiperspectivism, rather than the intrinsic merits of this or that aspect of the whole, that is a very valuable contribution to our reflections on contemporary art.
First of all, Adler lists the questions that may seem to discourage any overall interpretation of the work: the enigmatic character of the title of the work, the absence of any ordering principle that covers all the images and pieces, the clash between various rules that seem to organize the relationships between single images, the sheer number of the pieces collected in the installation, the astonishing variety of the material, and, last but not least, the fundamental differences between Cultural history 1880-1983 and other, similar as well as dissimilar, projects by contemporary or less contemporary artists. (In this regard, Adler’s study contains many surprises, such as the –very convincing– link he establishes with Gustave Courbet’s L’atelier du peintre.)
Once the question is firmly established, Adler continues with a number of reading hypotheses, which he presents and discusses with great elegance and clarity. He starts with a focus on issues of narrative, asking whether one can always convert a series of apparently random images in a larger meaningful, i.e. narrative, whole and demonstrating that, in the case of Darboven, one cannot (this idea may seem futile, but it runs counter to deeply rooted convictions, for instance in cognitive narratology, that it is always possible to project story lines on this type of material). He also discusses the difficulty of being confronted with material that is, from a historical and cultural point of view, irreducibly heterogeneous (and his conclusions in this respect are as cautious as in the field of narrative deciphering). And he finally suggests, in the largest section of the book, a whole series of intertextual and intercultural relationships that may cast light on the enigmas provoked by Darboven, starting of course with some usual suspects (in this case the paradigmatic structures of Soll LeWitt or the works by Mel
Image & Narrative , Vol 10, No 2 (2009) 176 Bochner, who constitute the immediate biographical context for Hanne Darboven’s work), gradually expanding the scope of his readings (here, Adler stresses more the possible influence of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas than of Gerhard Richer’s Atlas, for instance), and concluding with some very astute remarks on Broodthaers’s Musée d’art moderne (but reinterpreting it in a way that gives full justice to the idiosyncratic aspects of Darboven’s work).
In short, this is an excellent publication on an artist who deserved such a commentary and by an author whom we hope to read more frequently in the near future. Moreover, it is a publication that can be of interest to both the interested audience and the specialist, which is always a proof of quality of writing and thinking.
Jan Baetens is Editor of Image & Narrative. Email: jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
