Home, Critical Archive


Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts


Hanne Darboven
German; 20th-century

Chicago, IL: Bodenrader (Exhibition: Know)
81%

Dostojewski, Monat Januar / Dostojewski, month of January. 1990. Ink and gelatin silver print collage on paper, in 16 parts

I've yet to see any of the enormous installations of Darboven's that are in this vein, but I would guess that they sprawl too much for their lapses in logic and meaning to feel as internally consistent and interconnected as they do in this piece, which is very very taut. This tautness has a lot to do with how there are all these little vagaries of design that complicate the overall 4x4 grid format and the information it's so coy about conveying. (Each sheet contains a senseless mathematic exercise.) Namely, twelve of the sixteen sheets are of a common type (the sparser pages with a single heute in the top right corner), and they're arranged in horizontal groups of three; but the first grouping takes up the latter three slots in its row of four, while the next three take up the first three slots in their rows. It's a minor thing, but this slight offset to the arrangement imbues that first page with a proem's significance while giving the three bookending pages at the right edge a sort of summative tinge. This is very important: it's an instance of small but very precise and deliberate "formal" decisions enhancing an artwork's conceptual dimensions. Simply put, the obsessive-compulsive addition thing that takes place on each of the sixten sheets would be interesting but not much more were it not for the way the whole 4x4 grid has been composed. As it is, there's a remarkable sense of pointless crescendo that finds slight venting at the end of each row, and an ultimate (if vague) release in the bottom right sheet. Additionally, the erection of Dostoyevsky as the emblem of the month of January is funny and opaque. (2025)