The Lived Time Flowing Behind the Page

Where were you and what were you doing on October 5, 1980? Perhaps you hadn't even been born yet—.

The Keio University Art Center (KUAC) holds contemporary art exhibitions every year to create opportunities at the university for people to experience the art of our own era. This year, we are exhibiting the work of Hanne Darboven (1941–2009), a leading post-war German artist who pursued a unique creative world (Standing Point III: Hanne Darboven, May 9 – June 24).

Let's look at one of the exhibited works, "Milieu <80>: Today (for Walter Mehring)." On the wall, 139 sheets are arranged in an orderly fashion. The pages are filled with numbers, German words, and wavy lines. What on earth does this represent? At first glance, it is impossible to tell. One might feel at a loss. However, the handwritten characters and wavy lines, written dispassionately while adhering to a format, evoke the image of the artist writing each one and the time spent on that manual labor. As you follow each sheet, you find yourself overlapping with the flow of time she spent. In the section shown in the illustration, the days are counted: Day 1, Day 2... It breaks off on Day 279 and is replaced by transcribed text. The 279th day counting from January 1, 1980, was October 5—the day of the West German parliamentary elections. Centered on this election day, the work as a whole represents the year 1980. The process of deciphering what is depicted and how the work is structured is as thrilling and creative as cracking a code. And when viewed through the 139 sheets, Hanne Darboven's lived 1980 is portrayed in a way that could not be conveyed in any other form. Behind the seemingly dispassionate surface, Hanne's days, filled with red blood, are breathing. Therefore, we suddenly find ourselves asking: where was I and what was I doing on October 5, 1980—.

(Yoko Watanabe, Professor, Keio University Art Center (KUAC))