ART REVIEW : Hanne Darboven’s Works Tackle the Passage of Time

Evoking the passage of time is a snap for filmmakers and novelists, but it’s a curiously knotty problem for artists working in the static visual arts. A couple of decades ago, so-called “process” artists attempted to solve it by giving themselves a set of simple tasks to do and exhibiting the results of their labor. German artist Hanne Darboven continues to make time visible by patiently, inexorably inscribing number sequences and calendar dates on a mind-boggling number of sheets of paper.

In her 1989 installation, “For Abraham Lincoln”--which consists of 94 sheets of printed paper and a sculpture made of found objects--Darboven ruminates in her idiosyncratic way on the passage of time since Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Two title pages contain fragments from a German encyclopedia entry on the 16th President, copied by Darboven in her evenly flowing script. She has said that she chooses texts with “facts about humanity that move me.” In the passage about Lincoln, the writer says the President “won over the people through diligence (not “smoothness,” as the gallery’s translation would have it), plainness and . . . humanity.”

In the center of the gallery, a wooden pedestal with an elaborate, lathe-turned base--presumably produced by slave labor--supports a vintage sculpture of a black slave. Bending as if proffering a delicacy to his master, he holds an old-fashioned tray on which a tiny Lincoln doll stands.

Each of the other 92 prints lined up on the gallery walls is tightly structured with rows of blank calendar pages, dogged repetitions of spelled-out numbers in German, and a continuous sequence of 1981 calendar dates. Photographs of the sculpture and of black musicians from the 1989 Classic Jazz Desktop Calendar are sparsely dispersed throughout the prints.

To grasp the ritualistic side of Darboven’s work, the viewer need not attempt to read all the numbers or puzzle out the mathematical system she employs, which partially involves adding the digits within each date to produce a constantly increasing sum. Her impact is achieved by simply observing the rhythmic repetition of the graphic format and the relentless eddy of pen strokes.

Beyond literally documenting the passage of time, the pages of Darboven’s meticulously organized numbers yield no useful information whatsoever. But against the dull, steady drumbeat of her daily batch of writing--repressively conforming to a tightly defined system--the unresolved, complex history of blacks in America becomes a blare of trumpets. The obsessive, deliberately meaningless writing eventually comes to an end, but the questions linger forever.

(James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., Santa Monica; to Aug. 25).