As mentioned previously, it’s not possible to describe all of the works included there are so many. There are also a number of sculptures in the installation: a giant cross, a bell, mannequins, a horse, and a doll with a stuffed bear. The walls are covered with Darboven’s panels containing framed images and objects, including postcards, photographs, letters, and articles. The current exhibit at Dia:Chelsea consists of three rooms which are broken into smaller galleries. ![]() If Benjamin was a pearl diver who brought history to the surface, so too was Darboven. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depth of the past-but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. In her introduction to Benjamin’s Illuminations, Hannah Arendt writes: By presenting a multitude of images and texts next to one another, including those that reference German culture and history, Darboven is asking the viewer to confront the spaces between and grapple with such questions as “how does a Holocaust occur?” and “how does a culture grieve or not after such an enormous shattering?” There are no easy answers. These spaces are where the artist allows the viewer to piece together the context for understanding the work on her own. Benjamin’s practice of embedding texts and quotes into his work often resulted in montages - in constellations or scraps of texts - that, like Darboven’s “Kulturegeschichte 1880–1983,” allows for a space between. There is a softness, a kind of empathetic touch, to Darboven’s project and its mirroring effect, akin to the writing of fellow German Walter Benjamin. Installation view, Hanne Darboven, “Kulturegeschichte 1880–1983 (Cultural History 1880–1983)” (1980–83) at Dia:Chelsea (© 2016 Hanne Darboven Foundation, Hamburg/Artists Rights Society, ARS, New York photo by Bill Jacobson Studio, New York, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York) She does not describe the world around her but rather reflects it, remaining inside and refusing to participate in the distancing and violence of objectification that are inherent in description. Darboven mirrors reality in the form of countless permutations, which then fragment into a seemingly infinite series of refractions. ![]() It is not possible to describe each piece within the work nor to detail each aspect of the current iteration. This is part of Darboven’s genius: the construction of a seemingly endless archive that renders the viewer mute. It would take pages upon pages to describe the full extent of the project and, in this case, the exhibit at Dia. Deposited among the vast numbers of postcards, pinups of film and rock stars, references to the first and second world wars, geometric diagrams for textile weaving, images of New York doorways and portals, covers of newsmagazines, the contents of an exhibition catalogue of postwar European and American art, and a kitsch literary calendar are extracts from Darboven’s earlier works and mementos of her previous exhibitions. ![]() Weaving together cultural, social, and historical references with autobiographical documents, it synthesizes personal history with collective memory. ![]() Composed of 1,590 sheets, each measuring fifty by seventy centimeters, and nineteen sculptural objects, Cultural History 1880 – 1983 is one of the most epic works in Darboven’s oeuvre.
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