Hanne Darboven’s “Quartett ‘88” is dedicated to four outstanding women of the 20th century: Marie Curie, Rosa Luxemburg, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. The significance of their work in the fields of science, politics/society, and art/literature in the context of historico-cultural events taking place at the same time is related to the present. The structure of the work is based on an aesthetic concept developed by Hanne Darboven in the past 20 years, consisting of writing down and writing out temporal sequences of events.
The method of Hanne Darboven’s aesthetic concept is based on the graphicness of mathematical operations and her preoccupation with philosophical logic. She describes her works as “mathematical literature” and “mathematical music”. A recurring topic is time, the progressive flow of which can only be perceived in nature. As opposed to this, Hanne Darboven illustrates the limits of our existence using the simple systematicity of the calendar. She transfers the illustrated flow of time in the calendar to a transparent system based on the addition of digits indicating day, month, and year. The digits signifying the century and the millennium are omitted and the digits signifying decade and year are treated as natural numbers. This simple mathematical operation results in only 42 possible combinations within one year; only 1.1. and 12.30 and 12.31 occur once. At the same time, Hanne Darboven translates this additive concept of dates into musical scores, in which the digit 1 stands for the note e, 2 for f, 3 for g, etc. Compound numbers are expressed as an interval of two notes, e.g. 31=g-e, 24=f-h, etc., and numbers combined with 0 are used as broken chords.
