Lucy Ives on the 'Personal Mathematics' of Hanne Darboven and Madeline Gins

Canadian Art has published an essay by Lucy Ives, "No More Words, Words, Words," about the synchronous work of artists Hanne Darboven and Madeline Gins. "Why did each determine that a style of quantification was a necessary component of her poetics?" asks Ives. "What can we learn from these sometimes inscrutable, personal mathematics, this mathematical prose?" More:

...“there / is nothing to write about,” Darboven joyfully informs [Sol] LeWitt, who may have been her lover; she is ecstatic, having discovered how to “[do] <it>,” and possibly where to get “<it>,” how to immerse herself in a practice in which there is always more to write, more to manipulate, more loops and checksums, but no longer anything to discuss, “no more, / words, words, words.” As she would later say in an interview, “I wrote things down again by hand so that the mediated experience might impart something to me.”

In the year of the holy walk(s) to Sol LeWitt’s place, another artist and writer, Madeline Gins, an American, lived and worked in Manhattan. Gins, like Darboven, was in her late twenties in the late 1960s, but unlike Darboven she was born in New York and raised on Long Island. She studied philosophy and physics at Barnard College, painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, and in the early 1960s she met, collaborated with and, in 1965, married Nagoya-born artist Shūsaku Arakawa, who, along with his mentor Marcel Duchamp, exhibited work in the Dwan Gallery’s 1967 show “Language to Be Looked at and/or Things to Be Read.” Perhaps it is the recent entry of language into visual art that moves Gins to do so much work on her typewriter. Perhaps she sees herself as typing up not just pages but images of a kind. Maybe she, like Darboven, understands the space of the page as not just an opportunity for establishing semantic meaning, but also a site for immersing oneself in an experience of mediation. When, in 1969, Gins publishes her experimental novel and artist’s book, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), it contains a story about mediation, perhaps of the kind Gins herself experienced during the course of the novel’s composition...

Find the full essay at Canadian Art.