Blad 159 uit Stamboek van de leerlingen der Koloniale School voor Meisjes en Vrouwen te 's-Gravenhage deel II (1930-1949) c. 1949

This is sheet 159 from a student registry created some time between 1930 and 1949, from The Hague school for women. Looking at this image, I’m struck by the intimate process of record keeping. The entries here, so neatly and carefully recorded, bring to mind the work of On Kawara, whose lifetime project of date paintings, seem like a monumental act of repetitive mark making. You get a sense of this too from the registry pages, the handwriting, the typewritten lines, the glued in photographs. These different textures and depths, they speak to the way we try to grasp time, to slow it down by framing and fixing it. I’m drawn to the portraits on the right page. The one in the middle, the woman with the short cropped hair, the light falling on the side of her face. I wonder what she was thinking? It makes me think about what we leave behind, these fragments and traces of a life lived. Like Agnes Martin’s grids, these registers remind us of something so much bigger than a name on a page. Art is always a way of naming the unnamable.