Betty Danon

Betty Danon, in her daughter Marcella Danon’s recollection

Recollecting Betty Danon as an artist means first of all talking about her life and her way of living. Recollecting the person means talking about her art and the way it changed her and those who were close to her.

An impressionist painting can describe a landscape better than a photograph by grasping its essence without revealing its details. Therefore this book is not meant to give a precise account of Betty Danon’s life and work, as however close, it could but be incomplete, whereas it just tries to suggest the scent of the work and the message of a woman that was bold enough to accept the call of art at the age of forty-two.

Art as an opportunity to cross the frontier of a conventional conception of life, to give room to one’s hidden gift, to the capacity of looking deep inside oneself, to the wish to venture out in the boundless universe in search of resounding dimensions.

From painting to collage, from graphic sign to performance, from mail art to the use of computer, in the late ‘80s, definitely in the lead, Betty Danon found her most congenial environment in visual poetry: sound and sign, signifier and meaning, playfulness and commitment, lonely working-through and steady presence in a close net of international relations were at the basis of an uninterrupted work that went on for 33 years, from 1969 to 2002.

Driven by her Jungian inner analysis, she began her artistic process playing with the yin yang theme, in a few years getting to dot and line, upon which all her work and existential quest were founded: in time they became particle and wave, the foundation of the universe itself.

Once she got to the essential, after a year-long play with black and white, her artistic journey became tinged with joy and colour in Rainbowland, a huge stave-bridge made of air, water and light collecting everybody’s “sounds”, as she used to say. A poetic symbol of the “elsewhere”, the password to cross the threshold of the absurd, Rainbowland is a world Albert Einstein was the first to obtain the citizenship of, and where the second “Alice in Rainbowland” would entertain visitors with her zen-like questions.

From rainbow to Rimbaud, to whom she dedicated one of her early visual poetry works, it was a short step, and by then she had taken a run-up to rightly enter a world where poetry was meant for the eyes, no longer for the ears, where writing could become image and be treated as an object, where the artist took possession of that space between illusion and reality and where reading moved to different spheres beyond the represented ones: ”what you mean to say is invariably elsewhere, and that elsewhere at its best is like a neverending wave”, the artist explained.

Betty Danon’s artistic production is remarkably wide, lots of canvases dating back to the early ‘70s, collages, sculptures, audio and videotapes of recorded performances, hundreds of works on paper, more then 50 collections of visual poetry, a few numbered printed copies, others printed in a limited number, and other one-off items. Experts did show their appreciation; after receiving the volume entitled “dot-line”, in 1976, Roland Barthes wrote her: “Quelque chose de très beau, quelque chose de parfait…” (“Something so beautiful, something so perfect…”).

A remarkable work in the whole collection is “Io & gli altri” (The others & I) exibited in Galleria Apollinaire in Milano in 1979: more than 200 original works on music cardboard, signed by some of the best known exponents of contemporary art, such as Sol Lewitt, Nam June Paik, Ray Johnson, Pablo Echaurren...

Born in Istanbul, Betty Danon moved out to Milan in 1956, and exhibited her works in one-person as well as in collective exhibitions in many European and oversea countries and took part to two special exhibitions at the Venice Biennial, in 1978 and 1980. Her success, in the first twelve years of her activity, was instant, unusual, but she was intolerant of any of the rules imposed on artists by art galleries, and as she was lacking in diplomatic talent and in the necessary supports to establish herself in the Italian artistic scene, since the early ‘80s, for the sake of her inner tranquillity, she decided to continue working in the background, looking elsewhere for acknowledgement and above all for an incitement to go on. She exclusively turned to cultural circles free from speculations, such as museums, libraries and archives, she increased her relations with international sets, keeping in touch with American and Australian mail art and visual poets who would be close to her till the end of her life.

Rather than something to be exhibited, to Betty art became more and more something to live and communicate, something that could and should impregnate daily life and lead people to discover and use the wide margin of freedom and creativity life allows them to experience. So she started keeping workshops – called at first “Exploring”, later on “Harem” – to give people the opportunity to be creative for the first time in their lives. Far from being the aim, working with paper, words and colours was the means to create in the group an atmosphere of sympathy, mutual respect and warmth favouring the authentic communication with oneself and the others we all need so much.

Turned into a small art museum, her flat situated on the third floor in Viale Coni Zugna 37 was frequently visited by friends, colleagues, foreign visitors, English students – “Learn English singing along with Frank Sinatra and Betty Danon”, the playbill of one of her activities reads -; while looking at the walls of the rooms of her tiny flat you could plunge into a cross-section of contemporary underground art.

Her mail-box soon became an important spot in her home. There arrived the mail from artists and others from all over the world, and there for fourteen years arrived the multicoloured envelopes from the artist David Cole from New York, with whom she exchanged playful letters and works, views, jokes that helped her become familiar with the subtleties of the English language. The complex unpredictable twisted whimsical, sometimes thoroughly incomprehensible, plays with words the two visual artists entertained each other with one day will be the conoisseurs’ object of study and enjoyment.

Since 1989 her most faithful friend and tool was Toyfriend, the small Macintosh “cube” with which she joined the computer pioneers in the field of visual poetry. That would be followed by Toyfriend2 and Toyfriend3, both Macintosh as well, to which, in the memory of those who knew her, she is indissolubly associated.

Hardly willing to get out of her reign and by no means keen on travelling or society life, Betty used to be a reference point for many, a precious friend, a wise counsellor. She answered others’ existential complaints by quoting Baudrillard, inviting them to get rid of stereotypes, clichés and simulacra; she taught them to look into the mirror in the morning saying kind words to themselves; she helped them see problems in their right perspective catching a glimpse of the "light at the end of the tunnel", always reminding people not to take themselves too seriously; she used to keep the door open to the universe, the great mystery she recognised, though she never claimed to understand it.

Art became to her living authentically, joyfully, though being aware of one’s limits, of objective difficulties, of time going by.

Indeed time went by, and she began to notice it. A dream set her before a clock, she recognised it as a sign and turned it into work, Tetrakis. She reorganized her archives, created different anthologic copies of her visual poetry works, Pagine dimenticate e non (Pages forgotten and not), and got in touch with international archives. Her works are now in the “Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto” - where her archives are kept too -, in the “Museum of Modern Art” of NewYork, in the Ohio State University Rare Books department, in Sackner archives, in the museums and libraries of about 25 nations all over the world. When life gave her a clear sign of what her dream had announced her, she did not worry about herself, she worried about her work on which a prophecy weighed: “ It will be given acknowledgement when you don’t care any more”. It was with this calm confidence that she set on her journey to Rainbowland in April 2002, leaving multicoloured rainbows to be scattered the world over.

In October 2004 Pulcinoelefante, art editions, took to New York Art belongs to everyone, like the rainbow (L’arte è di tutti, come l’arcobaleno). With one sentence Betty Danon makes her message alive beyond time: “making art is being happy, being free, loving life, making revolution”.


Marcella Danon 

Osnago - ITALY, October 2005