It was only recently that we stumbled on the work of Charlotte Posenenske, a German artist who was born in 1930 and survived life in Nazi Germany during World War II despite her partially Jewish heritage. Posenenske’s story is remarkable in a number of ways, not the least of which is that she is best known for a tiny body of work produced in just two years of a truncated ten-year career in visual art. That her tenure as an artist was relatively short had nothing to do with her passing in 1985 from the effects of cancer: rather, she had deliberately walked away from the art world seventeen years earlier, in 1968, never to look back again despite invitations for her to return. Instead, she spent the last part of her life pursuing a career as a sociologist, studying the effects of industrialization on organized labor.
Her choice of an alternative vocation, however, was not quite as disconnected from her preceding artistic pursuits as might seem the case at first glance. For in the sculptures for which she is now celebrated are interwoven some of the very same themes she would take up in her new profession: industrialism and its relationship to art and craft; how things are made and who is equipped to make them; and how we value objects in the marketplace. Imagine our excitement when we discovered that someone had been exploring several of the very concepts that interest us at A.R.T. today – only a half-century ago. Sure is hard to have an original idea around here!
The principal sculptures which we and others particularly admire were assembled by Posenenske from pieces which she designed to resemble ventilation ducts, such as one might find inside a building. Pieces were either of a rectangular, square or transitional section, and could be attached to each other with screws. Her choice of materials was limited to galvanized sheet metal and corrugated cardboard, with no hand-finishing or post-production treatment to pretty them up and belie their industrial origins.
As visually appealing as they may be in a purely formal sense, an important distinguishing feature of her duct sculptures is more conceptual than visual: that is, the pieces were designed by Posenenske to be re-configurable, meaning they could be detached and then re-attached in a myriad of different configurations. In other words, they were modular.
Posenenske put the fact of her sculpture’s modularity into practice by leaving it to curators to arrange the pieces as they saw fit when exhibited in galleries or curated spaces. By implication collectors and spectators would also be empowered to install them to their own specifications. For one event Posenenske herself choreographed a performance piece in which a crew of assistants dressed in white Lufthansa jumpsuits re-arranged a set of modules suspended from a ceiling in order to reinforce her ideas about the fluidity of their composition.
But her preferred environment for their display were public spaces, especially transportation nodes – airports, traffic islands, train stations. In part this stemmed from her political sensibilities; keep in mind this is all happening in 1967-68 when the counter-cultural wave of democratization and anti-establishmentarianism was about to reach a crescendo. The socially conscious Posenenske did not want her work to be the object of market speculation by collectors banking on their appreciation in value for reasons of a limited supply and the rising reputation of the artist. Besides physically locating her sculptures in more ‘democratic’ contexts than the privatized gallery space, Posenenske also intended for them to be produced in open edition and sold for the cost of their production.
If you’re familiar with some of the thinking behind the portfolio of work we offer through A.R.T., you can see immediately why we feel such a strong affinity for this fascinating figure.
Happily, public interest in Posenenske’s work seems to be rising again with a new book and catalogue, an exhibition at documenta 12 in 2007 and now, at the Artist’s Space in New York, a series of events and films (left) organized around the Vierkantrohe Series (Square Tube Series) of sculptures that we have focused on here. Part of the program at Artist’s Space faithfully reflects Posenenske’s attitude regarding the non-static character of art: four living artists have been invited to position the modules in the space to their liking over the course of successive weeks. Listen, if she was okay with some guys in Lufthansa suits playing around with her tubes, what harm could a few artists do?
References:
Artists Space Exhibition and Film on Charlotte Posenenske through August 2010
Charlotte Posenenske by Burkhard Brunn (2009) at Amazon
