Dia Publications Spotlight: “Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress”
On view in Dia Beacon for the first time since her 2018 internationally touring retrospective, Charlotte Posensenke’s sculptural experiments reinvigorate the galleries with their inventive play with form. Through the numerous possibilities in which they can be recombined, they offer an open-ended experience for visitors with each and every installation. In the retrospective catalogue, Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress, an Alfred H. Barr Award 2020 finalist, curator Alexis Lowry traces the playful quality of the artist’s sculptures, drawings, and photographs, illuminating their connections to her Minimalist contemporaries along with broader socio-political concerns.
Charlotte Posenenske: “Never Done”
Alexis Lowry
Anxiety over pervasive mechanization and standardization in modern society was widespread by the late 1960s, and play had become an important form of resistance. Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Playtime, which follows two strangers as they navigate a hypermodern version of Paris, well illustrates this pushback. In one particularly telling sequence, a bewildered French businessman, Monsieur Hulot, gets lost in a matrix of cubicles—a burgeoning office architecture meant to improve worker productivity—as he tries in vain to connect with the person he intends to meet. Hulot might as well be in a maze, despite the gridded uniformity of the structures he moves within. This efficient order is undermined throughout the film by haphazard and hilarious human behavior, and the characters delight in the collapse of conformity. In the same spirit, Posensenske strategically deployed the principles of play, turning mundane readymade objects into opportunities for creative expression to liberate the consumer within an economy of industrial production that had left no room for it.
In 1938, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga had described play as an ideal form of social action: defined by structure (through a set of established rules) but without coercion, self-determining but nonetheless engendering communities of people who agree to those rules. Huizinga writes in an oft-cited passage from Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture:
Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious,” but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.
Free from the demands of production in any commercial or utilitarian sense and undertaken without a predetermined outcome, play, Huizinga argues, catalyzes not only an individual’s self-realization but also culture itself. The social function of play, he posits, is that of cultural formation. . . .
Similarly inspired by free participation, the Dutch countercultural group Provo used humor as a corollary of play to enact playful Happenings in the streets of Amsterdam. In 1960s Germany, as social and cultural unrest fomented, these international practices (those of Provo, in particular) inspired the aesthetically minded Spassguerrilla (Fun Guerrilla) tactics of a leftist youth movement to stage playful, anarchical social events. In one of their most notorious provocations, Kommune I planned to attack the motorcade of visiting US vice president Hubert Humphrey with flour, paint, and pies in the spring of 1967. Though the German police foiled this attempt to start an international food fight, the media widely covered the so-called Pudding Attack.
[Charlotte] Posenenske, a committed supporter of the student movement, engaged with these ludic tactics directly. In 1968, her close friends Paul Maenz, an adman and art dealer, and artist Peter Roehr opened a countercultural head shop they called Pudding Explosion in homage to the Pudding Attack in downtown Frankfurt am Main, just off the city’s commercial center. The store was stocked with political manifestos, drug paraphernalia, posters of the Marxist hero Che Guevara, and gag items like Anti-Nazi Spray. Posensenke helped design and paint the shop’s irreverent facade mural—a portrait of Karl Marx shot through with a bottle of Coke—and her system of interior ceiling panels and modular square cardboard furniture displayed the store’s subversive merchandise. Devising temporary and easily adaptable cardboard structures based on the principles of her lightweight Series DW, Posenenske reimagined her sculpture in order to stage the store itself as an absurdist environment. . . .
The playfully iterative nature of Posenenske’s serial work closely aligns with Umberto Eco’s theory of the open work, which the artist admired. Eco developed his notion in the late 1950s in response to innovations he perceived in Serial music, which largely emerged from composers associate with the Darmstadt School (based in the city where Posenenske worked as a costume and set designer until 1956). He was particularly moved by the structural uncertainty of musical works that the performer completes by actively interpreting a set of notational instructions. The open work not only engendered a plurality of acoustic or visual possibilities but also reconfigured the boundaries of artistic authorship as fluidly impacted by the work’s various forms of reception. The open structure of the Serial score exaggerates what Huizinga describes as music’s essential play quality: its performative “capacity for repetition.” In Posenenske’s work, such a “capacity for repetition” is realized in both the recombinable sculptural parts and the schematic drawings that make possible unlimited mass production. . . .
Posenenske’s practice, by engaging with issues of formal and conceptual subversion, brings to the fore what critic Michael Fried decried as the Minimalist object’s theatricality—its invitation to the spectator to move around the object, to encounter it spatially and durationally. That is Posenenske deploys seriality not only as an aesthetic device (notably reflected in the ways in which she herself proposed arranging her elements) but more importantly as a vehicle for cultivating indeterminacy within a set of fixed material terms—that is, for instigating play. In her emphasis on the open-ended variability of her unique series, she stressed that each consumer’s arrangement of elements was one fragment of a larger, constantly reconfiguring whole. As she counseled her consumers: “Don’t worry if you’re never ‘done,” because the recombination could go on and on without ever becoming boring.”