Minimalist intimacy and feminist materialism in the work of Charlotte Posenenske

Abstract

This paper presents a retrospective post-humanist and fematerial reading of the work of Charlotte Posenenske. This paper re-reads Posenenske’s work in relation to how a decentring of the human subject and artistic author in her Minimalist, fabricated, sculptural practice could be considered to extend an empathy to materials and allow for intimacy with objects; defined here as an amity, a kinship, a close reading, and consideration for objects and materials. The sculptural processes implicated by Posenenske, and her removal of the hand of the artist from her work not just in the production but also the installation and placement of the work, is radical. Posenenske’s work steps beyond the outsourcing of the labour of art to an anonymous factory worker in the case of the found object, or to a fabricator. Instead her work insists on a collaborative process not just in production but in the arrangement, configuration, and distribution of the artworks, that breaks down the hierarchies embedded in the production, reception, and circulation of art. Posenenske’s work is currently enjoying a revival and being correctly acknowledged for its radicality and importance to the history of Late-Modernist sculpture. This paper asks, what might Posenenske’s sculptural practice offer to the discourse of sculpture now in terms of notions of sculptural intimacy, and to a post-humanist, feminist ecological revision of female practitioners of minimalist sculpture?