MADE IN GERMANY

11 The palette is covered with dark and viscous gold, brushes and scrapers are accurately lined up. A hand, presumably a woman’s hand, assiduously and regulary dips the brush into the paint, as it might have done for years before. She is applying the dark red color, the liquid gold, onto plates and cups with virtous strokes. We suspect a repetitive act, but it seems harmonious and—contrary to the theses of the devoidness of meaning of the worker’s gestures—meaningful. Philine von Sell conveys the dignity of work, even if the worker cannot be seen in the image. This has nothing to do with a romanticization of the worker. The choice of subjects and the style of the photographs do not prettify away the fact that this is manufacturing, where objects used in daily life are still produced with know-how, by hand. Only a small number of people are on the immense factory floors, where machines clatter and clang, metal strikes against metal, rubber belts squeak, and cars, forklift trucks, and other vehicles drive, slightly overladen, across the polished composition floor. Now and then a hissing interrupts the torturous din, as though the escaping steam wished to call to mind the first hours of the Industrial Revolution, when steam-powered monstrosities in gigantic factory spaces performed a symphony of cacophonous horror. A lot of time has passed since then. The worker at the ma chine today enjoys much more protection from noise, toxic substances, and destructive work processes, and is seldom to be found in factory buildings at all, at least in so-called Old Europe. Insofar as people are regarded as a quantifiable cost factor, minimizing their presence has become economically valuable. This was already apparent to John Ruskin, the English art historian and social philosopher of early industrialization. In his maxims against the increasing erosion of meaning in English factory work, Ruskin developed an anthropocentric economic ethics that sought to identify the creative element or value in artisanal labor. For Ruskin, factories with functionally efficient designs were themselves synonyms for the decline in quality of human labor and its reception. In his Book of Disquiet, the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa observes that things have only as much value as people attach to them. In the era of the paradigm shift from mechanical Modernism to the digital Postmodern, this is an almost exem plary dictum: that “good form” is still something solid and tan gible. In other words, design in the ephemeral space of digital, no longer tangible form is not relieved of the responsibility of creating objects for people. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, globalized pro- cesses of development and manufacturing have “liberated” objects from systems of national branding, indeed from seals of approval altogether. And in so doing these processes have also taken away any innocence the objects may have had as artifacts of erstwhile good form, deeply rooted in a sort of “social sculpture.” Viewed in this way, the assembly sites that Philine von Sell visited in Germany must seem like anachronisms, relics of a time in which work went from hand to hand. Accordingly, the artist has photographed the products portrayed here—there is the temptation to call them, in the literal sense, manufactures— “by hand,” with an analog sort of care, and has not digitally manipulated them in any way. Faber-Castell, Würth, Schleich, Rectus, Falke, Villeroy & Boch, or Dr. Oetker and all the other firms depicted are syno nyms for just this Made in Germany, for entrepreneurial meticu lousness and social responsibility. Originally it was the English who wished to protect domestic production; the Merchandise Marks Act of 1887 was intended to warn consumers against goods and products made in Germany. What was intended to restrict the flow of goods into England, however, turned out to succeed at doing the reverse. A growing number of German products proved to be of higher quality than the competition. It should be noted that many German industrial and artisanal techniques had been adopted from those used in England, the market leader of the time, though these techniques were then improved and refined, not least through the contributions of the schools of arts and crafts, and later, in many cases, the schools of applied art. Thus a stigma was transformed into a mark of distinction. What had been merely a statement of national origin became a seal of quality in manufacturing and production. “It was ultimately a matter of indifference wether it guaranteed quality because it was German or wether it was German because it guaranteed quality.”1 The work processes photographed here are expressions of industrial mass culture, and stand for serial production and automatization. And yet the human factor is always present. Faber-Castell leads continue to be sorted by hand. The modular paste at Eternit must be spread by hand onto the basic forms, which fit together endlessly. Bausch Decor produces decor paper that reproduces wood grain with striking verisimilitude. Before the unvarying pattern can be printed with unvarying in tensity on enormous rolls, a worker must mix and prepare the paints, finding and recognizing the combinations that will result in an endless loop of the unvarying likeness of a given wood NO LIQUID GOLD ON UTOPIA . . . ANNE MAIER

MADE IN GERMANY

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