MADE IN GERMANY

12 grain. As with French champagne, a highly regarded name-brand producer is always compelled to produce a sameness in taste. The simulation is perfect. The endless repetition of events and processes—the mechanics—produce the object that is always the same. Perfection mutates from the artisanal excel lence of seeking to create something singular to creating in- definite constancy. The aesthetics of machine construction are oriented solely on the efficiency of its output. Wolfgang Ruppert believes it is crucial to view the history of objects in a more open way, free of too-narrow concepts centered around the artifact. In his “Plea for the Concept of Industrial Mass Culture,”2 he remarks on the changes in per ception that have taken place since the 1980s, and on a new open-mindedness in the visual reception of the world of objects. In recent years, the aesthetics of the serial have almost play- fully leaped across every boundary. The idea of a perfect reality, a world without flaws played at by the machines on factory floors, carrying out always uniform production processes with ceaselessly repeated sounds, shows, in a perhaps startling fashion, that almost no time has passed, aesthetically speaking, since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927. Certainly our conscious ness has changed fundamentally since the beginning of the age of technological reproducibility. Even so, we are haunted by the fascination of the constant. We quest soulfully after the singular, the error, exactly in that place where flawlessness is the mea- sure of all things. Made in Germany is anachronism and zeitgeist rolled into one. The occasional dwelling mound may be built up, as it were, by hand, yet the brave new world of goods in the twenty-first century remains a sort of floodplain, washed over by the ocean of world markets. And this is why we long for a point of refer ence, such as “good form,” to serve as a substantial signpost to No-Place: Utopia. 1 Rainer Metzger, “Exemplary Ground—On the Logic of the Label ‘Made in Germany’ in Contemporary Art,” in Made in Germany, exh. cat. kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, Kunstverein Hannover, Sprengel Museum Hannover (Ostfildern, 2007), p. 38. 2 Wolfgang Ruppert, “Plädoyer für den Begriff der industriellen Massen kultur,” in ibidem, ed., Lebensgeschichten. Zur deutschen Sozialgeschichte 1850–1950 (Opladen, 1980), p. 153.

MADE IN GERMANY

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