Masks can be tools to hide. They disguise a face in order to permit a change of identity, maybe even of personal reality. Sometimes a child will put a bag over her head and whisper, 'I'm not here now, I've disappeared'. Yet there are ways to hide an object and to think about invisibility that, in turn, make visibility possible.
If I enter the labyrinth at a different point in the pattern, I find the end of a thread under a door on which is written 'ninety years ago'. As I open the door, I recall a sentence we learned in school, 'langes Fädchen, faules Mädchen' (long thread, lazy girl). Behind the door, the first serially produced automobiles roll off the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. Strangely enough, it is on a long rope that the 'Model T', the first serially produced automobile, is drawn past the workers. Yet this thick thread had little to do with laziness - quite the opposite in fact, as it heralded the age of accelerated production.
Repetition as the Key to Democratic Goods
The inventor of the machine that was used to manufacture the same machine over and over again had a vision of a self-driven car for everyone - 'the car for the great multitude' as Ford called it.2 In order to realise his dream, Ford gathered an elongated ornament of human beings around a rope to the beat of interlocking and consistently uniform movements.
The son of a farmer, Ford got the idea for this method for the division of labour from watching butchers in Chicago. There, a cadaver was pulled along on a rope. A certain action was predetermined for each butcher, one removing the entrails, another chopping off the legs and so forth. Ford translated this disassembly of animals into an assembly of automobiles. Whereas the workers in Chicago removed one piece after another, the workers at the Ford Company added one piece to another on a metal frame pulled along by a rope. Each worker was assigned a minimal sequence in the array, the sum of each individual effort eventually composing a total process.
Division of Labour in the Ornament
The division of labour did not stop at the limit of the body but rather reduced it to the required proportions. Ford was able to describe with numerical precision how this interlocking of humans and machines along the long thread worked, and how many humans would be needed for each individual sequence. 'The production of the Model T requires 7,882 distinct work operations. 949 operations are heavy labour requiring healthy, able-bodied men. 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed men and ten by blind men.' The degree to which Ford's method of the division of labour was based on a notion of the human being as an ornamental element in a whole pattern is revealed by an extravagance to which Ford, who otherwise lived quite modestly, was carried away on his 50th birthday.
In the middle of the day, he had all the machines turned off. 14,000 men left the rope uniting them with their required body parts and assembled in the courtyard between the factory buildings. There they were to be photographed together with Ford in honour of his birthday. No platform raised Ford from the mass, which quickly dissolved into bright points - a serial pattern, in which each individual component disappeared - an ornament as mask. The interruption of work for this self-portrait cost roughly 14,000 working hours and was probably one of the most expensive photographs of its time.
The Nationalist Copy of Modernism
The man at the centre of this ornament, whose name led to the term Fordism in the 1920s, fascinated someone else. This visionary with a penchant for eclecticism was in prison, using the time to write a book in which he also expressed his enthusiasm for Ford's idea of the serially manufactured auto-mobile. While the role model from Detroit used a self-invented logo on his products, the prisoner took the existing logo of the swastika for the adaptation he fantasised.3
It was to be less than ten years before the prisoner could begin to realise his dream of serially manufactured automobiles. In July 1934 Adolf Hitler, who had meanwhile been released from prison and risen to become the Führer of his people, commissioned the star designer Ferdinand Porsche to create a 'car of the people': the Volkswagen. Porsche had already been working on a project like this for two years and had developed initial prototypes in collaboration with the Zündapp Company.4 In order to give the enterprise a form, the commissioner soon founded the 'Society for the Preparation of the German Volkswagen plc'. Four years later the design of the 'KDF (power through pleasure) car' was ready for production. A hundred-thousand German families appeared on the horizon, driving to summer holidays on the Autobahn under an industrially standardised animal mask. A year later it all changed and the civilian VW was postponed for some time later. The future 'Beetle' mutated into a jeep-like bucket car.5 Instead of driving to the seaside, men now drove to Stalingrad without wife and child and under a blanket of snow. Yet the detour of the war had no real adverse effect on the global success of the car with the snappy pronged logo and big saucer eyes. Production was resumed as early as 1949 under the label Volkswagen and developed into one of the most successful serially manufactured cars of all times, one that was even able to create the image of an especially 'human' car.6
A Machine at the Beginning of the End
Compact knitting machines that were soon to be computer controlled played a central role at the beginning of the end of the era of Fordism.7 In Italy the disputes between workers and factory owners had reached a climax in the early seventies and simply maintaining production became a questionable issue. As a reaction to the tensions, one of the first clothing companies specialising in knitwear, Benetton, began decentralising production. The typical large factory in the city was replaced by a network of smaller businesses distributed all over the country and supplying the flexibilised chain of production with preliminary work. The serial character of production was retained, but instead of the linear assembly line there was a fragmentary factory system that could be assembled and restructured according to political and economic convenience.
Human Fabric
The new model of labour organisation drained the classical modes of working-class resistance. Once again in Italy, autonomous movements began to form in response to the changed conditions. Since the members of the 'autonomous' movements could no longer define themselves as proletarians, a new model of solidarity took the place of the now precarious concept of class.8 The idea of autonomy soon spilled over into Germany. Here, in addition to other forms, the notion developed of an autonomous community defined as a collective body-weapon called 'black block'. This block consisted of a loose agglomeration of bodies transformed at a moment of external threat into a closely woven mesh of human chains. The human elements in the chain attempted to interlock as closely as possible so that none of the links could be torn out. The block was 'black' because political significance was attributed to the colour, but also because individual members of the collective dressed in black. Even their heads were enveloped in black material, mostly close-fitting cotton masks like those worn under the helmets of motorcyclists to protect them from the wind. The black 'hate-caps' - usually with narrow red appliqué around the eye slit - had a threatening effect en masse and became the logo of a movement obsessed with conspiracy and anonymity.9
Technophobia and Ghosts
With a traffic cone as their logo, a group of young men fascinated by interlocking chains, secrecy and cars worked in a space of about thirty square metres.10 Their room, crammed full with electronic devices, was located in an inconspicuous office building with rows of uniformly sized windows, similar to many that sprang up all over Germany after the war. Since the band from Düsseldorf regarded the German phobia about technology that was widespread in the seventies as a 'catastrophic misjudgement of the situation', they regarded themselves primarily as 'workers' rather than musicians or artists.11 Although their musical approach and the tools they used were contemporary, they were packaged visually in a nostalgic futurism, repeatedly borrowing set pieces from past eras. In a country that has only come to terms with its National Socialist past either insufficiently or with exaggerated thoroughness, confusion was occasioned not only by the uniform appearance of the band but also by their ambiguous way of playing with the ghosts of the Third Reich.12
Against the Commutability of Meanings
After the record Radio-Activität (1975) led to misunderstandings and the accusation of an ambiguous use of Nazi symbolism, Kraftwerk began working with a more precise identification of their references. Their record Die Mensch-maschine (1978) referred neither to German nor Italian fascism but to the communist utopia of man and machine locked in an unbreakable embrace.13 Yet it was again interpreted as being fascist. In this way, Kraftwerk involuntarily contributed to the 'historians' dispute' that erupted in Germany in the eighties. These years of debate were triggered by attempts on the part of conservative historians to 'relativise' National Socialist crimes by comparing them with contemporaneous events in the Soviet Union committed under the auspices of the hammer and sickle.
Magic of Machine Repetition
Kraftwerk's new perspective on the magic of machine repetition was inter-nationally more influential. Their pioneering work with the synthesizer, taken for granted today as a device for programming an automatised sequence of functional instructions, laid the foundation for a changed fascination with serial repetition. In the movement impelled by Kraftwerk, the dynamic of the machine referred less to production-oriented added value and more to a detached form of beauty, such as trance forms that had long been overshadowed by the ideological charge of machines and the way they were used.14 The trance of the serial, whether as sound structure or visuals, made it possible to experience the magic of machine repetition in a way that had been previously unimaginable.
Logic of the Pattern
I opened another door. In the space behind it there was a figure that I did not recognise as a woman at first, because she was dressed as a man. She pressed a folded note into my hand. I opened it and read, 'masks can be tools to disguise the face of a person, allowing this person to penetrate into a terrain that would otherwise be closed to them and take the booty there'. When I looked up again she had vanished. Although it was a repetition, it looked like an end, which made no sense in the logic of the pattern.
Translated by Aileen Derieg
'Ich war eine Glocke' (I was a bell) is written in a speech bubble in a drawing (Untitled, 1987) by Rosemarie Trockel. This confession of her own past is shot from a pistol by a naked woman wearing only a mask. The drawing was made in conjunction with the work Balaklava (1986), a series of five machine-fabricated woolen hats - such as those also sold as protection from the cold -released in an edition of ten.
The word 'multitude' has recently enjoyed a greater degree of popularity due to the bestseller Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
The swastika with left-turning bars is a symbol of the cycle of life in Buddhism and has sometimes been identified with the masculine principle. In its right-turning form it was a symbol of the feminine power of reproduction in Mesopotamia. The latter was to be used as a logo for the Volkswagen.
Ferdinand Porsche - an obsessive inventor who held over a thousand patents -had founded a construction office in 1931 and later supervised the establishment of the Volkswagen works. His son Ferdinand, who was later called'Ferry' to better distinguish him from his father, founded the well-known sports-car company after the war. His son Ferdinand took over the company in the 1960s. Although the Porsche sports car was technically based on individual construction parts of the Volkswagen, as a product it primarily made use of a desire to distinguish oneself from the mass on the highway.
The nickname 'Beetle' was given to the VW later, allegedly due to an article in The New York Times.
The one-millionth VW Beetle came into the light of day as early as 1955. The last Beetle left the assembly line in 2003 in Mexico, long after the production of the car had been discontinued in Europe and the USA.
Perhaps because it was just out of fashion or some did not want to believe that it was over, it was popular for a certain period to attach a 'post-' in front of Fordism.
What became one of the central concepts of this movement was the metaphor borrowed by Jean François Lyotard from domestic handiwork, a 'patchwork of minorities'.
The Italian company Prada later used a similar logo strategy.
In the 1970s the group drove ponderous Mercedes limousines, but switched in the 1980s to the VW Golf for ecological reasons.
In the late 1970s the Germans were gripped by a deep fear of computers, a so-called 'census', the idea of the 'transparent man' and nuclear power.
The Kraftwerk song with the familiar lines 'Wir fahr'n, fahr'n, fahr'n auf der Autobahn' was also an ironic play on the assertion, widespread in West Germany, 'not everything Hitler did was bad, the Autobahn, for example…'
In addition to an overly unambiguous adaptation of the aesthetics of Russian constructivism, there was an additional remark on the cover, 'inspired by El Lissizsky'.
The appearance of an ideological vacuum suggested in the 1980s and seemingly affirmed by the collapse of the East Bloc can hardly be so uniformly presumed today.
