Ford, Henry always rules.
The valuable things come from the States, and the cheap stuff from China they said. Everything runs, everything rolls, everything works, as long as you stay obedient at your station on the line. I wanted to see what happens when you stop that belt for a moment.
How could we live and work together then?Do we even have another choice?
But instead of feeding it with new gadgets or promises, I loaded it with the things the system itself produces, the things it can’t live without: the Bible, the Gas(Benzin)can, the bomb, the burger, and the Bush.
Five B-things on the A-Line, seen from my little German perspective behind the Atlantic. A little provincial grumbling, maybe. B for second choice, B for burden, B for bullshit. Objects that make life heavier, not lighter.
Polluters, gluttons, warriors, and fanatics, all aboard the B-Ark, as Douglas Adams would say.
Each item on that line is a kind of totem, a symbol of what the West has turned itself into:
Faith as a product.
Energy as currency.
Violence as routine
Consumption as religion.
Power as a pose, one trimmed like a hedge.
The material: Nero Marquinia, that deep black marble, almost as dark as American oil, only much more expensive per barrel. It carries the weight of these things with dignity, as if saying, “You wanted it, now bear it.”
Alternatives: none.
Every object was carved by hand (haha) from different types of marble, the Bible in holy white, the jerrycan in dirty grey, the bomb in soft pink marble, the burger with creamy alabaster cheese, and the eagle over a green bush in noble blue quartzite.
A whole civilization turned into a conveyor-belt miniature.
Not shut down, just eternally polished.
Back then, in 2007, George W. Bush was President. America spoke of freedom while dropping bombs, of faith while pumping oil, and of democracy while installing markets, unfair and ass-kissing to the rich.
I stood in my small atelier in Carrara and thought: This is the real Assembly Line, a pilgrimage route of symbols that no one sees anymore, because they’ve become too normal to notice.
Today, almost twenty years later, it still runs. Faster, slicker, more merciless.
The hands have been replaced by algorithms & robots, the line by data, the faith renamed Update 2.0. But the symbols haven’t changed, only the packaging got prettier.
Sometimes, when I look at old photos of the sculpture, I think: Maybe this A-Line was never a production line at all, but our damnation, our fate. Our chain that keeps us slaves to the system until AI finally gives us the mercy shot.
Carrara 2007
