performance
Song for Henry Ford (excerpt of the 25 min video performance)
This looping, repetitive song is a farewell to Fordism, partly nostalgic, partly sarcastic.
Background is the understanding that Fordism and Taylorism led to similar social and technological developments in the »Communist« East and Capitalist West. It turns out that the state centered production in Eastern countries in that period has to be understood much less as Communism than as another form of a Fordist shaping of society with a totalitarian state centered ownership of means of production. Thus the recent historical changes can be read as the fall of Fordism in its state centered form in the »East« (during the late 1980s) and Fordism in a social-liberal version of the »West« (ongoing – perceived as a series of crises). So we are not dealing with an end of history, but of Fordism.