Carsten Becker

text-art-and-standards-en

Art and standards. DIN standards and RAL colors in Carsten Becker's work series DIN

Anika Reineke, Konstanze Wolter, March 2022

Published in: Kunst und Werk – Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie 2022, ed. Alexander Friedrich et al., Baden-Baden 2022, page 157 – 173, ISBN 978-3-8487-7300-8. Order this issue

Image: Kunst und Werk – Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie 2022, pages 162–163

Abstract

The conceptual photographic work series DIN (2019–2022) by Berlin-based artist Carsten Becker is an occasion to look at the past, present and future of standardisation in technology as well as society and to ask about the influence and challenges of standards for the people. The article is divided into three parts: Konstanze Wolter takes Becker’s work as a starting point reflecting the role of the normed in contemporary global society, not only in industrial but also in social contexts. She focusses on the power of such regulations, be it in the field of global economy, the internet, or biotechnology. This is followed by a selection of works by Becker that were shown in February and March 2022 in the solo exhibition Norm in Chemnitz, Germany. In the last part, Anika Reineke examines Becker’s series DIN from an art historical perspective. On the one hand, she locates his works in the history of artistic approaches to repetition, pattern and seriality and, on the other hand, she examines the connection between industrial standardisation and the military field since 1785, as a key to the understanding of Becker’s work.

Excerpt | Excerpt as PDF (in German)

The eerie beauty of efficiency

Anika Reineke

[…] In DIN, Becker focuses on standard parts that were developed for military and commercial purposes. Framed photo prints in the formats 42x59, 59x84 and 84x119 centimeters show, for example, the club handle standardized in 1924, which was used as a control element for machines, or the Steinie form from 1953, also called a 'bomb' in everyday language as a beer bottle. What Becker's objects have in common is that they were standardized so that they could be mass-produced on different machines by different manufacturers. They all follow the standards of DIN, which was founded in 1917. At that time, the idea of standardizing the world of things was in the air, as evidenced by the German Goods Book (Deutsche Warenbuch) published by the Dürerbund-Werkbund cooperative in 1915.
Using the complex technical process of macro photography, known for its crisp image definition, Becker draws the viewer's attention to the clear form of the standard parts. The simplest explanation for their pleasant appearance is the perfection of the axially symmetrical contours, such as the elongated, convex curvature of the club handle, and the proportional composition of the parts, such as the one-to-two-thirds ratio of the bottles in Euroform 2 (olive green, chocolate brown). These representatives of universal form appear in Becker's work as apologists for the beauty of industrial production, as if Adolf Loos' polemic Ornament and Crime (1908) and Hermann Muthesius' idea of the “norm of good form” had come true. Using the medium of photography, Becker transfers these everyday objects into the infinity of a white space, familiar to viewers as the white cube of the art gallery. Removed from their context of use in this way, the curves, swings, grooves, lines and corners of the objects cannot be overlooked. As industrial objets trouvés, as archetypes of everyday objects, Vichyform 2 (red-brown), for example, shows the elegance of the aspiring form, Einheitsglas (violet) reveals a graceful interplay of roundings and edges. Others, such as the Swing C-Washers and the smooth Ball knobs, radiate a sublime calm in their abstract unrecognizability.
The colors chosen by Becker contribute to this impression; only through them does he transform the infinitely repeatable into individual pieces, diffusing them into the sphere of art through Becker's treatment. Their matt colors absorb the light, so that the razor-sharp outlines make them appear flat. In their inner form, however, the colors draw the eye to the three-dimensional shadows and points of light of these everyday sculptures.
Becker painted the representatives of these universal shapes with shades from the German RAL color collection, which is named after the Reich Committee for Delivery Conditions (Reichsausschuss für Lieferbedingungen) founded in 1925. It still lists the colors used by the German authorities and the military today. Although designed for infinite repetition, some of these RAL colors were finite: RAL 4000, the violet of the Rheingold luxury train on Becker's Einheitsglas, which ran from 1928 to 1939, and dark yellow, the color of his ball knob used for camouflage against infrared night vision devices, were removed from the color register after the Second World War. Other shades have survived in the paint collection, but have undergone changes in formulation and color effect, such as black grey (also known as tank grey) or ivory.
Carsten Becker investigated these buried standard colors of the war: For the RAL series (2017-2021), he collaborated with Jürgen Kiroff from Fürth, who took over the archive of the German Institute for Quality Assurance and Certification (RAL) in 2009, the successor to the Reich Committee for Delivery Conditions. With the help of old RAL color charts, formulas and archive documents, they reconstructed the tonality of colors that are no longer available or no longer available in their original shade. As components of these colors are no longer produced today, it took numerous attempts to achieve an authentic approximation of the historical color effect. Becker also pursued this in the subsequent Agfacolor series (2018-2021), which is based on color slides of German propaganda soldiers in the 1930s.
During Becker's research for the DIN series, it became clear that not only is the history of the use of RAL colors partially unexplored, but the history of numerous DIN standards is also difficult to reconstruct. Nevertheless, Becker found numerous standard parts that were standardized during the Second World War or were used for weapons and war equipment, such as the ball knob standardized in 1937. This also includes the Vichy shape bottle, named after Vichy, the French spring water spa and seat of General Pétain's regime, which collaborated with the National Socialists, as well as a branch of the AFNOR, which was regulated by Germany; the bottle shape was first standardized by DIN in 1942. In Becker's conceptual photography, these historical-military contexts seem to lie directly beneath the immaculate layer of paint and in the shadows of the perfectly formed metal parts. […]

Anika Reineke is a curator at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany

Series

DIN

Show

Norm, Konstanze Wolter eartis contemporary, 2022