The German title Arisch Meter is fire-branded onto a 200-centimetre haberdasher’s yardstick. Mauri introduced the theme of the ideologically connoted object in the late 1980s. He subsequently developed it in the 1995 ‘Arierwiege’ exhibition-installation (inv. 1023), consisting of works-objects ‘bearing witness to the traditional membership of a community that consumed its prejudices’, in which each accessory, labelled ‘Aryan’, ‘aspires to evoke the ambiguous design of an ideology’.1 Two copies of the work were made (inv. 3530).

1. F. Mauri, ‘De Chirico spiato’, in Giorgio De Chirico: Nulla sine tragoedia gloria. Atti del Convegno Europeo di Studi, edited by C. Crescentini, m&m – maschietto e musolino, Florence, 2002, p. 305.