Factory Series 2013
"One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind."
-Walter Benjamin, " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
"The Factory Series" is performance/installation by Brent Howard for which the artist will fabricate stylized icons of a factory that he has designed. The performance and residency will be taken place at Seton Gallery at the University of New Haven.
Howard will construct these factory icons during eight-hour shifts, five days a week, in a manner consistent with the standard forty-hour workweek established by Henry Ford on May 1, 1926. Each day the artists will take a fifteen-minute break in the morning and a thirty-minute lunch break around noon. Each workday will begin at 7:00 am and end 3:30 P.M beginning Monday, May 13 2013 and concluding Friday, May 17, 2013.
The artist will punch in on a time clock when he arrives to work and punch out when ever he breaks or leaves for the day. The sculptures that are fabricated during the performance will be identical in dimensions, material and fabrication and will be unsigned and sold at the end of the performance.
The minute the forty hours are complete the artist will stop production and nothing will be altered for the next three weeks until the closing of the show.
...the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his "confidence."
-Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author"