An assemblage of plastic and rubber objects hanging from a bike rack, with a sheet of plywood attached to the wall by a wire, recalls Tatlin's counter reliefs.
As you wander about Nari Ward's "Savior" (1996), an assemblage of plastic garbage bags, bottles, an old ladder, a mirror and other junky objects stuffed into a rusted shopping cart, you haven't the slightest idea of what the message is supposed to be, even as you feel the effects of the work infiltrating your mind.
It can thus be argued that it's really thought and concepts that give an experimental system its identity and persistence conditions; without concepts it's really just a loose assemblage of plastic, glass, metal, and dead stuff coming out of a blender.
"Pre-New" assemblages of plastic flowers, toys, and mirrors gave way to "The New": fluorescent-lit, spotless vacuum cleaners, hermetically sealed in Plexiglas cases.
On a grassy knoll behind a tent at the ill-fated Hudson Project, Jon Hopkins and I are sitting next to each other on two cheap assemblages of plastic and metal that are pretending to be chairs.
And so, with a clipboard in hand, wearing a gray shirt and no tie, McDonald approached a homeless man who was standing on Skid Row in Los Angeles, behind an assemblage of black plastic bags and a bicycle wheel.
We learn that she attended art school at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, but economic hardship prevented her from continuing her studies; now, she constructs and hangs from her ceiling weird sculptures like the Garbage Phoenix, a menacing assemblage of colored plastic forks and knives scavenged from her employers' parties.
This exhibition includes diaristic pictures and handmade dolls; enigmatic assemblages of wire, plastic reflectors and golf balls by the unknown artist called the Philadelphia Wireman; and decorated jugs by an anonymous creator.
So to procure an iced almond-macadamia milk latte during lunch, she must scurry past an assemblage of dirty socks, plastic gloves and cigarette butts on the steep staircase that runs parallel to the rail. .
But the bike's 767-pound assemblage of aluminum, steel and plastic composites is beside the point.
First seen in 1998 at the Here theater complex in SoHo, where it was performed in a 500-gallon tank of a stage, the show employs a singularly exotic corps de ballet: a spectral assemblage of swaths of cloth, plastics, feathers, dyes and fishing lures that unfurl, float, dissolve and bob in water in rhythm to Berlioz's music.
