Clearly Masi's replication of managerial consciousness is also concerned with how this is deeply implicated in patriarchal culture. To invoke expertise and reason is to invoke male domination. Masi's art may offer us unseen agents of control and retribution but it is difficult to imagine them being other than men. But it is not just the content of the work that marks this out. The use of materials and procedures (the stuffing of animals, the careful and elaborate staging of the elements, in essence the calculated fabrication of effects) realises a world in which the manipulative skills of the technician are a preparation for death. It is not surprising therefore that, in work that has consistently concerned itself with human distancing from nature and the sphere of the moral-practical, Masi should visualise death so directly in his currentwork. If in the earlier tableau nature is subjugated, here it is literally dead; the tableau form has been transformed from a site of conflict to a memento mori. Shed (1979/84) consists of a central sarcophagus or bier surrounded by a number of drawings of the structure at various stages. Exposed on the bier is a doubleheaded fossilized creature - half-human, half-reptile - and various objects and implements similar to ones in other tableaux: cones, hyperdermic needles, an urn. Over the structure stands a canopy of copper. Here the imaginative space surrounding Masi's use of the nature-culture opposition becomes one of doomed post-history: the emblematic death of our life-world. What was articulated at the level of struggle is now memorialized. It's a deeply pessimistic work, that not only sharpens the kinship all Masi's work has with a sense of the memorial (it is difficult not to see the tableau form as a visualization of death) but clearly locates its own sense of pathos as a product of the eighties.

In fact this work focuses on the question that all Masi's work asks. How do you represent the disfiguration of power in a language and a form that would make such feelings real to large numbers of people? How do you create a public form for such feelings that will enable those feelings to remain readable? Of course these are the questions that art with the public and critical aspirations asks itself, and the answer is always: with great difficulty. In a culture that makes the use of power benign, the idea of constructing memorials to its abuse is merely pathetic; there can be no commemorative role for such critical forms in the face of the binding links between public monuments, and dominant ideology. As Benedict Anderson has said in his book on nationalism, Imagined Communities, the cultural significance and power of this dominant ideology becomes apparent when one tries to imagine a "Tomb of the Unknown Marxist" or a "Cenotaph for Fallen Liberals". "Is a sense of absurdity unavoidable?" he asks. Clearly it is. And this is, if not the struggle, then the paradox of Masi's work. On the one hand it begins from a position of resistance to such a loss, and on the other it acknowledges that for the works to have the power and authority they do remains dependent on such restricted imaginings. For Masi's work to remain readable they must, so to speak, remain under darkness.