Given a similar open-ended approach, Shrine confounds expectations. The monument has been one of the main routes by which artistic practice has been placed, in acceptable guise, before the eyes of the public. Shrine, however, despite using the rich language of commemorative sculpture, is profoundly anti-monumental. The raised platform to which one gains access by a short flight of steps, the religious symbolism and the pervasively decorous and seemly tone of the constituent parts, serve only to impress on the viewer the ludicrous ambition of believing that one could construct a monument to anything at all. In that sense it poses a series of interesting questions about how one understands a work of art to be functioning, or the degree to which it is functional. Does this construction work as a monument to human folly, or as a work which engages with some of the issues which signal such folly? At a time when the desire of art for mass social pertinence and the self-declared status of design as significant style are becoming increasingly confused by slack thinking, Masi's work appears as a model of perceptual clarity. By determinedly shifting the 'look' of his work into the history of art discourse, he pre-empts the possibililty of its being 'used' in any direct or uncomplicated fashion.

The Nissen-like canopy of the shrine houses three marble sculptures and a marble sarcophagus from which 'spills' a variety of bronze objects. With the exception of a jaw bone, all the bronze objects are cast from items in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. They are pieces of French, German, American, Japanese and British equipment from the two world wars. After casting them, Masi has used a variety of finishing techniques to invest each with a patina which acts as a sign of historical placement. Thus they become cultural images that are often at odds with the reality of the originals from which they derive. The hand-grenade is actually British, although it 'looks' otherwise. Surely it was the Germans who used grenades with handles, ours looked like small pineapples didn't they? They must have, it says so in the comics. The flagon is cast from a trophy awarded to a German second world war pilot for 'kills' during the invasion of Poland. The original is fashioned in delicate silver, while its 'cultural memory' seems lumpen and brutish.

As a collection, these items behave in a manner quite different to the objects in Masi's earlier constructions. With a work such as Barrier, in which two Rhesus monkeys stare horrified through a double glass screen behind which are shapes in a variety of materials from terra cotta through to polished chrome, the objects can be seen as ideal forms; ultimate rationalism is viewed with anguish and profound pessimism. But in the case of Shrine, the realism of these things brings them immediately closer to the viewer at the same time as such intimacy is refuted by the distancing effect of the patination.

The marble sculptures are both anthropomorphic and abstract; and they are utterly absurd. Forms balance on other forms in a decidedly precarious manner, suggesting through their tentative positioning the volatile existence of those values and ideas in honour of which they might have been erected. The forms of these sculptures derive from the earliest drawings for Shrine, executed in 1980 at the same time as another series of drawings Rites, and from two wall-pieces; Totem No.1 (1981) has a photograph of an animal head balanced at the top of an arrangement of simple geometric shapes cut out of black card, and Deathshead Totem (1984) is a column of photocopies, of a skull, on which excessive toner has streaked, diffusing and partially obscuring the image.

At the corners of Shrine are four poles. On one a lamp casts a security beam down onto the construction; the second has a functioning Tannoy speaker; the third is a flagpole, upside down, its 'hoisted' white flag draped over the steps leading up to the platform; on the fourth a monitoring CC video camera pans slowly back and forth surveying those who look at the work. In a small cubicle nearby it is possible to watch others viewing the work; similarly it is possible to be watched by them as you view it. The presence of the video monitor certainly increases one's feelings of alienation, it mediates one's relationship to the construction, but at the same time it unmasks one's complicity, one's status as part ofthe work. The whiteness of the flag is less a sign of defeat (although its inversion might conceivably imply resistance to it) than of non-specificity. It is not this or that nation which is being impugned through the abuse of the flag, but rather the very idea of nationhood.