Although the objects in the pieces are handled with the distancing of Conceptual practice (The idea becomes the machine that makes the art (1 ) wrote Sol LeWitt) nevertheless their signifying role has undergone and is undergoing considerable changes. Whereas Kosuth's One and Three Chairs comprised an ordinary wooden folding chair in tandem with its photograph and a dictionary definition as an undifferentiated indicator of 'chairness', Masi's objects participate in a more open-ended scenario. They are stripped, direct, sometimes stylised in order both to assert their 'reality' and to be imbued with referential meanings within the context of each asemblage and it's juxtapositions.

A chair, as a relatively neutral cultural object, can readily be appropriated while maintaining its inherent formal and functional nature (and it might be relevant to reflect on the ubiquity of 'the chair' in contemporary performance art and dance ever since Rauschenberg strapped a chair to a Merce Cunningham dancer in the 1960's). But there are also secondary and tertiary orders of objects where appropriation becomes more suspect either because the functional symbolism of the object is incontrovertible or its inherent nature subsumes the symbolic.

Surgical instruments (which Masi used in earlier constructions Search 1975-77 and Meeting 1976-78) are so precisely modified for a specific function as to clearly proclaim it. They project an aura of surgery, wounds, blood and destruction - or healing. A skull, however, is death, not a symbol of it. Even when transformed materially, cast in bronze as in Deathshead Helmet or in Raku-fired clay as Trophy Room:1 in 10, the readings of skulls, bones, burial sites and tombs are clear and unequivocal. The stuffed animals, the dogs, monkeys, birds and rats which Masi has used over the years, however, demand multiple, even circular readings: rats are vermin, scavengers and disease-bearers, the objects of laboratory experimentation, symbols of exploitation. A dog is man's best friend; but a stuffed dog standing in for a man in a tableau also represents the beast in man, the beast subdued, man as victim of his own bestiality.

It is when Masi combines these different 'orders' of objects that readings of his works become complicated and intentionally ambiguous. What remains consistent however, what bonds the disparate elements together, is the treatment and presentation of the material. Uniformly well-crafted, highly finished, fixed in immutable physical relationships, the assemblages achieve the alienation of precision. Behind this precision is the American born Masi who spent three years as a teenager in a military academy, but left the States because he didn't like the national concept of continuous improvement. Behind this disturbing elegance and high resolution is the Masi of Italian extraction who studied in Milan, who responds to materials, finishes and craftsmanship but questions the tyranny of order. Behind this elaborate orchestration of resources is the Masi who learned traditional bottegha practice while assisting in Valerio Adami's Paris studio, but pursued a personal path outside of this collaboration.

Central to all the work is a concern with issues of power. At times this is a general concern, framed within metaphorical tableaux. Recently it has become a more directly political commentary, as in the work Trophy Room: 1 in 10 concerning unemployment, mounted in The State of the Nation exhibition at Coventry.

'The decision makers', writes Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its optimizing the system's performance-efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard.' (2). That certain level of terror within the efficient exercise of power is where Masi operates, and he is not chary of using the blatant, the imbued objects which I have described as the 'tertiary order', to achieve his effect.