Assemblages/ Found Things

My Worktable: Photo, Greg Duff

The significance of a found object is that it has none. Decathected, by being lost—though I don’t mean lost, so much as discarded. The objects I find on the street, in empty lots. Not things still useful—things sticky with the snare of desire. The desire that adheres to and generates the delusion of ownership. I like these objects because they are free. I don’t want to own them. I don’t want to return them to a state of servitude, to become their slave. When collected, placed in some degree of proximity, they suggest their own form of desire… objects placed beside, under, inside another object--I sense affinity—or indifference. If the former—it is as though they have become a new object, each retaining its own identity, but now also, a part—of something else. These are the assemblages that I build… or better-- build themselves when I lend them my attention. The prime rule… is that there must be no rules. Else I would be the Master, the enforcer, the tyrant god … and so, eviscerate my own existence… for there are no gods. No Masters. Were I to aspire to that… I would not be.

Poor Hamlet…