Bill Brown excavates the deep philosophical history of assemblage in this talk. He explores assembly as an artistic practice in literature and the plastic arts while bringing the work of Theaster Gates, Rina Banerjee, William Burroughs, Tan Lin, and many others into a newly assembled conversation.

Bill Brown is deputy provost for the arts and Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the Department of English, Visual Arts, and the College. He is a principal investigator for the Object Cultures Project within the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and has been a coeditor of the University of Chicago’s journal of art, culture, and politics, Critical Inquiry. He has published award-winning essays and books that engage the literary, visual, and plastic arts.