The Art of Assemblage at La Venta

How might the meaning of monumental sculpture be ephemeral? At La Venta, objects from greenstone figurines to massive basalt sculptures were recycled, reworked, and moved around the landscape, their new configurations and associations creating new kinds of meaning and enabling new kinds of ritual interaction. This essay considers the assemblage, and not just the individual work, as an important category of art-historical analysis. By considering the divergent materialities of stelae, celts, figurines, and colossal heads, as well as the role that ephemeral materials played in the construction of ritually significant assemblages, I explore the connections between monumentality, memory, and forgetting at La Venta.