To begin this brief consideration of Matthew Buckingham's extraordinary exhibition at Henry Art Gallery, and also his artistic project as a whole, let us read the opening sentence of a very old book, Aristotle's The Politics: "Observation shows us, first, that every polis is a species of association, and, secondly, that all associations come into being for the sake of some good...." The second observation in this sentence ("the sake of some good") is worthless—there is no good or bad reason for anything to be or not to be. The first observation in the sentence, however, is golden. Its value is this: A city is a species of association, and, as the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde was to argue at the end of the 19th century, everything is a species of association (flesh, stone, stars).

We find this understanding at work in Buckingham's films, narratives, photographs, and installations. For example, Play the Story, the exhibition at the Henry, is the democratization of several associations—historical event, political movement, geological development, urban situation, cinematic sequence, and architectural form. In the installation called The Spirit and the Letter, we see the historical (Europe at the end of the 19th century), the political (the emergence of the modern feminist movement), and the architectural (neoclassicism as a space of importance, wealth, and prestige). The subject of the installation is Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th-century feminist and the mother of a woman, Mary Shelley, whose fictional creation, the monster in Frankenstein, is one of the leading symbols of an age, the 19th century, that established the world that we now occupy—a world characterized by international commerce, industrial capitalism, finance banking, urbanization, and a full reliance on the advances made in science and technology.

As if reversing (and reversing again) the way one sees an image within a room-sized camera obscura, The Spirit and the Letter has a neoclassical hall that's projected on the west wall, a golden chandelier that rises from the middle of the floor, and a heavy mirror hanging on the east wall. Walking toward or away from the chandelier gives one the feeling of walking upside down on the ceiling. And in the image projected on the wall, an actor playing Wollstonecraft walks upside down on the ceiling. Who is upside down? You or her? The confusion is aesthetically pleasing. So, too, is the ghostly Wollstonecraft, who reads passages drawn mainly from her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the white light that brightens a window, and the deep mirror on the east wall that reflects this delicate arrangement. The marvelous thing about this and Buckingham's other installations—False Future (which concerns the "arrival of cinema") and Everything I Need (which concerns the late life of the Jewish-German doctor and scientific hand-reader Charlotte Wolff)—is that these associations are not prioritized or resolved. Each association retains its independence.

Bruno Latour, a French social theorist, once pointed out this series in a lab: a rat, the brain of that rat, a neuron in the brain of that rat. Each part in this series has no resemblance to the other parts, though they are of one thing. There is no visible continuity from the rat (one association) to its brain (another association), and from the brain to a single cell in that brain (yet another association). Something similar is at work in Buckingham's art. There is a cinematic association (the projection), there is a political association (the speech), and there is an architectural association (the neoclassical interior). One is not dependent on the others, and one does not overwhelm the others. And what underlies these discontinuities is the absence of an organizing teleology—Aristotle's "the good."

But there is one installation that ultimately fails us: The Six Grandfathers, which concerns the history of what is now called Mount Rushmore. A series of notes posted on the wall describe its geological and social history. We learn that Mount Rushmore, originally called Six Grandfathers by the Lakota Sioux and shaped by geological events that happened 66 million years ago, is the site of a lot of suffering, greed, state-sponsored terrorism, and broken promises. The series of notes ends with a poster that imagines the monument 500,000 years from today: rubble rising up to four time-effaced presidents. The message is clear and wrong and classical: All that is done by humans is done in vain. Geological events, therefore, are seen as more real than human events. But in reality, human processes—be they architectural, political, or cinematic—are natural processes. The Six Grandfathers is the only crack in a perfectly democratic exhibition.