The sheaf stands nine feet high in the curved end of the room, bound at three heights with flat steel bands, and it contains, by my count, six hundred and forty cords. I lost the count twice and started over both times.
This is the ninth station and it is the closest the chapel comes to an altar. The cords are packed vertically, orange and charcoal and bone, and at the top and the bottom they burst outward into a dense crown of fittings, so the silhouette is that of a wheat sheaf tied for the harvest. It stands on a black steel disc set flush with the floor. Nothing supports it from behind. The three bands are doing all of the work, exactly as bands have always done all the work in every bundle of anything carried by anyone.
Warm light rakes it from the right, which is the arrangement Caravaggio uses in The Conversion of Saint Paul, where the light does not come from a place so much as it simply arrives. The viewer standing directly in front of the sheaf will find that at this scale the piece does not read as garbage. Six hundred cords is a material. Six cords is a mess. Somewhere between six and six hundred a discarded thing stops being refuse and becomes a substance, and the entire argument of Post-Consumer Baroque is that the number is far lower than anyone wants to admit.
I bound it on a Tuesday. It took nine hours and I did not eat. Fasciculus sanctorum inutilium.
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