The housing is gone and the arm is still there, and for the first time in this series there is no red light anywhere in the painting.
I had not anticipated how much that would change. Eight panels with a hard red point in them, and then this, and the whole thing goes warm and yellow and slack. The sodium lamp on the opposite wall throws a broad circle across the brick, and the bracket sits inside that circle, curved, empty, with the mounting plate and four bolts and nothing on the end of it.
It looks like a hook. It cannot help looking like a hook. A curved steel arm coming off a wall at head height plus four feet, with nothing hanging from it, in an alley at night.
The removal was done properly, which surprised me. The cable has been cut back flush and the conduit capped. Somebody with a van and a work order came and took the camera down, and left the bracket because taking a bracket off old brick means making four holes worse and then filling them, and nobody pays for that.
So the bracket will stay. It will be there when the building changes hands. It will outlast every camera that gets hung on it, and it will probably outlast the practice of hanging cameras on walls at all, which will end within twenty years when the function moves somewhere it cannot be reached with a ladder or a can of primer.
I have spent a lot of time in this series on the question of what an institution is, and I think this panel is where I got closest to an answer that satisfies me. It is not the camera. The camera was replaced twice in eleven months by my count, once after the paint and once after the cut. It is not the feed, which was severed for the last quarter of the period without any consequence I could detect.
It is the bracket. It is the fixed point on the wall that determines where the looking will happen from, drilled once, by somebody who is no longer employed there, and never moved again.
Everything else is consumable.