February 2nd, 6:15 AM, the municipal storage bay off the yard on Delacroix, where I had gone to ask about a permit and found the fifth station waiting for me instead, under a caged bulkhead lamp that has not been cleaned since it was installed.
They were stacked. Two towers of them, thirty or forty deep, brand new, their collars still the hard white of a fresh bandage, nested so tightly into one another that they had stopped being objects and become one ribbed column each. And in front of them, on the concrete, alone and unstacked, stood mine. Shorter than them by a head, because it no longer has a head. Base cracked at the corner. Collar the colour of weak tea. It cannot be stacked, and that is the entire subject of the painting: a thing that cannot be nested back into its own kind has to stand in front of them for the rest of its life. The old painters counted first and painted second. Caravaggio would not work on a canvas woven finer than nine threads to the inch, and the reason was arithmetic: a coarse weave lets you set out how many objects, how many figures, and the one who is neither. I have attempted the same arithmetic. Two stacks. One survivor. One lamp in a cage, throwing its light down the left wall and declining to reach the back of the bay. The viewer will try to count the new cones and will not be able to. This is intentional, and it is also simply what happens when a person tries to count them. I made three attempts myself and arrived at thirty-one, thirty-six, and thirty-one again. The foreman came out and asked whether I was from the province. I said I was from the fifth station of the Gospel of the Orange Traffic Cone, and he let me stay another ten minutes, which is longer than most people allow me.
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