Twenty-four small windows in a brass plate, and almost nothing written in any of them.
I painted this straight on and centred, with the little bulb above throwing light down the face of the plate so that the upper windows are bright and the lower ones fall away. That gradient is the only drama I have allowed myself here. The object does not need help.
Count them. Twelve on the left, twelve on the right. Each one is a slot behind a small glazed window, each one intended to hold a card with a surname on it, and this arrangement has been standard on this continent for a century because it works and because nobody has thought of anything better.
Now read them.
You cannot. That is the painting. Perhaps four of the twenty-four still hold anything legible, and I have painted those four no more clearly than they were, which is to say barely. The rest are pale cream, or grey, or the ghost of pencil, or empty behind the glass. Paper bleaches. Ink is not permanent, particularly the ink in a ballpoint pen in 1974. Cards get pulled when a tenant leaves and the next tenant does not bother, and after the third or fourth turnover the slot has simply stopped being a thing anybody fills in.
So here is a device for finding a specific person in a building of twenty-four households, mounted at the only entrance, in continuous use, containing no usable information whatsoever.
The building runs anyway. Everyone who lives there knows their own button by position. Third down on the right. You do not read your own intercom, you count to it, and a visitor who does not already know the count is simply out of luck and will have to telephone from the pavement, which is what everybody does.
The brass is the pleasure of the picture. It has not been polished since the sixties and what happens to unpolished brass over that long is worth a career of looking at. It goes brown, then a dull olive in the recesses where hands do not reach, then almost black in the screw wells. Where thumbs have travelled, over and over, in the same tracks beside the buttons, it comes back up to something like gold.
The building is a hundred and fifteen years old and the only part of the front door that still shines is the part people touch.