April 18th, 1:26 AM, at the long steel table in the back of the recycling depot on Ferrier, where they permit me to stay after hours because I asked with the wrong amount of seriousness and it confused everyone involved. This is the seventh station and it is the one I was most afraid of. I had spent six paintings insisting that these objects possess an interior life, and I had never once looked inside one.
The casing came away in a single curl. That curl is in the painting, lying in the left compartment: a strip of thin steel rolled on itself like a shaving off a plane, still bright on the inner face where nothing had ever touched it. And beneath the casing, the thing itself. Not a mechanism. Not a device. A column of dark layers, disc pressed upon disc pressed upon disc, so tightly compacted that the entire interior reads as a stack of pages. Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing shows an old man at a table with a skull and a book, and every commentary I have read talks about the skull. I have always thought the painting is about the book: the enormous open volume taking half the canvas, the light landing squarely on the page and not on the man. The battery is a book. It is a column of pressed pages that were read once, at length, by a device that then forgot them entirely and asked for another. I painted this station three times. The first two were too triumphant. The viewer is not meant to feel discovery here. The viewer is meant to feel the particular embarrassment of having been right about something for six paintings and for the wrong reasons.
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