Under the housing of a two slot toaster there is a rack, and the rack is the reason for everything else. Two mica boards, a lattice of wire wound back and forth across them in perhaps forty passes, a carriage, a spring, a bracket, and the green lever on the end of a rod. That is the whole animal. I brought it home from the yard and took the shell off with a screwdriver, and the ninth station is what was underneath.
I had not expected it to be beautiful, and I want to be careful about how I say this. It is not beautiful in the way the housing was beautiful, which was the beauty of a surface polished by hands over eleven years. It is beautiful the way the inside of an instrument is beautiful. Every wire sits at a considered distance from every other wire. Nothing is decorative. Somebody in a factory in the middle of the last century solved the problem of heating two slices of bread evenly, and then a thousand people copied that solution, and it has not needed improving since.
The shell stands behind, empty, tipped back against a spare plate on the bench. The rack stands in front, in the light, at three quarters. I arranged them in that order deliberately. For nine stations the housing has been the subject and the rack has been a rumour; here the surface goes into the middle distance and the working part comes forward, and the sequence turns out to have been about a thing the viewer has never once seen.
This is a portrait of an object with its skin off and its structure intact, which is what Caravaggio was doing in the fifteenth century when he lit a figure hard from one side and let the anatomy make the argument for him. The screws lie on the bench where they fell. I painted the screws. There were nine.
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