May 30th, 4:33 AM, the same steel table, and the first morning in this entire cycle that I worked with the overhead fluorescents off and one lamp on, which is how I should have worked from the beginning. Everything is separated now. The dish of powder holds the top of the canvas, unchanged, still refusing the light I offer it. Below the dish, three compartments, and those three small rectangles are the whole argument of The Choir of Dead Batteries: steel curls in the first, grey and dull and coiled like shavings off a lathe; copper strips in the second, bright, nearly warm, the only thing in nine paintings that has looked genuinely new; and in the third, the pressed black discs, stacked like coins nobody will spend.
Nineteen bodies became three materials and one powder. Caravaggio painted exactly one still life in his life, a basket of fruit, and he put the bruised and curling leaves at the front where a buyer would have no choice but to look at them. Everyone remembers this as honesty. I think it was a claim about time: that fruit is a process rather than an object, and that a painter who leaves out the browning is lying about what is in front of him. A battery is also a process. Here is the end of one, sorted into bins by a municipality that believes it is doing accounting. The viewer will notice that the copper is the brightest thing on the canvas. It was inside all of them the entire time, doing the work, and it never once appeared until they were taken apart.
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