March 3rd, 6:15 AM, the morning I finally admitted the drawer was full. I carried them down in a moulded pulp tray, the kind that holds fruit at the back of a grocery, because it was the only object in the apartment with walls low enough to see over and high enough to hold. Thirteen had become nineteen. I had intended to tape the bundle. I had no tape. I used a length of black cord cut from the blinds and bound them across the middle in one loop, which held them the way a hand holds a fistful of pencils: not tightly, not kindly, sufficiently.
This is the fifth station and it is the last in which they are still together. The viewer will notice that the cord passes over some cells and under others with no discernible system. There was no system. There was only the need to make one object out of nineteen so that it could be carried down four flights and across a parking lot. Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ is usually described as a painting about betrayal. I have looked at it for years in a monograph with a broken spine and I have come to think it is a painting about how many hands it takes to move a body that is not resisting. The armour, the lantern held up at the back, the crowding, the reaching. It is a logistics painting. So is this one. Nineteen voices, one cord, and a tray built for pears. Ligatum ad finem.
Prints available. Acquire this work as a fine art reproduction, worthy of any wall that deserves better.
| Unframed Print | Framed Print |