They came back for the bracket after all, which I did not expect, and now there is nothing on this wall but four holes and a shape.
The shape is the part I want to talk about. Where the mounting plate sat, the brick is a different colour. Eleven months of rain and exhaust and brick dust fell on everything except that one small rectangle, so now the rectangle is pale and the wall around it is not, and you can read the exact footprint of a thing that is no longer there. Four dark holes at the corners, still holding their plugs.
I painted this on the last night of the eleventh month, in the same sodium circle, from the same spot on the opposite wall where I had stood for every other panel in this series.
And I want to record what happened while I was working, because it is the reason the painting is called what it is called.
A man came into the alley from the north end, walking quickly, and about halfway along he did the thing. I have watched people do it in this alley for eleven months and I can describe it precisely: a small lift of the chin, a glance up and to the left toward the wall, and then a fractional change in the walk. Not fear. Nothing so dramatic. The gait tightens. The hands come out of the pockets. It lasts about a second and a half.
There was no camera. There had been no camera for two weeks. He looked at four holes in the brick and adjusted himself for them.
So did I, and I knew better, and I had a diagram of the coverage in my coat.
That is the finding, and it took eleven months and ten paintings and I am not certain I like it. The apparatus was never the object on the wall. The object on the wall was a teaching instrument, and it has now been removed because the teaching is complete. The alley is watched by nothing at all and everybody in it behaves as though they are seen, and that arrangement costs the building nothing, and requires no maintenance, and cannot be painted over or cut.
I have painted ten pictures of a camera and the last one has no camera in it and is the only one that is actually about surveillance.
Oculus qui non dormit.