A portrait cast by what a house could spare
tap a hanging thing to cut its string · stroke across the strings to cut several · the artist hangs something else in its place · cut enough and the whole work comes down · move the hand to lean the eye
An artist's workshop: one lamp, one wall, and a table of the house's things. Mugs, plates, forks, bottles, a kettle, a chair rise from the table on threads and hang in the lamp's beam, each where its shadow fills a part of a sitter on the wall: a profile, a bird on a branch, Nefertiti, the detective, a hand. From anywhere in the room the wall shows the sitter and the heap is plainly junk; from the lamp's own place, where the eye goes once each is whole, the heap itself is the sitter. Tap a hanging thing to cut its string and watch it fall, tumbling, and the sitter lose a feature; stroke across the strings to cut several at once. The artist hangs something else in the gap, and it is never the same thing. Cut enough and the whole work is taken down, string by string, the lamp goes out, the floor is cleared in the dark, and the next sitter is begun.