A red upright trolley—the kind removalists use—is standing upright with its back to the viewer. On the trolley white gaffer tape straps an MDF panel in place. It is a bit larger than A2 in size. Bubble wrap hangs over the top and is slightly visible down the vertical sides: it appears the MDF board has another object taped to it that is covered in bubble wrap. The package is then taped to the trolley. But from the back, with the horizon line slightly above the mid point of the vertical format image, the contents of the trolley are a mystery. The upright red trolley with its solid black rubber tyres faces the viewer, where it stands in a picturesque scene of a beach with clean sand, graduated blue water, some sand dunes with vegetation in the background and a clear blue sky to which the upper section of the trolley projects. Judging from the shadow cast by the trolley and the brightness of the sky, the photograph seems to have been taken mid afternoon. The verticality of the red trolley connects foreground, middle ground and background in a composition that seems at once spontaneous and studied.

Yet a couple of elements of this image are beguiling. A pale green nylon rope is tied to the central upright steel tube of trolley and then meanders off to the right of the picture, then off the edge. Its insouciance is threatening the tranquility of the image, for though it is slack it still seems ready to topple the trolley or pull it out of the frame. Describing this rope, recognizing its disturbance—the scene and the viewer—circumvents its potential to pierce, to pull the viewer with it. Yet its violence is not so obvious. Rather it is its slackness that threatens to be jerked tight, upending the trolley, ripping from the calmness of the image, that pierces. Its very slackness, its casualness is what perversely suggests a brutal thrust that could occur in a split second. The viewer cannot relax with this potentiality, they are beguiled by the scene but pricked with this projected scenario.

In the middle ground of the image but in the distance far enough to be recognizable without detail, is a portion of tree protruding from the cobalt blue water with a row of white sea birds evenly spaced across, perhaps 9. The line of the horizontal tree sits just to the right of the trolley roughly inline with its upper horizontal member. This is the necessary accompaniment to a beach landscape, to give it the doxa of received knowingness. Yet the relation to the red trolley in the foreground and the white birds lined up across the tree debris in the distance is somewhat perplexing, precisely because this image seems irreverent to doxa. (A landscape taken in portrait format with an undefineable object taped to a red trolley on a beach is hardly going to make it into the family photo album.)

I am confronted by the spatial relationship of the line of white birds and the rung of the red trolley, I want them to become one, I want the birds to sit on the rung in miniature, I want them to dissolve the illusion of distance. But my punctum is not this. My pain derives from the intransigence of a picture that is at once improvised and self conscious. I cannot reconcile the tension in this image that wants to collapse, to fall over while pretending to be as ironically informal as the row of birds on the tree lying in the water.

This is my scenario, my image, my text.