Monthly Statement:
February 2006

OBJECT #21
DATE SENT: February 28, 2006
SENT TO: Milton Porteus
SENT VIA: US Postal Service

DESCRIPTION OF OBJECT: 7” x 1 1/2” x 1 1/2” yellow plastic hairbrush. Handle and shaft are molded plastic with a small indentation mid-way up shaft. Bristles are black and contain various bits of dust and a few stray hairs.

ORIGIN AND APPROXIMATE DATE OF POSSESSION OF OBJECT: Given to me by Milton after my own green plastic hairbrush broke apart during the fall of 1972 during our freshman year at Rider College, Lawrenceville, NJ.

MOST RECENT LOCATION OF OBJECT: In the left hand closet of our down stairs bathroom on the middle shelf and next to various medicinal, cosmetic and grooming items.

RELATION OF OBJECT TO RECIPIENT: Milton, my freshman year (1972-3) roommate at Rider College in Lawrenceville, NJ, handed the brush to me after the unlikely disintegration of my own green brush. My original brush had been subjected to turpentine, and the plastic fell apart one fall day as I was brushing my hair before class. This was two years before I decided to stop brushing my long hair for a full year (9/74 – 9/75) and twenty-one years before I shaved my hair to the barest stubble (7/93) for a photograph I was making. Milton and I wound up as roommates in Olson dormitory (Rm. A105) by chance and we got along quite well although we left the school at the end of that year, both transferring to different schools for the next fall. Milton smoked and drank Carling Black Label beer and spent most weekends at the school. I didn’t smoke – probably our only conflict in the time we roomed – and went home for a fair number of the weekends. We were robbed once, losing a small black and white television, and we were both constantly punched by our neighbor, Fred, a big senior who had some good qualities, but was a nasty, almost violent person when he drank, which was quite often. Milton and I found ways to tease Fred, with the help of his roommate Ed, who was a funny, fun-loving guy as well. Most of my memories of Milton center on listening to albums on a small compact stereo that belonged to one of us. Milton introduced me to Randy Newman, whose “Sail Away” remains one of my all time favorites, and a particularly brilliant atypical album by the Beach Boy’s (Surf’s Up), which I still have and play to this day. It was a good experience to live with Milton. We ate meals together, got hoagies at night, played intramurals, and sat around a lot, trying to kill time until the semester was over. My experience at Rider was academically insignificant. It was the wrong match for me as it was mainly a business school and the classes I took were no challenge at all, a re-hash of high school and much less difficult. But my roommate and a number of the guys on my floor – John Layne, Ziggy, Ed, Greg Fous, Allan Brill, Richie Blumenthal and Dave, and Ralph Eastwick - loom large in my memory, filling my first experience of living away with a sweet nostalgia. But mostly I remember Milton, whose long red hair hung close to his shoulders, and whose great laughs and unflappable demeanor helped me get through one of the pivotal transition times of my life. His background and mine had wide differences, but I always felt that I couldn’t have had a more well-suited roommate at eighteen years old. After we both left Rider, we kept in touch for a while. I hitchhiked to Boston once when Milton was living on the Fenway and we drove out to the Cape for a weekend visit. We corresponded for some years, writing letters and postcards until eventually we lost touch. I had not seen Milton for a number of years until 1997, when I was on the Cape for a two-week vacation and looked up his name in the phone book and found him. We visited with him and his wife and family and had a great fish dinner, his kids entertaining all of us with their jokes and stories of summer. Since then we have again fell out of touch. My hair was short that summer, as it has been since 1993. I have had no need to brush it since that year, and most of the time I have a close-cropped crew cut. The yellow brush has sat in my bathroom closet for many years, even making the move from my old apartment to my new home. When we visited, Milton seemed quite happy to be living on the Cape, working at a newspaper, if I remember correctly. His hair turned considerably darker and was shorter as well, the fair indication of time’s passage that has changed us both.

RESPONSE OF RECIPIENT:

DATE OF RESPONSE:

Process: My plan is to de-accumulate objects I now own during the course of the exhibition year. I will photograph the selected object then send the object with a letter to a person who has some relationship to the object or whom I think might be interested in the object. The letter will discuss the project and tell the receiver they can keep the object, destroy it, give it away, recycle it or anything else they choose. I will ask them to document it in the place they now have it and send their image and/or written description back to me of what they did with it and where it is. I plan on de-accumulating an average of one object per week. The new images/descriptions will be placed in a plastic folder and exhibited along with a photograph of the object as it was in my possession.