Monthly Statement:
February 2006

OBJECT #23
DATE SENT: February 28, 2006
SENT TO: Simone McLaughlin
SENT VIA: US Postal Service

DESCRIPTION OF OBJECT: 6 1/4” x 5 7/8” x 1/2” poetry book by Pier Paolo Pasolini, titled PASOLINI Roman Poems. Cover photograph is a high contrast print of Pasolini in a trench coat and sports clothes and sunglasses walking on a road in what might be a squatter’s camp or a very poor neighborhood. Three smiling little boys look at him and he looks down at one, smiling as well. In the background are three other boys and perhaps a woman in the far distance. Small hills are in the extreme distance. There are five black and white photographs interspersed throughout the book, depicting Pasolini in various locations. The back of the book gives a short overview of Pasolini’s career and life. There is a stain on the back cover. The book was published by City Light Books, San Francisco in 1986 and is Number 41 in their Pocket Poetry Series. The book was translated from the Italian by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente with an introduction by Alberto Moravia. The book contains 27 poems, most in the original Italian language, though the last two are in a dialect, which may be Friulian or Ladino. All poems are translated. There are 145 numbered pages.

ORIGIN AND APPROXIMATE DATE OF POSSESSION OF OBJECT: Given as a gift by Alejandro Anreus, a friend, colleague, and passionate poetry lover. Most likely I received the book some five years ago or longer, though I cannot be more exact than that.

MOST RECENT LOCATION OF OBJECT: On the dresser in my workroom in my home. The dresser is in front of a wall that faces east, and next to a window that looks out to the deck and backyard. RELATION OF OBJECT TO RECIPIENT: Simone, daughter and niece of my long time friends Jeffrey, and his brother Joey (see d-acum 3 photogram) spent the fall semester of 2005 abroad, studying in Rome. She attended John Cabot University, where I taught during alternate summers from 1990 through 1998. The school, which has been in Trastevere since 1992 - a particularly beautiful section of the city - is primarily a business school. I’ve learned from Jeffrey that that was a bit of a problem for Simone since she is planning on being a veterinarian. “None of the credits will transfer” he told me, “but who’d miss a chance to spend three months in Rome?” Not Simone, obviously, who as far as I can tell had a blast. While she was there she sent mass emails to all of her friends and family back home and I had the pleasure of being part of that group. It was a wonderfully rich, vicarious experience, as Simone wove long tales of her travels around Europe, her negotiations with Rome and Romans, her various adventures with food and wine, and the seemingly non-stop excursions with her roommates and friends over weekends and school vacations. I was happy to share as much as I could remember about Rome and Trastevere with her, primarily centered on food and art, and she seemed to genuinely appreciate my suggestions. I learned from Jeffrey that Simone had become taken with the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, notorious filmmaker and poet of the 50s-70s, who was allegedly murdered by a male prostitute on a lonely road near Ostia, a beach area outside of Rome. Pasolini’s films and poems are rather intense, scatological, irreverent, iconoclastic, and in the eyes of many Roman Catholic’s, blasphemous. It seems the perfect sort of culture for a twenty-one year old to be concerned with. Whether Simone actually likes his work or not, I am unsure. Her father has related this information to me, and I have known Jeffrey to exaggerate a bit over the years. None-the-less, I hope Simone’s new found familiarity and experience for things Italian will include some of the more experimental and confrontational genres of cultural artifact. Reading or viewing Pasolini is a long stretch from O Sole Mio and gelato in the Piazza Navonna, to be sure! One further connection is that Jeffrey, Joey and I made a grand tour of Europe during the summer of 1976. Jeffrey and I had graduated college that year. We all left on June 13, and toured together for some six or seven weeks before we went our separate ways for the remaining month or two. Our last stop together was in Paris where somehow we wound up renting a room for about a week from some North African gentlemen in an apartment that we called “the mushroom cave” since it had no discernible daylight. One of the last things I remember from Paris was going to see Pasolini’s “Last Days of Salome”. I remember little of the movie, and have not seen it since, but I do recall leaving for a while during a particularly vivid and repulsive scene that centered on eating. I am not that squeamish, but I felt unable to look at the screen for any length of time. This book is not as graphic – the word is still somewhat less off-putting than the image, perhaps – and any intimation of shock for shocks sake is not my intention. I merely hope that this odd connection between Simone and I will be remembered when she opens the book and reads from the Italian, attempting to recall her language classes and her experience in the city of Pasolini. I also hope it will serve as a bridge to Simone, and provide some notion of the types of ideas that affected her father, uncle and myself, and might, perhaps, inform her life as it did ours.

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.