Monthly Statement:
November 2005

OBJECT # 11
DATE SENT: November 30, 2005
SENT TO: Damian Testa
SENT VIA: US Postal Service
DESCRIPTION OF OBJECT: Metal Jew’s Harp, 3 1/4” inches in length, 2” at largest end. Metal is tarnished and dull.

ORIGIN AND APPROXIMATE DATE OF POSSESSION OF OBJECT: Most likely given to me as a gift, probably in 1974, by a girlfriend, though who, when, or in what context specifically, I cannot exactly remember.

MOST RECENT LOCATION OF OBJECT: In a cardboard box with other collected objects, resting on an old sponge. The box is on a cheap metal bookshelf, to the left of the door and against the north wall of my studio.

RELATION OF OBJECT TO RECIPIENT: Damian Testa, whom I have known since September, 1959, when we enrolled in kindergarten together, and who I was in the same school with every year except one (1972-3) until I graduated college in 1976, was a great fan of Jean Shepherd. If he did not actually introduce me to the famous radio personality and writer, Damian certainly was one of the leading members of a group of friends who reveled each morning in the previous evening’s broadcast by Shepherd on WOR Radio – 710 AM – when we were in grade school. We would all recount the stories each day, and laugh as well as share the profundity of the discourse and philosophy we found as adolescents in Shepherd’s stories. Damian’s older brother Bart, who was a writer, intellectual, and all around cool guy, was probably one of the sources of our introduction to Shepherd. Mr. Shepherd played the Jew’s Harp on the radio often, accompanying some recorded music, often a rag-time piece. I remember Damian having his own Jew’s harp, standing as we waited in the cold for a bus on a winter evening after school, and twanging it, and then rubbing his teeth due to the pain that accompanied playing the harp. I tried it a few times myself, though the vibration was too intense and I hardly ever played it. While I am not sure if Damian will be interested in using it as an instrument, this Jew’s Harp will provide another memory of all those nights when we young boys listened in the dark and quiet night to a voice that was telling us there was something more than what we knew about in the small world of urban New Jersey.

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.