Justine Kurland’s new book “Girl Pictures” is heartbreakingly beautiful, and has given me a kind of organizing principle through which to focus my past artistic motivations. Above all, the book is about the urge to run away.
My first memory of running away was some time around 3rd grade. My friend Steven Woods was sleeping over, and after the sun finally set on our long afternoon of playing catch and looking at baseball cards we settled into my bedroom and dressed down for sleeping. I remember the exact pair of red plaid boxer underwear I had on, I was excited about them because I had only recently upgraded from tighty-whitey’s and enjoyed the abundant space, but this particular pair was just the wrong texture so that it didn’t do a good job of absorbing whatever remains of pee came out after I pulled up my pants up. It was late enough to be retired in my room, but we weren’t saying goodnight yet. Steven had moved from New York the year before, he always wore a Yankees hat and acted tough, and we got to daring eachother we couldn’t sneak out of the house without anyone noticing. This was an easy task actually, my room was in the very front of the house and we had only to slip out of my bedroom door and then 5 feet to our right was the front door. So we did, out the door, down the three brick steps, across 15 feet of mowed grass lawn, a sidewalk, and then hallelujah the street. The cement felt good on our bare feet, and once we were there our instincts kicked in, “Run! let’s go to Pardee Park! They’ll never find us there!!!” so we sprinted and giggled and yelled at eachother, our words falling behind the speed of our feet. Now I noticed the second failing of my new boxer underwear: there was no button for the pee-hole, and I achieved a whole new level of freedom as my penis got perfectly bounced out of the opening in the red plaid, and stayed there taking in the breeze as I ran away from home as if for my life.
We got to the end of the block and turned left, then kept our speed for another short block until we crossed the street into Pardee Park. There we jogged across the huge field, to the climbing tree on the far side of the park. We climbed in our baggy shirts and underwear up into the trees where we were hidden by the canopy, and there we perched for some time, catching our breath and whispering. After a while, we saw a man rumaging through the trash in the distance. We pointed to the plastic bags covering his feet and laughed and snorted and tried to keep quiet. I think we were scared of the homeless man, we didn’t know what to do and so we made fun of him, but there we were all run away from home and confronted with a real deal homeless person.
It didn’t take long for my brother, three years my senior, to come and find us in the tree. He relished the responsibility of his chore and treated us with a mixture of reprimand and pity for our predictability. As promised, I havn’t ended up where I intended in this little writing, but what I am trying to say is that running away is a topic that has gotten alot of mileage in art making. It’s a pursuit of freedom that is fleeting and ephemeral, because if you run away for too long, there’s no home to go back to.
