When I first moved to New York in 1984, I fancied myself street-smart. Wrong. The city was a darker, scarier, and more raw place. Or perhaps I was just very young. In either case (and friends back me up on this) New York was a lot more perilous then, with fewer cops around, and trash and litter pretty much every where you looked—some of it fascinating. I didn’t know why I felt compelled to pick up ripped passports, trampled photographs, blurred notes scrawled in Bic pen on the back of Marlboro packages—but I did.
I made my collection of junk into a set of 100 2-sided collages, each about the size of a baseball card. I called the project 100 Fugitive Felons, after I saw a poster in the subway stating the NYPD was searching for just that many criminals on the lam. I felt like I was gathering evidence, might have crossed paths with some of these people; as if I was preserving some record of small scale despair. I was preserving the history of the city’s unknown, unwanted human flotsam by noticing and cataloging the ephemera left in their wake. I keep the set of collages in a black evidence binder; they remind me of mug shots, police blotters, other official record books.
I knew that the logical conclusion to the project would be to re-lose the felons: to take the collection to a grimy park somewhere or Madison Square Garden or Times Square, and just leave it behind, return it to time’s slipstream. Only I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So it sat around my studio; was photographed and exhibited a couple of times, was seen by some people. Last time I looked at the collection, I noticed that I only had 99 felons left. They are stored 4 to a binder page, and somewhere in the middle of the book was a page with one unoccupied slot.
One had escaped, been pilfered, gone missing in its travels. I couldn’t remember which felon was missing, and it disturbed me more than I’d care to admit that I had lost just that one. I tried to be zen about it. Did someone swipe it during a photo shoot? Did it fall out somewhere in my disorganized house? In any event, that day I also noticed the plastic binder pages were so old they had begun to destabilize and become sticky: I thought they were archival quality when I bought them but clearly they needed to be replaced. I stored the collages in 2 gallon-sized ziplock bags until I got around to ordering replacement pages.
Today, instead of undertaking a hideous project I never should have agreed to, I decided to procrastinate by refiling the felons back into the new pages. I had thrown them into the ziplock bags in a jumble, and it dawned on me that I’d never be able to put them back in their original order. Well, so what I thought? Embrace the randomness of life. Love chaos. Wabi-sabi. I just began grabbing the cards and storing them away. Lo and behold: when I finished, I had 25 pages with 4 collages each. I had never lost one; it must have been slipped into a case with another, and since they’re 2-sided I never noticed. There is a lesson in there of some sort, I think it’s about the larger meaning of fugitive, but beyond that I have no clue.
When I first moved to New York in 1984, I fancied myself street-smart. Wrong. The city was a darker, scarier, and more raw place than it is today, and it turned out I knew nothing about how things worked. Or perhaps I was just very young. In either case (and friends back me up on this) New York was a lot more perilous then, with fewer cops around, and trash pretty much every where you looked—some of it fascinating, and some of it on fire. I didn’t know why I felt compelled to pick up ripped passports, trampled photographs, blurred notes scrawled in Bic pen on the back of Marlboro and Parliament packages—but I did.
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