Exposition

The Truth in Painting 1993: Runaway Train (last edited: 2024)

Martin Lang
open exposition

About this exposition

In 1993, Soul Asylum released Runaway Train, which became a global hit. The music video featured real-life missing children taken from the “milk carton kids” campaign. It quoted the statistic that there were over one million youth lost on the streets of America. I always wondered what happened to the missing children in the music video. When a child goes missing, something has happened to them, and it is at least hypothetically possible to find out what (the truth is out there). Originally, I set out to create a piece of investigative art that would shed some light on the whereabouts of these children, but I ended up painting their portraits. Painting is a way of lifting normalised stories of tragedy into the heightened position of portraiture – ordinarily reserved for people in positions of power. These forgotten kids were unceremoniously eulogised on milk cartons because abductions in 1993 were so ordinary that Americans consumed them while eating their cereal. Soul Asylum made different music videos for the different countries in which they released their single: I concentrated on the missing people from the British version. Tragically, many have been found dead. In one case, a child was located because of the video and returned to his parents: he later blamed the video for returning him to the abusive domestic situation from which he had being trying to escape. Some have been found alive; more are missing presumed dead. Because 1993 was pre-internet (indeed, pre-digital), the amount of information about each missing person available on the web varies greatly. Perhaps the most heart-breaking discovery from this research was that one child’s parents continue to be extremely active – resulting in continuous police activity, local newspaper coverage and even offering a reward for information leading to the whereabouts of their daughter's body – while another missing person has no information about him at all on the web or in local newspaper archives.
typeresearch exposition
keywordsPainting, portraiture, process oriented practices, Investigative art, post-truth
date08/06/2021
last modified01/01/2024
statusin progress
share statuspublic
copyrightMartin Lang
licenseAll rights reserved
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2433626/2433627


Simple Media

id name copyright license
2466209 Andy Gooch (murdered, by Andrew Firth). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466211 Billy Bennett (missing since 1985). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466213 Dinah McNicol (murdered by Peter Tobin). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466215 Kevin Hicks (missing since 1986). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466217 Lee Boxell (missing since 1988). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466219 Louise Kay (missing since 1988). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466221 Mark Bartley (missing since 1992, but reported sighted alive). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466223 Mark Garvey (missing since 1987). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466225 Nicola Payne (missing since 1991). 2021. 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466229 Simon Darby (missing since 1989). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466231 Susan Callum (reported found alive). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466233 Vicky Hamilton (murdered by Peter Tobin). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved
2466236 Ben Needham (missing since 1991). 35cm x 30cm Martin Lang All rights reserved

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