Xia Wu
October 4, 2015
Just kids
Patti Smith
In this excerpt of Just Kids, Patti Smith thinks back on her experience living in New York with artist Robert Mapplethorpe in the late 1960s. In New York City, Smith encountered Robert, who became not only once her lover but also a companion who knew her and understand her through her lifetime. Both of them are passionate about art, about life, and their unbreakable, complicated and heart-breaking relationship were discussed through the memoir.
One of my favorite quotations is “Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These are young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves. ”[1] This quote inspires me that there is a kind of relationship between peer and friends, which is more complicated and intimate, but it is not only about sex, or friendship. I can also feel a sad, but not pitiful emotion behind the quote. They finally found themselves through art but meanwhile the heavy price of art is that the realization of themselves value also created a crevice of their relationships.
I would like to ask my peers about how Smith evaluate art after knowing that Robert, the man whom she worked with and share ideas about art, was actually homosexual. Did she think that it was not worth it to devote their enthusiasm to art at any price? Since art led them together, and then set them apart, but finally formed an unbreakable bond in their whole life. I think smith would never regret of putting so many efforts into art, because art helped them to find the true value of themselves, which is a precious thing that a lot of people have been seeking in their whole life.
I enjoyed this excerpt because I thought this excerpt was just an ordinary, boring teenager love story when I read the first paragraphs of the excerpt. But later I found out that it was not only about heart-breaking love, about sex, it was also about friendship and peer support between each other. Moreover, Smith even rethought about the essence of art itself and the point of creating art, which also awaken me to think about why I decided to learn art abroad, which was a quite long journey from my home indeed.
[1] Patti Smith, Just Kids (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 79.
