“Kiss Off” Exhibition
Luxembourg & Dayan
[Image: Lynda Benglis "Female Sensibility" (1973) Video, 13 minutes, 5 seconds ©Lynda Benglis. Courtesy of Video Data Bank www.vdb.org School of the Art Institute of Chicago]
This event has ended.
Luxembourg & Dayan present Kiss Off, a group exhibition organized in collaboration with Francesco Bonami, that rethinks the trope of the kiss in artworks spanning the twentieth century. Featured artists will include Marina Abramović and Ulay, Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, James Lee Byars, Patty Chang, Willem de Kooning, Urs Fischer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jeff Koons, Marisa Merz, Joan Miró, Elizabeth Peyton, Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Joyce Wieland, among others.
In 1971 Vito Acconci made an edition of prints while in residence at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design titled ‘Kiss Off’, indexing a series of actions: after applying lipstick and kissing his own body, Acconci rubbed his pigmented flesh on a lithography stone, using his corpus as a stamp. Whereas a kiss is most typically interpreted as a transfer of touch between two separate entities, Acconci bent the common definition to encompass an intimacy both solipsistic and serialized. He suggests that kissing might involve more or less than two, and that a kiss is not always an embrace.
One year prior, in 1970, Canadian-born artist Joyce Wieland created an edition titled ‘O Canada’, also at the print studio of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. This lithograph bears the marks of her lipsticked lips as she sang the Canadian national anthem against the plate—a succinct and distinctly feminist critique of blind patriotism. That Acconci made ‘Kiss Off’ so soon afterward has led some to speculate that his work was in fact a retort, or perhaps homage, to Wieland’s. Exhibited together, these pieces suggest a tension that runs throughout the exhibition: within romance lies critique, within intimacy lies antagonism.
Love is a timeless preoccupation, but its incarnations and representations are mercurial. Taking Acconci’s ‘Kiss Off’ and Wieland’s ‘O Canada’ as a cues, the exhibition at Luxembourg & Dayan considers kissing as one instantiation of love that morphs over time and can encompass more than intimacy. Some of the works on view invoke kissing literally, as in Francis Picabia’s embracing figures, Sigmar Polke’s ‘Liebespaar’ (1965), Andy Warhol’s ‘Kiss’ (1963), and Lynda Benglis’ ‘Female Sensibility’ (1973). In other works on view, what appears to be a kiss is in fact a designation of discomfort. For the duration of a 1977 performance titled ‘Breathing In/Breathing Out,’ for instance, Ulay and Marina Abramović locked lips with their nostrils blocked by cigarette butts, so that the only air available to each artist was the other’s exhalation. They passed out after 19 minutes as their shared supply of oxygen dwindled, suggesting that interdependence can both give life and poison it. In a 2000 video by Patty Chang made in response to this work by Abramović and Ulay, two women appear to make out but actually pass an onion back and forth between their mouths as tears course down their cheeks. In still other works, such as the adjacent silver circles of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ ‘Untitled’ (1995), kissing surfaces as merely one possible reading of the artist’s deceptively simple meeting or melding of abstract forms.
Media
Schedule
from February 23, 2018 to April 14, 2018