People congregate near the doorway, too timid to intrude, or stare from an adjacent balcony, careful to keep their distance. Some pretend to gaze out the nearby window. Others take a quick look and leave — only to return again and again.
“I feel like I shouldn’t be watching,” said a wide-eyed Roxanne DeLuca, 19, who nevertheless gawked with a clutch of other teens who provided a steady chorus of giggling and breathless commentary, including “Do they really do this all day?” and “Do they enjoy this?” and “Is this pure art?”
Sprawled before them were Jessie Marasa, 24, and Ben Law, 25, two performers with chiseled bodies who were rolling around on the floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art, their lips locked, their arms and legs intertwined as they engaged in a rapturous kiss. Here, in the 4th-floor gallery, making out has become modern art.
“Whoa! Look at them kiss!” said one of the teens, as the young couple exchanged another luscious lip-smack.
For seven to 10 hours a day — whenever the museum is open — a rotating cast of a half-dozen couples working in two-person, 2 1/2-hour shifts, have engaged in marathon sessions of mouth-to-mouth as part of an exhibit called “Kiss,” a performance piece that re-creates famous smooches from art history. The so-called “living sculpture” has sparked intense interest among visitors — though only a few besides the teenagers have the guts to stare unabashed at the performers. Instead, the gallery has become an amusing scene of sidelong glances and surreptitious spying.
“Look at this woman,” chuckled MCA security guard Shmeek Johnson, 31, as he nodded toward a visitor peering around a doorway, her body hidden as she cranes her neck around a corner for a not-so-subtle peek. “She’s interested, but she doesn’t want anyone to see that she’s interested. People try to be real slick.”
Set in a white-walled gallery space bordered by floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Michigan, the choreographed eight-minute routine depicts great kisses from painting and sculpture, including Auguste Rodin’s amorous embrace, Constantin Brancusi’s head-to-head hug and Gustav Klimt’s gold-leafed smooch.
The performers are fully clothed, and many are real-life couples. With each kiss, they seem to slide further into their own private rapture. Moving through the poses, they straddle each other, spoon side-by-side, crawl and roll along the ground, often while staring dreamily into each others’ eyes. It all takes place in deliberately paced slow motion, giving the routine a look of a sensual, two-person yoga.
Though the MCA has hosted performance artists before, organizers say “Kiss” is unique — so unique, in fact, that when the installation opened in early October, many visitors failed to recognize it as art.
“People were like, ‘Hey, do you know someone is making out in your gallery?'” recalled Maribel Cruz, 25, an MCA security guard.
Adding to the confusion is the fact that there is no sign and no nearby explanatory literature. No hint at all that this is indeed an art exhibit. In addition, the performers wear street clothes.
Some visitors walk into the gallery, only to make a quick retreat. Others nearly run past — careful to keep their eyes straight ahead. But a few stay to admire the show, often becoming more captivated the longer they linger.
One couple watched for several minutes before exchanging a few kisses of their own. Another adventurous couple tried to join the performers on the floor; security asked that couple to leave.
“Kiss” is the work of Tino Sehgal, 31, a British-born artist whose previous installations at galleries in Europe and Canada were equally unconventional. One exhibit included a lone man writhing on a floor; another featured schoolchildren playing tag in a gallery; and, in a third, performers dressed as museum guards danced a jig and sang: “This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!”
Sehgal says his aim is to make art out of fleeting social interactions. He shuns the description “performance art,” preferring “constructed situations” — work in which the viewer’s reaction becomes essential to the piece.
The “Kiss,” he said, is a celebration of the “here and now.” “There’s nothing that brings you more into the here and now than a kiss,” he said, in a phone interview from New York City, where he is preparing for an exhibit. But the piece is also a celebration of “the artificial, of the constructed, of the non-functional.”
“As any other artwork, there is no definitive message, it’s what people make of it,” he said.
What people make of it has been mixed. “Is this really appropriate?” asked Douglas Fadden, a strapping man from Philadelphia wearing a brown leather jacket, clearly skeptical as he furrowed his brow and watched two performers embrace. But a moment later Joan Hamilton, 70, an elegant, gray-haired woman from Harrisburg, Pa., found herself transfixed. “It’s a beautiful intimacy,” she said.
“Kiss” starts daily just before the MCA’s 10 a.m. opening and continues uninterrupted until closing. That means the puckering continues for seven hours most days, until Dec. 30, the final day of the exhibit. “You have to put on lip gloss because your lips get pretty chapped by the end,” said one performer, Raphaelle Ziemba, 27, a thin brunet with full lips, who is married to fellow performer James Morrow, 31.
On a recent day, Morrow, a man with stylish stubble, blue eyes and a boyish build was rolling across the floor, his arms, legs and lips fully engaged with Krista Hughes, a curvy, 23-year-old redhead with alabaster skin and a fairy tattoo on her lower back.
They were strangers before they began the public smooching sessions.
“I thought, ‘Shouldn’t I buy her dinner first?'” said Morrow, who says that he thinks only of his Raphaelle while performing.
Despite the initial embarrassment, Morrow and Hughes plunged into the work, which pays about $45 per person, per shift. “We had to just go for it,” giggled Hughes. And the two appear to have adjusted to the job’s demands. After their shift, they walked away from the gallery space, laughing and holding hands.
But “Kiss” isn’t all ecstasy and intimacy. Performers wear kneepads and complain about the unforgiving floors. Rick Kubes, a 40-year-old actor with rippling muscles and a red goatee, said, “There’s definitely a point where you start noticing that you have to pee, and your left pant leg is rubbing you the wrong way.”
And in the end, many performers lament, the thrill of “Kiss” dissipates over time — much like the excitement of real-life flings and purely physical affairs. Meghan Strell, 38, a petite blond with a compact, muscular build, sighed at the inevitability. “It does resemble a relationship. So nice in the beginning, and then you get bored with it.”
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cmastony@tribune.com
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‘Kiss’ isn’t just a kiss
What: “Kiss” is a “living sculpture” that re-creates famous smooches from art history, including those depicted by Auguste Rodin, Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch and Constantin Brancusi (below).
Who: Performed by a rotating cast of couples — many are professional actors and/or dancers — working two-person, 2 1/2-hour shifts.
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.
When: Through Dec. 30
