Kinetic Attractor (The Kiss) (1996)

Kinetic Attractor (The Kiss)

Silicon rubber, clothing, Perspex, coated-polystyrene

65 x 100 x 36 cm

Private collection

‘Representations of the kiss are surprisingly rare in art considering the immense significance attached to it throughout history, in virtually every culture. Perhaps this is because it is so difficult to represent iconically, as a single, whole, thing. A portrait is obviously a single thing. A still-life, a group of objects is a single thing. A landscape is a single thing. A nude is a single thing. A kiss is always two things attempting to become one. The two examples of  The Kiss in art history that spring most readily to mind Rodin and Munch are, famously, attempts to blend two figures into one. At the centre of The Kiss there is always an infinitesimal but unbridgeable gap. There has to be, logically, because only two things can make a kiss. If a single thing could kiss itself it would still not really be a kiss.

In Kinetic Attractor two truncated CPR dummies, (the things used in First Aid courses to demonstrate the Kiss-of-life) are sucking face. The fact that the purpose of these dummies is to represent the passive recipient of life giving oxygen already presents their relation with an insurmountable obstacle they are both takers. Given the lack of genitals the kiss is there only means of interaction. If we assume that there is some air in there they can exchange it, lung to lung, especially since their mouths have been altered to resemble a leechs sucker, an organic air lock. But then they are doomed to exchange the same 1.2 litres of air continually. They are only dummies, incapable of absorbing oxygen from the air, so this wheezing give and take has the potential to go on forever. It could be seen as the perfect kiss, the perfect relationship, since neither partner can come off worse. (We could choose to ignore the fact that they cannot benefit from their partnership either). They are held in a kind of active stasis.

The female’s face in this particular model of cardiopulmonary resuscitation dummy is taken from the death mask of a beautiful and mysterious women whose uninjured corpse was discovered floating in the Seine a hundred years ago. The mask, with it’s inscrutable, possibly beatific expression, became a test of draughtsmanship in the academies, with artists trying to capture her indefinable expression, neither grin nor grimace. Was she in heaven or was she in hell?’

Simon Bill