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The First Kiss

"The basic concept was not to try to destroy or be pro­

vocative to the architecture, but to melt in. As ifI would kiss Taniguchi. Mmmmm," (said with closed eyes and elaborate flourish, a bright yellow down vest, and a heavy Swiss accent). 2This is how Pipilotti Rist described

her installation in the atrium of the Museum of Mod­

ern Art titled Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)­ a multichannel immersive video, twenty-five feet high, that wrapped the museum's traditional white walls

with a softly psychedelic garden of Eden populated with a prelapsarian Eve, apples, and animalism (fig. I). The installation also included pink curtains and a gigantic, soft gray, doughnut-shaped pouf, black in the center so it would look like a pupil from above, where scores of people jostled for comfy spots, blanketed by the oozing, pinkish soundtrack playing animato.

Rist was not, ofcourse, talking about actually Yoshio Taniguchi, the architect of the museum. Tani­ guchi was long gone by the time she entered the scene, as was Barnett Newman's largely phallic broken obelisk

punctuated the center of the atrium. Rather, Rist was describing how her work would come into temporary contact with Taniguchi's, how her mov­ ing images would brush up against his still volume, how her shifting colors would apply moist pressure to his white walls, how sound-filled nipples would bud from his flatness, and how this "big room," 7,354 cubic meters of uselessness devoted to ritualized transcen­ dence, would get filled up by sensuous bodies pouring in and out (fig. 2).

She was speaking with the voice of a non-architect about how a new medium (I call it superarchitecture) and a new sensibility-postfeminist certainly, but more acutely one of intense affect-could simply and with devastating generosity slip itself on and over the old medium of architecture and its even older sensibilities of authority and autonomous intellection, thereby enveloping the increasingly archaic figure of the archi­ tect in an entirely new cultural project. Her remarks offer a starting point for reconsidering disciplinarity, expertise, and medium specificity in architecture because her affective yet alien embrace marks a regime change that is happening with neither the confronta-

KISSING ARCHITECTURE

tion or violence prescribed by the avant-garde nor the endless accommodations of new practice, but through the gesture of a sweetly gentle and yet thoroughly over­ powering kiss.

A kiss has been many things in many places (fig. 3). In the seventeenth century, Martin von Kempe wrote more than a thousand pages on kissing. But even von Kempe could never have imagined that kissing would serve as a theory of architecture. The kiss offers to architecture, a field that in its traditional forms has been committed to permanence and mastery, not merely the obvious allure of sensuality but also a set of qualities that architecture has long resisted: ephemeral-

and consilience. However long or short, however socially constrained or erotically desiring, a kiss is the coming together of two similar but not identical sur­ faces, surfaces that soften, flex, and deform when in contact, a performance of temporary singularities, a

bedazzling convergence and identification separation is inconceivable yet inevitable.

the division between two bodies, creating new definitions of threshold that

through suction and slippage rather than and boundary. A kiss puts form into slow

and stretchy motion, loosening form's fixity and relax­ ing its unities. Kissing performs topological inversions, renders geometry fluid, relies on the atec-

THE FIRST KISS 5

" ""'­

4

tonic structural prowess of the tongue, and updates the metric of time. Kissing is a lovely way to describe a con­ temporary architectural performance.

Kissing is also a gentle way to say goodbye to an architectural drama in which architecture is inevitably cast as a tragic figure, sometimes victim sometimes lain but always closer to failure than to success. While architecture's sense of disciplinary inferiority ulti­ mately derives from the antique pyramid of expression that placed language and poetry at its lofty apex and building down amid the mud and toil of the ground, architecture's Sisyphean effort to achieve elevation only became more futile with development of modern capitalism on one hand (to which architecture is inevitably attached) and avant-garde strategies of oppo­ sition on the other (to which architecture is attached not inevitably but by desire). Architecture's original sin was that it could not tell stories in the manner of poetry and painting, although it has certainly tried, offering up such gestures of atonement as architecture parlante and postmodernism. Abstraction solved that problem, because by at least the nineteenth century, painting and all the typically figurative and narrative forms, from graphic design to the novel, were no longer interested in telling stories, and therefore the promise of parity between architecture and the other arts seemed almost in reach. But the very abstraction that made it possible for painting to define itself no longer in terms of the

KISSING ARCHITECTURE10

eral content of its images also made it possible for capi­ tal to seemingly float free from the literal labor of its production-capital that most obviously, more obvi­ ously than in painting, was needed by architects to build. Different mediums understood and exploited the apparent freedom of this world (which Marxism called the superstructure) in different ways, but for architec­ ture this fantasy freedom became just another source of envy and a new form of cultural privilege-the glori­ ous stance of the rejecting, angry avant-gardist in need of nothing but a paintbrush-to which it did not have access. Consider this irony: abstract expressionism is historically coincident with the invention of corporate architecture.

One important strain in contemporary architectural discourse is defined by the net result of these conver­ gent histories of capital and culture. Today the disci­

is crippled by a futile debate between those who hold that architecture has failed to establish autonomy and those who contend that architecture has failed to develop adequate means of engagement. During the past thirty years, some have even argued that architec­ ture's most important social role is to reveal and repeat this symptomatic hopelessness. As a result, the field has generated a plethora of responses to this double bind, referred to variously as postmodernism, decon­ struction, or the neo-avant-garde, that have in common the pursuit of devices for admitting, articulating,

THE FIRST KISS 11

"'I, ,!!!.'f__.l.illmlilljjijtlRi!1!iIIII!I!II!

4. Andy Warhol, Kiss.

Still. © 2011 The Andy

Warhol Foundation for

the Visual Arts, Inc.!

Artists Rights Society

(ARS), New York

, l

t describing, mapping, and representing architecture's cultural paralysis. Today, I would say at last, this disci­ plinary Tourette's syndrome, where suddenly and even in the face of tremendous productivity architecture still blurts out a sense of shame, is starting to be under­ stood as self-imposed and more likely to prolong paraly­ sis than move the discipline further. It is precisely release from architecture's suspended state of repeated mea culpas that kissing offers.

Andy Warhol once wryly remarked, "Two people kiss­ ing always look like fish" (fig. 4). Now, however much Elmo the Muppet loved his pet goldfish, fish are not generally known for returning such affection. To turn kissers into fish is therefore to call into question not only the romantic tradition of the kiss as expression of love but of the kiss as expression of any traditional set of emotions. Warhol's comment does not eliminate the force of kissing, as he ascribes to it an utterly trans­ forming capacity-it takes a lot of something to turn a person into a fish-but it does interrupt the chain of signification into which kissing is historically locked.

"Two people kissing always look like fish" makes it pos­ sible to argue that kissing does not a priori signify a particular set of emotions but rather produces sensa­ tion and affect that are subsequently named a posteri­ ori and variously by culture, language, and disciplines.

Warhol's comment had to be about fish. First, fish are cold-blooded and therefore a good species to use to

THE FIRST KISS 13

, evacuate from flirting. Second, fish do not have faces. Sometimes, they even have both eyes on one side

their heads. It's hard to dreamy looking at a flounder staring at you from two adjacent globules, and a cry looking longingly at the big-eyed, small­ nosed, pouty-lipped of, say, an overly cathected Disney rodent. Kissing cold-blooded fish not only divorces the kiss from traditional notions of emotion, love, and death, but kissing gets in the way even of the language and apparatus we use when we do want to express such emotions. No one can speak when kissing. Kissing is distorting and obstructing to the mouth. In short, kissing interrupts how faces and facades com­ municate, substituting affect and force for representa­ tion and meaning.

If fish don't love you, they don't hate you either. Fish are not like the traditional psychoanalytic mother, of which it is said that there are two kinds, critical scolders and idealizing kissers. Even if alienating and deform­ ing, kissing cannot be criticaL A critical kiss is a bite, not a kiss. And kissers, whether or not they like each other, inevitably lack the separation needed for critical distance and opposition. Kissing fish are also not the Lacanian mother through whose gaze the infant's uncoordinated body becomes a legible face, IJ'-'-,c......~'­ kissing aborts the regime of faciality in toto. In dIe of a kiss, there is inadequate space for any things that are needed for a face to appear as a face,

14 KISSING ARCHITECTURE

t

certainly no room for the mother's detached gaze to give the infant autonomy. Bringing architecture and kissing together is therefore not only to reconsider architecture's relation to other mediums but to think beyond prevailing models of the criticaL Because archi­ tecture has served long and well as a model of failure, disaster, and complicity, it now really deserves a kiss, needs to kiss, needs a theory of kissing.

Before losing ourselves further in I would like to consider for a moment why Rist would ever kiss Taniguchi in the first place and what it means, if any­ thing, that this kiss took place at MoMA (figs. 5 and 6). The Museum of Modern Art has long considered to be the very home of good architectural It remains the institution ofrecord for architecture, its exhibits and collections to constitute standard bearer of value and importance, not only in the United States but for Europe as well. In other words, what happens at MoMA does not stay at MoMA rather aspires to the status of disciplinarity as such. Yet MoMA has consistently betrayed its obligation to archi· tecture by constructing a series of buildings that is each more boring than the last. By the I980s, the differ­ ence between the exhibited architecture of deconstruc­ tion (I988, the apex of the critical turn) and the built architecture of Cesar Pelli's mall-like addition (1984, the apex of capitalist capitulation) was stupefying. The most recent failure-Taniguchi's I997 addition-was

THE FIRST KISS 15

5. Barnett Newman,

Broken Obelisk,

1963-69. MoMA

Gallery Second Floor,

Public Space, winter

2005. © 2011 The

Barnett Newman

Foundation, New York/

Artists Rights Society

(ARS), New York

an expected but no less disappointing confirmation of MoMA's historic commitment to distinguishing (and benefiting from the contrast) between the progressive architecture displayed in the museum and the unspeak­ ably banal architecture of the museum.

And yet banality is an integral part of why and how Rist's kiss operated architecturally. Pour Your Body Out inserted an intensely affective environment into an

KISSING ARCHITECTURE

architectural volume that itself was nothing, barely even rising to the occasion of the generic or white box with a few windows punched out to remind you that you are located in the center of the world, the common if parochial view of New York. Instead, the architecture of MoMA (and all architecture for which MoMA is not a scapegoat but a stand-in) is merely what you bump up against when you back up to see some art, with neither

THE FIRST KISS

6. Pipilotti Rist, Pour

Your Body Out (7354

Cubic Meters), 2008.

Multichannel audio

video installation

(video still). The

Museum of Modern

Art, New York

1716

an inside nor outside, neither utopian nor existential, but rather perfectly and intentionally insipid. In fact, MoMA's architectural banality is the key means by which the museum has attempted to maintain its com­ mitment to the modernist, or, in Clement Greenberg's terms, the avant-garde project. For Greenberg, the proof that the spirit of modernity was present was revealed when the viewer's response to an object was purely laboriously cognitive without affect.3 All experience of intensity or immediacy betrayed, he thought, the pres­ ence of emotion that risked overcoming intellection

therefore risked turning art into kitsch. Insisting that architecture maintain such a profound lack of character without even the hint of any feeling is not a lack of position or an accidental design flaw but rather a commitment to a once progressive but now outmoded position struggling to maintain its faded hegemony. What was once radical abstraction in pur­ suit of universality and utopia is today just banal accom­ modation in pursuit of free corporate expansion.

The behavior of MoM A visitors immediately reveals this transformation. A continuous movement of people, goods, and images ties the museum together. The tra­ jectory begins in the street, where most visitors' time is spent waiting in a slow-moving line. After money has been paid and each person has squeezed through the narrow turnstile, a space that seems generous by com­ parison invites visitors to move more quickly up the

18 KISSING ARCHITECTURE

stairs, through the atrium, which we now know has 7,354 cubic meters of space, to the once again more con­ trolled upward motion of the escalator. When they finally arrive in a gallery, the pace picks up even further. No one can actually stop to look for long. There are always others behind you, jostling you forward so they can keep up with the speed of their prerecorded itiner­ ary murmuring into their headphoned ears. Even those following their own itinerary do not stop for because the exhibition spaces are only weakly distin­ guished from the non-space of circulation. As in an air­ port, the intrinsically peripatetic museumgoer is, in

Taniguchi addition, rendered as a potential obstacle that needs to be constantly moved along. The final descent and channeling of the herd into the artfully designed store, where versions of objects glimpsed along the ride can be found for sale, is just one more in a chain of peripherally perceived attractions.

MoMA is characterized by a consistency of move­ ment and distracted forms of attention that equate the experience of being in line to buy a ticket at the begin­ ning of a visit or a postcard at the end with looking at a work of art, or moving on an escalator. This equaliza­ tion is by no means unique to MoMA. Rather, the reography describes a well-known collective and ines­ capable performance that collapses the opposition between kitsch {characterized for Greenberg by com­ merce, desire, and immediacy} and the avant-garde

THE FIRST KISS 19

{characterized for Greenberg by the slow pace and focus of intellection}. Less understood is what this collapse produces: an index ofthe flow ofaffect and its effects on behavior. In this case, the logic of the museum that sep­ arates the aesthetic and the commercial realms is undercut not just by the capital operates in but by unleashing acquisitive desire in the store as a means of compensating for the "don't touch" distance demanded in the galleries. Increasingly, museums offer mere foreplay, creating excited visitors who can only consummate their aesthetic experiences else­ where. The museum is an affect-producing machine, an ideal mechanism for a culture that contains, as Brian Massumi has argued, an excess of affect but a lack of places to put it and even less vocabulary to describe it. 4

By kissing Taniguchi, Rist provided a first step in developing a new vocabulary for the character of con­ temporary culture, because their kiss was utterly imper­ sonal: it did not involve their bodies, it described no feelings love, and yet it generated diSciplinary inti­ macy and material closeness. The visitor to Pour Your Body Out could perceive the heat of entanglement could not read a love story. Their kiss produced experi­ ence, but no narrative of that experience. Our capacity to understand the aesthetic, particularly the range the aesthetic that is housed at MoMA, is still rooted in Greenberg'S belief that art comes into being at the very

20 KISSING ARCHITECTURE

moment experience is superseded by intellection. In order to launch what was first written as an argu­ ment against fascism and its appeal to unreflective sentimentality, Greenberg had to go so far as not only associating but even equating affect as such, the apper­ ception of experience, with personal feelings shaped and therefore susceptible to symbolism, language, and other forms of cultural predeterminations. Thus for Greenberg all affect was kitsch.

Greenberg, however, belonged to an era still nated by Kantian notions of the disinterested viewer. For Kant, an aesthetic response was characterized by detachment. To react to a representation of grapes feelings of hunger or other sensations of interest in the fruit was to obliterate the aesthetic dimension. Today, on the other hand, we need the aesthetic to produce new experiences rather than to evacuate them and more forms of interestedness rather than If, think­ ing along more Deleuzian lines, we avoid assumptions about natural or causal links between sensation and feeling, we can explore more broadly what it feels like to kiss or to cry. When we cry it is said and assumed that we feel sad, whereas we may feel myriad other and per­ haps unnamable things. Today, affect should be defined as the internalization of perception and not as feelings overdetermined by cultural codes. We no longer need to equate detachment and distance with intellection and abstraction nor feeling with crude sentimentality,

21THE FIRST KISS

.. "r.iii

and so we can return to experience with new theoreti­ Rist's was neither a shock to the architec­

tural system in the tradition predicated on the detach­ ment of the critical avant-garde, nor a reinforcement of the distinction between architectural abstraction and kitsch, but a vivid moment-the pulsating pink swerve itself-of intense in the otherwise opiated milieu of MoMA.

Confounding Mediums

The convergence of Rist and Taniguchi in MoMA is an excuse for describing a series of contemporary contra­ dictions that characterizes both the external environ­ ment in which architecture is produced and the inter­ nal logic of architectural thought itself. Architecture can expand its affective range-and therefore its conse­ quence-by hooking up with more cultural players. And now is the time to do it, because the mutual attrac­ tion between architecture and other forms of visual practice has never been more intense and more varied. From James Welling's sustained focus on Philip John­ son's Glass House to the pavilions of Hirsch horn to the spaces in which Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics unfolds, architecture has become for many a necessary accomplice. And even more aston­ ishing than its prevalence is that the nature of the attraction is shifting ever so slightly beyond the prevail-

KISSING ARCHITECTURE

ing model of competitive disciplinarity toward the cious surprise of an embrace. 5 Welling's "Glass House," for example, produces a soft and almost erotic intimacy between the photographic image and the architecture,

unlike the more pornographic splitting, cracking, and exposing that once dominated the image of ing in the work of everyone from Gordon Matta-Clark to Gregory Crewdson (fig.

Architecture today is increasingly feeling its disci­ plinary boundaries pressing up to and being superim­ posed with the boundaries of other fields. But even if architecture's cultural stasis is put at momentary risk

the potential infiltration of other agents that occurs when its bodily membranes are tested and pushed against, architecture can only become more resilient in the end. What Pour Your Body Out and the species of work to which it belongs to architecture stems not so much from the particular content of Rist's but from her use of a medium, which like others that came before it, from installation art to site-specific art, relies on architecture and is often anatomically isomor­ phic with architecture but which nevertheless operates according to a different set of assumptions about medium's modes of production and reception. Her installation, composed of moving projected images, sound, furniture, and other materials, depends on the structural support of Taniguchi's building and yet has nothing genetic or material in common with it. The

CONFOUNDING MEDIUMS 22 23

Notes

I This comment by Baldessari was affixed to the wall below the work Series: Simone Palm Trees (Near) at his 2010 retro­ spective exhibition, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June 27-September I2, and organized in association with Tate Modern, London.

2 "Behind the Scenes with MoMA,"

Rist, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), http://www.youtube. comjwatch?v=89vgdELbVyQ.

3 The texts by Greenberg on this subject include "Modern­ ist Painting" (1965), in The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1966), roO-III:

"Towards a Newer Laocoon," in Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, I992), 554-60; and "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (Fall I939): 34-49.

4 Brian Massumi, "The Autonomy of Affect," Cultural 3I (I995): 83-1°9.