Endless Kiss 2013 Goat Major Projects, Cardiff, UK
Reconstruction of El Lissitzky’s Proun Room, 1923 from a 72 dpi image from the internet.
Image of installation with table and laptop set up for discussion on repetition in art.
Endless kiss is not primarily about the nature of authorship but more about the way the power of an artwork has a kind of atomic half life and a charitable rate of decay, in terms of its influence. Erosion of an artwork is caused by its adoption and false status facilitated by exposure in the media. The rise of the Internet and digital media simply presents us with echoes of the original and erosion by exposure to the media results in an artwork becoming stripped into base elements of which history becomes one of a number of meta-materials for its composition and is no longer dominant in the reading of the work.
The work is a prop*, it has cocktail party syndrome where it is able to give the right replies to questions but is unaware of the meaning and value of the words. The metaphor is of an endless kiss, a moment of spontaneity repeat over and over, just as when a word is repeated over and over soon becomes meaning less and absurd. The power of a kiss is that it lasts an instant in the heart and a lifetime in the memory. The title is ironic. Paradoxically to the thrill of a kiss, the work was made methodically while listening to slow and relaxing music, one song in particular became the antithesis of ideas behind the work and became symbolic of the true sense of an endless kiss. The song was ‘No other Love’ by Jo Stafford which provided a haunting soundtrack to an exercise in guesstimating something from the past from limited resources.
* a small object such as a book, weapon etc, used by actors in a play or film.
RICHARD HIGLETT 