For Marina Abramović and Ulay’s 1977 performance “Breathing In/Breathing Out,” the two artists locked lips and blocked their nostrils, embracing to share breath for 19 minutes — until they both passed out. A kiss is not always a romantic gesture. The works in Luxembourg & Dayan’s new group exhibition “Kiss Off,” opening February 23, showcase the many different expressions — and meanings — of kissing that artists have explored in the 20th century.
The show takes its prompt from a pair of works made one year apart in the early ’70s: Canadian-born artist Joyce Wieland’s 1970 lithograph “O Canada,” for which she sang the Canadian national anthem with her lipsticked lips against a printing plate, and Vito Acconci’s 1971 piece “Kiss Off,” a series of actions in which he kissed his own body then used his lipsticked skin as a stamp. The works — one a feminist critique of blind patriotism, one a suggestion of self-love or even solipsism — form the center of the show. Other kisses come courtesy of Lynda Benglis, Patty Chang, Urs Fischer, Elizabeth Peyton, Francis Picabia and Andy Warhol, among others.