Two televisions are on the floor. They face each other.
To see what is on the screens you must lower yourself. You must bring your face to the gap between them. The gap is a few inches. If you do not lower yourself you will not see anything and you will have come to the gallery for no reason, which is also fine.
What is happening between the televisions is a kiss. There are thirty-two of them. We counted. Thirty-two is not a large number. It is not a small number. It is the number we arrived at and we wrote it down.
When you lower your face to look you are aware that someone could see you doing this. You are in a gallery. There are other people. You have chosen to put your face very close to a gap between two machines showing two people touching each other's mouths. You chose this. Nobody asked you to. The work did not ask you to. The work is simply there, on the floor, doing what it does.
The awkwardness is not incidental. The awkwardness is the content.
Time in this work does not move forward. It folds. The kiss repeats, loops, offers itself again. The thirty-two become one, become none, become thirty-two again. The viewer crouching on the floor of the gallery is suspended in a moment that has no intention of resolving. This is not narrative. This is duration as a thing that touches you.
The libidinal economy is already everywhere in the room. The desire to look, to get closer, to hold the position a little longer than is comfortable, to justify the position intellectually once you are already in it. The machine does not produce desire. The machine reveals what desire was already doing. Capital works the same way. It does not create need. It finds need where it lives and charges admission.
The kiss carries its history. Gender performance, heteronormative visual grammar, the long archive of who gets to touch whom on a screen and who watches from outside the frame. This work is interested in the outside of the frame. It is interested in the queer possibility that exists in every structure at the exact point where the structure becomes aware of itself, where it flinches, where the logic breaks and something else briefly occupies the gap.
The curtain was left open by someone who knew. You are not a voyeur. You are a participant in a system that was always going to require this posture from you. The only choice you had was whether to lower yourself or remain standing and see nothing.
The two televisions continue to face each other. This will not change. You may leave whenever you are ready.
