Sample Kiss, Amber Landgraff

Amber Langraff "Sample Kiss", Photo: anonymous

Amber Landgraff stands outside of The Spa, a beauty salon on Whyte Street. She has set up a portable kiosk stand to display “Amber” a product line of “break up kisses”. As people walk by Amber offers to give people the “ends of relationships” for free. Most people don’t acknowledge her offer and keep walking. One man stops and asks what she is selling. Amber replies in a friendly, yet professionally confident way, that she is offering four different types of break-up kisses, “goodbye kiss, jealous kiss, bitter and unwanted.” He laughs. Then walks away.

I get up from where I sit observing the situation. I approach Amber and ask what it is that she is selling. Her demeanour is approachable and likable, her tone is clear and confident. She repeats the same script, “ I am giving away the ends of relationships. Would you like to try one?” I say “sure” and decide to select the bitter kiss. Amber writes the word “bitter” down on a blank white business card. Then she takes a pink lipstick from the display and applies it to her lips. Looking straight into my eyes, she glares at me while her face slightly contorts, before she says “bitter kiss”. It is a moment when something in our interaction shifts. I laugh a little nervously, a little uncomfortably. I know this sensation, a mix between humiliation and relief. It’s a sensation I have felt before when giving and receiving bitter kisses in public spaces. This sensation shifts quickly to an intellectual realization that this is an action intended to evoke a kind of derive and detournement of social exchanges. I find my own reaction strangely delightful, and I laugh. She kisses the card bitterly as promised, leaves an imprint and then hands it to me. I thank her, not entirely sure why.

Amber offers to give away “the ends of a relationship”, a paradoxical claim that cannot fulfill its premise. The beginning and end of relations are often signified by performative utterances. For instance, the vows of a marriage promise everlasting love, which as we well know, is often compromised. While divorce, the ‘end’ of a relationship, is arguably the initiation of a new type of relation (ie. the ‘ex’, the friend, the co-parent etc). Ritualized events are used to mark beginnings and endings - to mark key moments of relation in time. They are measurements that signify entry into predetermined and recognized forms of relation. Amber’s bitter kiss, given to me in our encounter, was neither a measurable beginning nor ending, our ‘breakup’ is a relationship that is continuing through different forms of encounter.

I would argue that Amber’s kisses are also not free. She offers what appears to be an altruistic and philanthropic exchange with passersby. Like many marketing strategies, corporations and businesses offer their clients free gifts or free use for ‘trying their products’. Inevitably, these ‘free’ gifts work to socially acclimatize clients to the products as a way of insuring future purchases. Does Amber’s kiss oblige me to her somehow? What is it that she gets in exchange for our transaction? I question my own sense of indebtedness to Amber’s kindness and generosity. I am suspicious. Within the flow of capital exchange and the barter system, free gifts and acts of kindness tend to mean that there is something owed later down the line.

In a conversation I had with Amber, she explains her interest in what she sees as ‘the failure of relation’ in this work. She is aware that the intention to do something for free, for the good of people through altruistic gesture is rarely realized. From the performance, it is clear that many participants do not care about the gesture, as they walk by her or walk away from any relation with her (ironically, these passersby have failed to not have a relationship with Amber). Sometimes the affect Amber may hope to evoke is never realized. Amber also raises an interesting key question. What happens when the intention for a performance is conveyed but never realized? This is an aspect of performance that is rarely questioned. The artist’s intention for a work is usually the gauge for determining the success of a work. When there is not a correlation between the intention and the actualization of a work, it is said to fail. This is often the value system used in the art world to assess and conserve performance art works. But how do we account for the multitude of relations and events that occur not as success or failure, predetermined frames of art reference, but outside the conventions that delineate these values of exchange?

There are moments I feel that, as an “invited and knowing audience” it is too easy to fall into the role of a social anthropologist who perceives actions as quantifiable evidence. When observing interventions in public spaces, I try to sit and watch as “a pedestrian on the street,” but this is compromised by the fact that I possess “insider information”. My presence also renders the event more of a spectacle- with the pedestrians unknowingly performing for me and future art audiences through my presence as blogger.