All tied up

Half a century later, The Kiss was causing controversy in Britain once again. For years, it had occupied the central rotunda in what is now Tate Britain, but, following the opening of Tate Modern in 2000, it was moved to the new gallery, where it languished on a landing near the toilets.

When the British artist Cornelia Parker was invited to participate in the Tate Triennial in 2003, she decided to return The Kiss to its “prime spot” in Tate Britain, wrapped up in a mile of string. This was a reference to an infamous wartime show of Surrealism in New York designed by the modern artist Marcel Duchamp, who criss-crossed the exhibition space with a “mile of string”, so that his tangled web would obscure the other artworks.

“It was like a battle between two styles,” Parker explains, referring to her own intervention, which she called The Distance (A Kiss with String Attached). “I’ve always loved Rodin, but I probably love Duchamp more. And I felt that even though it was the most famous sculpture in the Tate – people love it – The Kiss had become a bit clichéd. I wanted to give it back the complication it used to have: that relationships can be tortured, and not just this romantic ideal. So the string stood in for the complications of relationships.”

Not everybody was enamoured with Parker’s idea. Negative articles quickly appeared in the press: “Some of it was quite painful, but it didn’t surprise me,” Parker recalls. “Perhaps it seemed a very arrogant thing for me to be doing.” One irate visitor to the Tate even whipped out a pair of shears and chopped off Parker’s string before the guards could intervene. The Tate wanted to prosecute, but Parker didn’t wish to give any more oxygen to the assailant’s cause. “Instead I just tied the string back together and put it back on,” she says, “and that made it even less lyrical and slightly more punk. I imagined that Duchamp would have enjoyed that, so I thought I should enjoy it too. Actually, it’s one of my favourite pieces I’ve ever done.”