The Kiss (1901–04) is one of French artist Auguste Rodin’s most famous sculptures, showing the naked embrace of two lovers. The piece depicts unsanctioned erotic desire, and in its early history it disquieted public morality.
Tracey Rose echoed this rebellious spirit of uninhibited sexuality when she referenced Rodin’s sculpture in 2001, playfully taking on the role of the sinuous female figure in her photographic version of The Kiss. Christian Haye of The Project, her dealer in New York, played the male. Thus the sexual negotiation of power and position that occurs during a kiss is reflected by the negotiation that happens between artist and gallerist.
Shot in black and white at the South African National Gallery, the photograph emphasizes the difference in skin color between the two figures. Rose invokes the masterpiece not only to commit the artistic solecism of imitation and copying, but to upset the unity of whiteness reproduced in Rodin’s cold marble figures.
In a seminal performance piece presented as a video, TKO (Technical Knock Out) (2000), Rose placed video cameras inside a punching bag, and once again naked, proceeded to punch the bag with increasing force, accompanying each blow with a primal sound somewhere between a grunt and a groan. As her voice rises to an orgiastic climax, the pale, grainy images of her body on the video screen swing queasily in and out of focus. Whether her performance is an act of personal catharsis or a vigorous rehearsal for a revenge of sorts is not clear.
Rose’s surrealistic video The Wailers (2003), filmed in a Johannesburg swimming pool, grew out of the artist’s “dream of five Hassidic Jewish boys playing basketball against the Wailing Wall,” as she describes it.
In 2005 the artist decided to fly to Israel and act out her disgust against the so-called apartheid wall dividing Israel from Palestine. In Jerusalem, Rose and her cameraman woke at 4 a.m. As she recalls, “I painted my body (bright pink) and we hired a car and drove up to the wall. Earlier in the day there are fewer patrols.” Naked, except for a tiara, tights, panties, and boots, Rose got out of the car and played the Israeli national anthem on a guitar (badly), then pulled down her panties and urinated against the wall.
Rose’s masquerade was both comic and extraordinarily brave. Her performance, documented in a video called San Pedro V—“The Hope I Hope” was undertaken, she says,
“to create humor and to provoke a reaction. To point up the absurdity of the situation,” but it could well have landed her in an Israeli jail. Although a sentinel in a watchtower can be seen in the background of one of Rose’s images, she left the scene without being arrested. Only her arresting video and the photographs taken at the scene live on.
TKO 2000
Stills from a looped video projection
5 minutes, 54 seconds
Collection: Iziko South African
National Gallery, Cape Town
© Tracey Rose
The Wailers 2004
Stills from a single-channel video
19 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and
The Project, New York
© Tracey Rose
San Pedro V—“The Hope I Hope” 2005
Images courtesy of the artist
Photographs: Christopher Wessels
© Tracey Rose
The Kiss 2001
Lambda print
124.5 x 127 cm
Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Pam Warne
© Tracey Rose