A Preliminary Theory on Kissing
By Megan J. Arlett
On July 19, 2007 a woman walked into the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon, France. The eighteenth-century mansion was quiet, as art museums usually are on a Thursday, and she walked through the white rooms the way museum-goers do–slowly, with thought. Inside it was cool. Her footsteps echoed. Her name was Rindy Sam. She wore red lipstick, Bourjois’ Rouge Best, and a white shell on a black string around her neck so it hung within the notch at the center of her collarbone. Her dark hair reached towards her waist as she walked past the collections. Eventually, she came to Cy Twombly’s painting Phaedrus. An all-white triptych, the painting demonstrates how the hand of an artist can physically break through layers of paint. Each white canvas, re-whitened, textured and heightened shows the kind of release Twombly himself described when he said, “To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release. Crisis by no means limited to a morbid state, but could just as easily be an ecstatic impulse.” Sam found herself in front of this white crisis. She leaned forward and kissed one of Phaedrus’ panels.
She wore the same red lipstick to court. "I just gave a kiss. It was a gesture of love,” she said. “When I kissed it, I did not think it out carefully, I just thought the artist would understand." The prosecution described her kiss as a “revolting bestial act of cruelty,” “a rape,” and “aggressive as a punch.” The language of consent informed the statements made by the plaintiff’s lawyer, Agnes Tricoire, who said, “I do not share her vision of love. For me, love requires the consent of both sides.”
To see a photo of Sam outside the courtroom, surrounded by microphones and cameras, somehow both pleased with and surprised by the attention, is to see a woman who appears simultaneously innocent, cunning, and a cog: the Young-Girl.
French radical philosophy journal Tiqqun describes the Young-Girl in the publication Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl as a “type” of person. The theory refers to how youth and femininity are idealized under contemporary capitalism, that misogynist consumerism functions best when people fit into pre-formatted personalities that can then be easily marketed to. The Young-Girl is vapid, anxious, concerned with fitting in, with being desired, she is a cliché lifted from Hollywood. “You’ll like this book,” a friend told me as he placed his pink-covered, dog-eared copy of the book into my hands. “It’s… unique.” Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl is an overwhelming book of statements that mixes profound thought with faux-deep remarks on 21st century capitalism and its perpetuation of women’s stereotypes. By perpetuating stereotypes, people seek to fulfill them and, therefore, are easier to sell to. The book is full of excerpts from teen magazine covers such as “How To Be Sexy Without Coming Across as a Bitch" and reflections like “The Young-Girl is old insofar as she is known to be young. There is therefore no question for her of benefiting from this reprieve, which is to say of committing the few reasonable excesses, of experiencing the few "adventures" expected of people her age, and all this with an eye to the moment when she will have to settle down into the ultimate void of adulthood.” These aphorisms build and build throughout the texts, repeating the term “Young-Girl” into a kind of chant: the Young-Girl X, the Young-Girl Y, the Young-Girl Z. Preliminary Materials’ most crucial idea is that capitalism perpetuates a “girl culture” whereby women unconsciously perpetuate their own powerlessness by buying into the idea of innocent youth as a goal. When Sam stands in front of those microphones, she knows she must demonstrate a kind of ditzy innocence. The only power she has is one that emphasizes the idea of women as powerless. The world has raised her to do this.
Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of book. Reviews on Good Reads range from “nailed it” to “pretentious garbage.” Even the book’s translator described the process of translation as “like being made to vomit up my first two books, eat the vomit, vomit again, etc., then pour the mess into ice trays and freeze it, and then pour liquor over the cubes.” Still, somewhere in those vomit-ice cubes I found chunky kernels of truth.
At seventeen I boarded a train in my hometown in southern England with three friends–Alice, Charlotte, and Emily–and traveled through Europe for a month. Along the way were many, many kisses. Almost all were in the dark corners of nightclubs some in the darkness of bedrooms, many with young men whose first names and nationalities were the extent of what we knew about them. In Paris, a German musician. In Budapest, a Hungarian law student. In Amsterdam, a twenty-six-year-old Canadian who had overstayed his work visa, laughed deeply at my jokes, and placed a sticky square of green-laced brownie onto my tongue with his thumb and forefinger in celebration of my eighteenth birthday. Even when she isn't trying to seduce, the Young-Girl acts like a seductress.
In mid-July, after two weeks of travelling, we walked our newly tanned shoulders and aching feet (from shoes designed more for fashion than sight-seeing) into the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. Once a summer palace for royalty, the Belvedere was busy, gentle murmurs throughout its bright, stately rooms. Through the windows came flashes of the palace gardens, green, red splashes of flowers, the white surprise of a fountain’s droplets caught on the wind up to the second floor, and when I turned the corner into the final gallery, a high-up room that must, once, have been a bedroom, or parlor room, I was not expecting The Kiss. I did not know that Gustav Klimt’s famous work lived in the Belvedere until that moment, did not know that I was about to encounter the couple embracing in their quilted robes. I had seen images of the painting before, of course, but had never quite realized that the gold of it was a true gold leaf rather than an imitation in paint. To see a photo or print was in many ways like reading a description of Twombly’s Phaedrus as white panels painted white, replications or descriptions had done no justice to the artist’s hand pushing through the piece or the subtle changes that flicker across a golden canvas as you view it from minute degrees of difference. I stood. I observed. Other than the gold, I was struck by the woman’s almost impossibly bent neck, the odd position of her body–kneeling, but not quite holding herself upright–her hand’s half-limp curl, her expressionless face. It seemed as though in all the beauty and luster that surrounded her, everyone had failed to notice her vulnerability, the fact that she could very easily be dead.
In front of her, a thick velvet rope hung between two stanchions. Cameras hung from the ceilings. Bored museum staff stood in the corners. Why the desecration of art is so common, I can’t be sure. The Mona Lisa sits behind bulletproof glass; The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen has been decapitated twice, had green paint poured over her, and had a dildo attached to her hand. In 1986, the painting Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III, a 7 x 18-foot canvas by American artist Barnett Newman, was slashed multiple times with a box cutter. Newman’s piece was (and is) a demonstration of abstract expressionism. The majority of the canvas is painted a shimmering, depthy red. To the left-hand side of the canvas is a narrow strip of dark blue. It is the kind of painting one might look at and think, “I could do that.” The kind of comment my grandfather would hear and say, “But you didn’t, so you couldn’t.” But many people in the Netherlands also considered Newman’s piece an affront to “real art” with one writing to the director of the museum, “He did what hundreds of thousands of us would have liked to do.” The defendants lawyer said that Who’s Afraid… was a kind of provocation that called for a reaction, which it got.
When I met Klimt’s broken woman, I did not see provocation in her. I did not look at her painted-on clothes and think they invited anything. I wanted to extricate her. Not to rip her out of that embrace, but slowly unfold her from those golden arms, invite her to step down from that canvas and leave. I did not want her. I simply wanted to do better by her. I wanted to lead her through those cool, echoey rooms, the flowers dropping from her hair as we took the stairs down into the foyer and left, disappearing into the streets of Vienna where, once we switched her dress out for something a little simpler, she might have some hope of going unseen.
The Young-Girl thinks that she is the object of much more surveillance than she really is, says Preliminary Materials. But what happens when the surveillance is real? What happens when the surveillance is even more than you could possibly imagine? Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl was published in 2001, before September 11th, before my younger sister was born into a country with the most CCTV cameras per capita in the world, before webcams sat in every home, before cameras accompanied our phones. What happens if the surveillance exists but fails to see what it’s looking at? The night I met The Kiss, I stayed in our hostel room to recoup sleep while the girls went to a nearby bar. As I slept in a tight knot of dreams, Charlotte lost her virginity to a French-Canadian in the laundry room, while Emily lay with a dark-haired head between her legs for the first time on the communal kitchen table, her impossibly long red-hair curled out across the length of the table behind her. In the world of Young-Girls, coitus appears as the logical sanction of all experience. So beautiful and reckless, the first time in our lives that we had felt desire manifested onto us and our lively, living bodies, the sense of the self as meat, as the heap of an organ, the loss of contact with the self, the crushing of all intimacy with the self, the sense of self meat, the self that the Empire offers for consumption, the first time we had felt desire in ourselves and then sensed the world respond. We looked at the world. The world looked right back.
The next day, after a slow start at the kitchen table where Emily had ended the night before, we boarded yet another train to yet another destination. We spent the three-hour journey recapping the night before, blushing, howling with each other’s laughter, when the Young-Girl giggles, she's working, falling asleep with our cheeks pressed against each other’s shoulders, sweat wicking up our necks into the base of our ponytails on those dusty, airless trains, and arrived in Budapest’s grand train station with its high vaulted stained-glass ceiling in the late afternoon, where we walked through the city’s streets with backpacks the size of our torsos to yet another hostel room to begin the routine of greeting our new destination by moonlight. There was, we’d read, a rooftop nightclub nearby, a place where we could drink cheap beer above the city, see its lights carved in half by the Danube. Showered, make-uped, hair brushed, and outfits chosen; we set out into the dusk.
Even without her, we would’ve pulled eyes towards us, but Emily had been a beacon all across central Europe, a source of heat. 5’9” with curly, red hair that bounced towards her waist, its color alone drew stares, while her striking physicality–the long legs, the angular face, the freckled, bony shoulders–had prompted a man in Berlin to lift his shirt, slap his belly and growl at us as we ate chow mien out of paper cartons on a curb. So normal was this surveillance that it became like no surveillance at all as we walked from our hostel to the square where the guidebook had listed the nightclub. If people stared, we didn’t notice. And if we did, it wasn’t important.
We arrived at the address listed in Alice’s guidebook. A small square hemmed in by the tall, white-walled buildings that characterize the Pest side of the city. The day’s warmth still trapped in the pavement beneath our sandaled feet. Alice checked the map. Emily wandered towards a nearby McDonald’s, it’s neon McMenü reassuring in its familiarity even with the golden arches lighting up such a strange, historic shell.
“You look lost.” I turned to see a young man outside the McDonald’s with dark curly hair and slim, circular glasses. “Can I help you?”
“We’re fine,” I said. “Thank you–”
“We’re looking for a club,” Emily replied. The square around us was largely deserted. To evidence of chatter from a rooftop bar, to lights to tell us which iron gate to walk through, or which intercom to buzz, just a handful of shuttered stores and dark windows.
“We can take you to a club,” the young man outside McDonald’s said. Behind him stood a small group of men and a young woman, quietly watching the exchange and turning to each other. Behind them, scatted graffiti tags on the historic white stone. By their feet, discarded cigarette butts. “We have cars.” He pointed vaguely over to where parked cars lined the road. “My name is Adam.” Adam wore slim-cut chinos and the type of tightly fitted leather shoes that only European men can wear effortlessly. He smiled at Emily. An easy smile. Alice looked up from the map. Charlotte peered at one of the young men behind Adam. The night sat hot and heavy on top of us.
Was there more to the exchange? Did we talk more? Did we flirt? I don’t remember. I know I watched Emily and her red curls clamber happily into the back of a car and I told myself, as I told others when retelling the story, that to die with my friends would be preferable to walking back to the hostel and being abducted alone. The Young-Girl will never stop flattering herself for having "Common Sense.”
We drove from Pest, the half of the city where our hostel was, to Buda, the old city across the river, Alice and Charlotte in one car, Emily and myself wedged in the back of another with four strangers, following the car in front over the river where they pointed out the lights of parliament shining on the Danube’s muddy water. “That restaurant, you should go,” Adam told us from the driver’s seat. “Best paprikás in the whole city. Have you tried paprikás? Do you know what it is?” The men, we discovered, were law students with rich, well-known parents, and international school educations. Adam and Tamás were brothers, the woman was a childhood friend, and all seven had been at school together and were reunited for the summer after returning home from their respective universities across the continent. Every one of them spoke Hungarian, English, and French fluently. One spoke a little German and Czech, the brothers both read and spoke Hebrew, and by the time we pulled up to wherever it was they were taking us, the adrenaline-pound in my throat had subsided, sunk down to a deeper place and settled.
We climbed out of the cars by the ivy-laced gates of a public garden where a doorman sat on a folding chair beside turnstiles. After our entry fees were paid for us, red bands taped around our wrists and our hands stamped (of-age and admitted), we pushed through the metal spokes into the dark greenery and emerged into a space we never could have discovered as foreigners in that city. We were in a park, but under awnings, sitting at wrought iron tables were small groups of people drinking and smoking and laughing. Across the way a bartender cleaned her station with a damp rag. And in the middle of it all was a large, rectangular reflecting pool. Except, from its opaque base red and blue and yellow pushed up through the water, cast the leaves on its surface into shadows above the dance floor built into the ground beneath it. Later, nursing a 200-forint beer recommended and paid for by Adam, the wet heat of July filling up her curls with an ever-expanding frizz, Emily whispered against my ear, “I knew they were okay. They had a girl with them.”
For days Adam and his friends stayed tethered to us via Emily’s phone: sights to see, restaurants we might try, a bar to meet them in that night. The night before we were due to catch a train to Zagreb, Adam and Tamás threw a party for us at their home in the hills above Budapest. We drank his parent’s whisky with cheap, off-brand Cola. We let off a fire extinguisher accidently-on-purpose. We praised the Fates for Adam’s parents being out of town for the weekend. We praised the Fates that we had happened upon these men outside a McDonald’s. We lay on the grass by the pool and looked at the stars. We rolled around and paired off and some of us slept (and some of us didn’t) and we woke up with the tired, ecstatic glow teenagers hold the night after drinking. We stayed in touch for months afterwards. We did not get hurt.
How do we value anything? As any lover of contemporary art will argue, the price given to an abstract, impressionist work is as much about context as it is about what you can see. If value comes from the confluences of time, place, context, and experience, then it is only with time that I understand the value of that night in Budapest, how it built a foundation of hope in me. When Adam saw Emily’s red-headed beauty across a square, his reaction was to show her, and her friends, the city he loved, to rope his own friends in on an adventure towards making a foreign teenager swoon (how we all swooned).
A kiss in its conception is an act of tenderness. Or, at least, we assume it is an act of tenderness until proved otherwise, until the kiss is described as a punch and our imagined kiss must be rendered anew. A white canvas painted white might be considered, by some, a worthless composition. Or, three million dollars. Or a single euro, the symbolic amount Cy Twombly sued Rindy Sam for. A kiss seems such a generous gesture until it is given forcefully, until its sweetness becomes damaging. There are so many ways to read Rindy Sam’s actions against Phaedrus: an impulsive act, a vindictive act, a naïve act, the act of a Young-Girl. “When I kissed it, I did not think it out carefully, I just thought the artist would understand," she said. A red lipstick stain on a white canvas seems like a trivial thing, until you remember all the women with transparent kiss and grope marks, all the damage done in an invisible, unlipsticked way. What I want you to understand is how invaluable a life filled with mutual desire and permissions is, how rich and priceless it feels to hold such memories. If I had to save something in a fire, it would be that night in Budapest, how my self-protective instinct for badness in the world was supplanted, replaced with the same mutual lust that stewed in the air between a group of young men and women. How they looked at us with desire and we looked directly back, wanting it, knowing we wanted it. If a fire licked its way towards me, I would save the night in Amsterdam when I slept in snatches between my best friends and the snores of two almost stranger on a mattress on an apartment floor, the rooftops starting to turn gold with sun through the naked windows. She manages to detect the Spectacle wherever it is to be found, and wherever she finds it, she adores it. Or the night we left a Prague nightclub at 3am to swim fully-clothed with four American boys in the Danube. The summer I turned eighteen, every single kiss planted on my body was wanted. I would save it all.
We took hundreds of photos during the July and August of that year: Charlotte puckering her mouth at a trout bought from the market before cleaning and frying it for dinner, Alice with her wide-brimmed hat by the canals in Venice, Emily clutching a recently stubbed toe. Tan lines, bars, the bullet pocked walls of a parliament building, the Moulin Rouge, a peacock in Prague, the cherry-size ceramic pig we found who became our mascot, Charlotte backstroking in a river. The four of us laying head to belly in the heat of a park in Berlin, a baguette and Boursin cheese beside us, crumbs on our chests, sweat on our cheeks. But the only photo from the night at the Forrai brother’s home in Budapest was taken by Emily the morning after. It is the simplest, most Young-Girl photo I can imagine: almost entirely filled with clovers photographed from above, her bare, freckled feet peek out from the bottom of the frame, just her toes. It is dawn, the dew on the grass is barely visible but it is there. It is an entirely innocuous photo, one that barely seems to belong among the landmarks and escapades, a perfect way to show that an image is as much about context as about what you can see.
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About Megan J. Arlett
Arlett was born in the UK, grew up in Spain, and now lives in Texas where she is pursuing her PhD. She is an editor at the Plath Poetry Project. The recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2019, Best New British and Irish Poets, The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, and elsewhere.