SINÉAD GLEESONtalks to blog artist Philip Thiel about his latest project, 2010: The Year of Kissing People
HOW MANY PEOPLE have you kissed this year? As of today, Philip Thiel has kissed 142. By December 31st, that figure will be 365; a different person for each day of the year. Why? Because of a project he’s engaged in called 2010: A Year of Kissing People. Thiel, who works for Melbourne’s Immigration Museum in Australia, engages in an annual artistic project that involves a daily ritual. “It came from a collective New Year’s Eve resolution. My idea was to write a poem about the year, summarising each day in a couple of lines and at the end of the year, I had a huge poem completed.” Thiel set up a blog as a way of documenting his work, and followed up the poem project with something more public – presenting a flower to a stranger every day. “When I started the flowers project, strangers, and even people from countries I had never visited started reading the blog, and I became addicted to the feedback aspect of it.”
His work to date has focused on the lives of saints, lemons and a year spent randomly following people, but his latest kissing project has piqued much interest. “Intimacy is really lacking in my culture and community, so it’s about making a stand for intimacy, but also pushing myself to do something that’s very ambitious. The idea of kissing a person a day seems impossible to many. It’s an artistic challenge for myself, but I want people to think about the limits of what is possible,” says the 28-year-old.
Immediately I want to ask him 20 questions – who does he kiss? Does he tell them about the project?" He first outlines the rules: the kiss must be on the lips and last for more than a second. "Initially, I invited readers of my blog to arrange to meet to kiss me, and I got lots of offers from people globally. Friends often want to be a part of the project and offer to kiss me. I use online dating sites to propose kissing people, but I don't tell them it's a project. So I meet them, kiss them and report on that episode on the blog. Sometimes I randomly encounter people on the street or at events. I really enjoy not telling people about what I'm up to, if it's possible to work out consent with them. I like them nothaving an explanation for my desire to kiss them."
It’s probably quite easy for Thiel to convince people to kiss him. He’s funny, articulate, velvet-voiced, and – helpfully, for a project like this – a little flirtatious. He documents every encounter on his blog, encouraging regular readers, strangers and even the people he has kissed to comment on the experience. The blog seems as integral a part of the project as the meeting of lips, and Thiel dubs himself a “blog artist”.
“I like the blog’s immediacy, that it’s not contingent on time and that it’s accessible immediately and internationally. The comments on work have become part of it. I want to see the responses I get, share them with others, even the negative, moralistic ones.”
Thiel’s partner, gave him the title of “blog artist” and I’m wondering how his partner (he refers to him twice as his husband) feels about him kissing strangers. “Julien is French, so his culture has a radical understanding of intimacy. He hasn’t limited me in any way, and he’s a storyteller himself, so he has a respect for things that come out of life. We don’t have a relationship where we have to reserve ourselves sexually for each other and if anything was to disrupt our relationship, it would be something much deeper than just kissing or sex. The kissing project is probably connected to my liking the kind of relationship I have with him.”
Another motivation for Thiel is that he loves kissing, and has noticed a difference in attitude to it between the sexes. “The men I meet always want more than a kiss, and a woman will be suspicious that all I want is a kiss.” The ratio of kisses has been 65:35 in favour of men, and the oldest “kissee” was 65. He has kissed multiple nationalities (he attributes this to Melbourne’s multiculturalism), kissed on top of a Ferris wheel and on the beaches of the Dominican Republic.
Does he enjoy it? “The dailyness is a real challenge, it takes commitment and organisation,” says Thiel, “but because it’s so interactive and social, I get a lot of energy from other people to continue. I really enjoy the feedback, it really sustains things. Kissing in itself is its own reward. It’s supposed to make you live longer, it burns calories and it’s stimulating to kiss different people. How could I complain about that?”
2010: The Year of Kissing People is at thiel.livejournal.com
