Wolfgang Tillmans’ photograph, The Cock (Kiss), 2002, was vandalized during an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2007, but the first mention I can find of the attack wasn’t until 2011, when Tillmans gave a lecture at the Royal Academy:
This photograph (The Cock (Kiss), 2002) of two guys kissing got slashed by a visitor at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington. I’m always aware that one should never take things for granted, never take liberties for granted. For hundreds and hundreds of years this was not normal, not acceptable, and this term of acceptable is really what I connect beauty to. So, sometimes I’m said to be turning everyday subject matter into beautiful things, and I find that a bit uncritical, unless it is connected to that beauty is of course always political, as in it describes what is acceptable or desirable in society. That is never fixed, and always needs reaffirming and defending.
The attack on The Cock (Kiss) has become part of the picture’s lore, repeated well beyond Tillmans’ own mentions. The image was shared widely online as a defiant response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub murders, something Tillmans’ publisher Phaidon wrote about within days of the shootings. In 2022 writer Douglas Stuart spoke with Tillmans about the photo, and the attack:
TILLMANS: I put it in my first American museum survey exhibition that toured from Chicago to Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., where the picture was attacked, slashed by somebody with a key, ripped. It came as a shock. But I’ve always been struck by the fact that you can show two men killing each other at three in the afternoon in any country in the world on public television, but you can’t show two men kissing each other.
STUART: Certainly, it’s an image that has been a call for solidarity and defiance in the queer community. It was an image that was actually so central to the writing of my book.
Stuart took inspiration from one of the The Cock (Kiss) kissers for a character in his YA novel, Young Mungo, both as a sweaty symbol of gay liberation and as an object of homophobic attack.
When homophobia seemed resurgent this past summer, the Smithsonian was being newly threatened, and beautiful things again needed defending, Tillmans mentioned the incident on Instagram. He said it was slashed, and removed from the show. I realized that though I’d seen the show multiple times, written about it, and even partied with Tillmans and the curators after the opening, I’d heard nothing at the time about the slashing, and remembered no public reporting on it, or even on the removal of a prominent work. Indeed, it seems it was never made public until Tillmans made it public.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which co-organized the Hirshhorn’s Tillmans show with the Hammer Museum, owns an edition of The Cock (Kiss). Was it the one attacked? There’s only an edition of 3+ 1AP. Is one lost? I wanted to look more closely into the attack, and the museum’s response to it. So I went into the exhibition files in the Smithsonian Archives.
It was not a publicly known attack or scandal, but an extreme example of the kind of thing a museum has to deal with when putting on an exhibition. Tillmans’ work is especially vulnerable as much or more for its form—naked prints taped to the wall—as for its content. And it posed a particular challenge for an institution oriented around conserving and safeguarding art objects. Lent artworks, collection artworks, and exhibition copies each involve different, specific levels of care.
The damaged photo was an exhibition print. The MCA Chicago did send their newly acquired print of The Cock (Kiss), 24 x 20 in, and framed, to DC. But Tillmans instead hung a giant exhibition copy of The Cock (Kiss), 205 cm tall, which he shipped from his studio.
There were routine condition and incident reports from daily curator and conservator walkthroughs, tracking bumps and fingerprints. The attack was not that. It took place on Tuesday, July 24th, less than three weeks before the show ended. It was not observed, but it was found by a guard within a few minutes, just after noon. It was assessed by conservators and removed almost immediately, and they notified the Hammer’s registrar on the 25th, and sent along a report, recommendation, and images. Curator Russell Ferguson. immediately let Tillmans know. “oh shit,” he replied, “damaged in an attack or accident? waiting for pictures.” Though his studio was about to close for summer holiday, Tillmans said a replacement print could be shipped the next week.
The digital images are not in the archive, though. The Hirshhorn’s conservator described the damage, and recommended a repair, which the artist immediately agreed to; he did not want the work off view for the weekend.
I made a diagram approximating the damage, which was “a V-shaped tear” 6×4 cm, smushed with an accordion fold; a 7cm scratch connected to the base of the tear, and another, 12 cm scratch along the left side of the tear. It was near the center of the image, about 1/3 of the way up. “The scratches are relatively broad,” the conservator wrote, and likely caused by “something like a key.” Mapping it out, I imagine there were two quick, forceful slashes, one up, and one down.
The Hirshhorn’s conservator flattened the creases, taped it from the back, and filled in the scratches with watercolor. The work was back up on the wall by Thursday, less than 48 hours later.
With the urgency gone, Tillmans’ studio didn’t have to rush the replacement exhibition print, and so it only arrived in mid-August, after the show closed. It was sent on with the rest of the show to the next venue, the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, but I can’t tell if it was shown there. The damaged print was to be returned to Tillmans’ studio; there is no FedEx return trail, so I think it tagged along to DF, too. The weirdness of the insurance coverage dragged out the tiny claim for a few hundred dollars. In the end, there was no permanent harm to the edition, and the museum’s quick work minimized the impact on the show.
Typing that almost sets up a conclusion that the attack was a non-issue, or to shrug, what do you expect to happen when you hang 300 prints straight on a museum wall? But that is wrong, because someone visited the Hirshhorn, saw Tillmans’ photo of two guys kissing, and decided to attack it. The photo itself, and the moment it captures, had nothing to do with defiance. Hanging a seven foot tall print of it in a gallery full of soldiers, in Bush-era, Iraq quagmire Washington, was an affirmation of its everyday beauty, attacked in a moment of everyday violence.
When I started this search, I thought it was to sort out the various accounts of the attack. What I wonder about most, though, is the Hirshhorn’s silence about it. The museum’s quick response of the harm to the exhibition made it easier to ignore the violence and hate the exhibition exposed. And Tillmans’ own desire to not let the attacker succeed in removing the photo clearly drove the decision to not expand the impact of the attack by waiting for a replacement.
But what if they’d said something? What if someone noticed this major photo missing, and said something? Would there had been an outrage, or a shock? Would there have been a risk of copycat attacks? How would Wayne Clough’s Smithsonian have reacted when called on to defend The Cock (Kiss), and to defend showing it? Would such a controversy in 2007 have steeled the institution and its principles, and averted Clough’s cowering homophobic censorship of David Wojnarowicz’s work at the National Portrait Gallery in 2010? Or like a once-whipped dog, might they have silently vetoed or canceled Hide/Seek—like the Tillmans exhibition, the work of an outside curator—in advance?
Maybe it’s relevant that Tillmans’ first public mention of the Hirshhorn attack only came in 2011, after the Smithsonian’s Wojnarowicz censorship, which came as a quick response to a single religious extremist’s attack, not for queerness, but for blasphemy.
In September, Tillmans wrote: “In recent weeks I was feeling for the curators at the Smithsonian museums in Washington D.C. having to adapt their museums program to the new regime of president Trump. Wondering if my work would still be able to be shown there. At my solo show in 2007 the work The Cock (kiss) of two guys kissing got slashed by a visitor and had to be taken down. Memorial was left untouched.”
Memorial is Memorial To The Victims of Organized Religion, a 2006 installation where a space is created by a grid of 48 monochrome prints across a corner. Tillmans made a second version, Memorial To The Victims of Organized Religion, Version II, last year, for his show at the Pompidou. I would love to imagine a Smithsonian museum showing either work right now, but the silence of their absence comes as no surprise.