Anna Pulley

Artists Micheal Zheng and Nicole McClure locked lips for seven hours straight during a guerilla performance at SFMOMA.

On Saturday, March 26, 2011, in the SFMOMA’s public atrium, museum-goers strolled amiably and children played with a motion sensor spotlight. A voice overhead boomed things like, “We are all watching you,” and, “It’s so great to see you again!”

And off to one side, Michael Zheng and Nicole McClure, both artists and near strangers, stood locked in an arduous embrace in public view for seven straight hours, from the time the museum doors opened at 11 a.m. until they closed at 5:45 p.m. Their enthusiastic osculation was part of Zheng’s guerilla art performance, titled “Making Out at SFMOMA.”

Museum onlookers became participants, whether they wanted to or not. Some were not happy about it. One man’s look of disdain was almost tangible— and as he walked up to the ticket taker, he said, “That is disgusting.” “Get a room,” whispered an older woman from out of town to her female friends. One husband turned to his wife at the coat check and said, “I wish it was two chicks instead.” His wife responded by smacking him.

At one point Zheng stealthily removed McClure’s bra and flung it to the floor, where it lay with a few other garments until the Customer Service Manager covered up the bra because she was concerned it was offensive to some families. Interestingly, as one SFMOMA staff member told me, “A lot of people were offended by it until they found out it was performance art.”

Other visitors broke into wide grins when they noticed the making out. “This is the most interesting thing I’ve seen in the museum,” said a college-aged guy, who had just visited SFMOMA’s voyeurism exhibit on the fourth floor. While the make-out performance wasn’t intentionally timed with the exhibit, it fit damn near perfectly, and because of that, many people mistakenly thought Zheng’s piece was in collaboration with the museum.

“That’s hot,” said a girl in her late twenties. “This is masturbation material,” said another, a sentiment that was echoed by many of the women I spoke to, including a girl I invited to watch with me for a potentially awkward first date. Very early on, she admitted to being turned on by the performance. I figured since Zheng's piece was sort of like an awkward first date performed for the public, that I would engage with it in a similar way. No documentation of my performance exists, but I will say that the date went very, very well.