Tehching Hsieh - How is experience changed by being designated as art, and how does art differ from ordinary life?

Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (Live Art Development Agency and MIT Press, 2009)

«Of all the “curious undertakings” of performance artists, none have been as striking as Tehching Hsieh’s lifeworks. In 1986, the artist dropped out of the public eye to begin his final performance piece, “Thirteen Year Plan,” a period during which he would make art but not show it publicly. He emerged in 1999 with a ransom note bearing a simple message: “I kept myself alive.”
In addition to “Thirteen Year Plan,” the dedicated Hsieh did a series of one-year pieces, which included spending a year in communication blackout (no reading or writing, either), a year spent in a room punching a worker’s clock on the hour, repeatedly, and a year of total artistic abstention. “Although [Hsieh’s works] attracted a cult following in New York and Taiwanese performance-art circles, they took place out of view of the art world, which barely mentioned them”. But the mainstream art world has “finally clocked in,” with Hsieh’s works earning exhibits at the Guggenheim and MoMA.» - Julie Hanus


«Reading Out of Now has reassured me that I'm not the only one struggling to understand and take meaning from art. Although this book focuses on Tehching Hsieh's lifeworks (from the 1970s to 2000) there is poignancy in Adrian Heathfield's attempt to get to the crux of his art, to find out why he made it and what it meant retrospectively.
The book seems to take the traditional monograph format (big, heavy, smells good) until you actually start reading it... the first deviation from this is in Heathfield's introduction he says: 'Often when I read a story with a name in it that is hard to say my tongue trips and I lose the thread.' I know what he means - even Tehching knows what he means; when Hsieh first started making art as an immigrant he adopted the westernised name of Sam. The book focuses on each lifework in turn and is narrated from a second hand witness' vantage point, illustrated and then contextualised with letters from contemporaries - admirers and detractors alike and is concluded with an essay by Carol Becker.
One letter included, written to Hsieh states: 'You are brining shame and discredit to the Chinese people. Go home to Taiwan' whilst another, sent during One year Performance 1980-1981 (during which Hsieh attempted to punch a workers' time clock in his studio ever hour), politely - and with every effort not to offend - pleads for an explanation of his work:
'Why do you do such performances? They do not seem self-fulfilling or such as to give much pleasure of insight to audiences, but there must be much more to them than is apparent. Please try to let me know.'
This request is echoed throughout. I'm not sure that any book, or exhibition, could ever answer, but this one certainly tries. And in doing so presents rich and textured arguments into many possible 'whys' doing justice to Hsieh's work and leaving it ultimately up to the reader to decide. There can't ever be any definitive meaning for art for anyone except its own creator. We all interpret differently and it is these nuances which Heathfield captures - sharing with us his attempts to understand and make sense, including his own one day re-enactment of One Year Performance 1981-1982 (during which Hsieh roamed New York without shelter for a year).
Hsiehs' work is fascinating, profound and mysterious. For example in Out of Now there are pages of photos of the tapes which recorded the dialogue between Hsieh and Montano (during Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984). Although photographed these tapes are sealed and no one is meant to ever hear them - let alone transcribe them.
I suspect it is this lack of sympathy for an audience (or is it respect?) that has, to some extent, exacerbated Januszczak (who claimed it would take over 24 hours to view all the work in the exhibition at the Tate). But this is exactly what appeals to me about Hsieh's work as it is tenderly presented here. At last art isn't presented in a defence of itself. Heathfield in this book has created, in Becker's words:
'...a frame for the documentation of Hsieh's work and all the elements of its process - a safe holding environment, where the work can rest, where the artist's actions as well as his words about them become the centrepiece and where writers like myself and other artists can attempt to think around the edges...' « - Samantha Bond

«The figure convulses violently, his hair lurching this way and that. His body flutters in spasms too quick to be seen, jumping instantaneously across miniscule distances without moving through the space in between. Next to the figure, the hands of a clock spin alarmingly out of control: relentless, emotionless, like a machine lost in manic dream. And always, throughout this frenzy, a facial expression that gives nothing away, looking outward at us through the camera lens, seeming literally oblivious. Seeming literally to be facing oblivion.
This is a film, being projected onto a wall in a room full of artists, curators, and academics. The event is the launch of the book Out of Now. The film was produced over the duration of one of Hsieh's five year-long artworks, during 1980-1981, in which he pledged to punch a time clock every hour of every day for 365 days. After doing this duty each hour, Hsieh stood next to the clock, faced the camera, and exposed another frame of the film. He is always wearing the same clothes, always wearing the same expression - only his hair, shaved at the beginning of the year, seems to change. As a piece of work in itself, the film has a quality which makes it difficult to watch; but watching it with the knowledge of the full story makes it all the more unfathomable. What would it mean to know nothing for a year except the intervals between this action? To sleep, to think, to live, only in the time in between? How do you try to comprehend this while watching the six or so minutes during which this film speeds through a year of Hsieh's life?
Many of us will have heard of Hsieh's one year performances, which, in addition to this year of measured time, included a year spent confined in close quarters, a year spent without shelter of any kind, a year spent tied by eight-foot rope to Linda Montano during which touch between the two was forbidden, and a year spent avoiding any contact with the objects or institutions of art. But it is one thing to know of these acts, and another to confront them: watching this film is, in one way, an encounter with the magnitude of the work. Standing before the film, I find myself face-to-face with the work. Except, of course, that I am not. Watching the film at this comfortable art opening is nothing like the work. The object of the film might have more of the residual power of Hsieh's year-long gesture than, say, whatever internal preconception I have about the work, or, for that matter, these words that you are now reading. But the gesture, though evoked more effectively, is absent. This is the nature of Hsieh's work: no one could ever have seen the work, or experienced the work, except Hsieh himself. We can only ever experience it through mediation.
This problem of Hsieh's works - that they are only ever apprehended through their traces, and that their traces are always inadequate compared to the magnitude of the works - is a problem which Heathfield and Hsieh self-consciously address in the production of the book, Out of Now. How does one do justice to these works? How does one represent the works, when by their nature they exceed representability? This is always an issue whatever a book's subject, but it seems most pointed in the case of these lifeworks, which elude comprehension more than any other artworks, perhaps, or at least any other work which did not result in the death of its creator. Heathfield acknowledges this directly in his introduction: ‘To speak of these acts here and now in writing requires a tentative voice, because the acts themselves concern the limits of the sayable and the legible.'
In the face of this inherent impossibility of commensurability between the works and their document, the book makes a mighty effort. Though its objecthood will always be insignificant with regard to the experiences Hsieh underwent, it is nonetheless a massive, magnificent object: it consists of nearly 400 pages, including over 250 pages of photographs and other visual traces, and it's a big, beautiful object - too big, in fact, to fit on the shelf with my other illustrated books. As an example of its ambition, one way the book represents the 1980-1981 work described above is by reproducing each and every film frame. Even when the frames are shrunk to half the size of a postage stamp, it still takes 30 pages, each with several hundred tiny images, to represent the year. (There are some missing frames: Hsieh overslept and missed 133 out of the 8,760 hourly appointments with the clock, and more frequently, there were malfunctions with the filmmaking apparatus.) Elsewhere in the book, Heathfield writes lovingly and carefully about each of the one year performances, substantiating them with historical contexts and philosophical ramifications. In his own reflection on the film and the experience of watching it, for example, he describes the way it produces a ‘nowhen', ‘a delirium of altered consciousness, both for Hsieh in his long durational performance and for his observers, who are left to piece together the parts.' No words, no images, no conceptual frameworks would be adequate to describe Hsieh's work, but the scale and excessiveness of this careful giant of a book are adequate, at least, to indicate the scope of their insufficiency.
One final point seems necessary, on the topic of visibility. Much of Hsieh's work is outside comprehension, outside comprehensibility, but on a more basic level it is also outside sight: no one is there to see it. This is most the case for Hsieh's thirteen-year project, the work which followed the five year-long pieces. During these thirteen years, Hsieh pledged to make art but not to show it publicly. He disappeared. Out of Now represents these thirteen years with thirteen blank pages, like the black pages in Tristram Shandy, pointing only to an absence about which nothing is sayable. But alongside this deliberate engagement with invisibility, which we might characterise as being internal to the work, Hsieh's work has also had an external, historical invisibility. Heathfield writes,
'Hsieh's work has found itself in a peculiar place - neither here nor there - within the art market, art institutions and their circuits of exhibition, and within art and performance criticism and theory. His work and its artefacts have remained largely uncollected and only scarcely displayed. In art discourse he is rarely discussed: in the many books addressing Conceptual Art and later conceptualist work his oeuvre goes wholly unmentioned and in the major critical works focusing on Body Art, the performances are barely traced.'
This inattention to Hsieh's work may be because of prejudices based on nationality or ethnicity, or because of the irrelevance of institutions to the work, or perhaps as a consequence of its internal thematisation of invisibility. In any case, Out of Now is a deliberate corrective to this marginalisation, and this is at least one other function of its hefty size. Letters to Hsieh included in the book, in which Marina Abramović, Tim Etchells, Peggy Phelan, and Santiago Sierra acknowledge Hsieh's impact of their work and thought, are also part of this restoration of attention. Amongst these corrective gestures, one for which I found myself particularly grateful was the reproduction of a lengthy written interview between Heathfield and Hsieh, conducted with painstaking commitment to clarity and dependent on mediation through translation. It is evident that a lot of thought and effort went into this extended conversation, and it feels like a tremendous privilege to be able to read Hsieh's own thoughts about the origins, meanings, and problems of his work. In relation to these incomprehensible acts, what is stunning about Hsieh's words is the degree to which he seems fully to have comprehended the magnitude of what he was undertaking. His knowing, fearful, and courageous attitude toward what he did makes them all the more remarkable.» - Theron Schmidt


«DVD-ROM [Performing Life: The Work of Tehching Hsieh] documents the life work of Tehching Hsieh. Hsieh is an artist whose medium of expression is not words or sounds or paint, but his own life. His work consists of five "One Year Performances," done between the years of 1978 and 1986, and "Earth," a thirteen-year performance that stretched from the end of 1986 to the end of 1999. Each of these Performances involves a particular vow, a particular constraint, and a particular mode of being. Each of them is meticulously documented in a manner appropriate to its content. And, although Hsieh never explicitly states his rationales for his pieces, each of them implicitly raises profound, difficult questions about life and art and being, and about what it means to live in the world we live in.
For the first One Year Performance, known informally as the Cage Piece, Hsieh spent an entire year locked inside a cage that he had constructed in his loft. It was much like being in a prison cell. Hsieh had nobody to talk to, nothing to read or listen to, and nothing to do, except think and count the days. Each day, he documented the ordeal by making a mark on the wall, and taking a photograph of himself. An assistant, with whom he did not exchange words, brought him food, and disposed of his wastes.
This first Performance is about solitude and isolation. It questions the inner limits of identity and being. Hsieh stripped himself down to the bare minimum of subsistence: not so much in terms of food, shelter, and clothing, as in terms of social contact, material comfort, and opportunities for amusement. We are sustained by our communication with others, and by the nourishment and stimulation that the outside world offers us. How much of all this can one give up, and still remain oneself? What does it mean to reduce the self to its narrowest possible compass? What does it mean to think, without the opportunity to communicate or record what we are thinking? Hsieh's performance may have been inspired by his own experiences of alienation as an illegal (at the time) immigrant in New York City. And the piece certainly resonates with the plight of political prisoners in solitary confinement around the world. But Hsieh's willing embrace of such a state of deprivation remains mysterious and unsettling.
For the second One Year Performance, known informally as the Time Piece, Hsieh punched a time clock, every hour on the hour, twenty-four hours a day, for an entire year. An observer verified each day's time card. "To help illustrate the time process," Hsieh shaved his head before the piece began, and then let his hair grow freely for the duration. Every time he punched the clock, a movie camera shot a single frame. The resulting film compresses each day into a second, and the whole year into about six minutes.
This second Performance focuses on the nature of time. We are, fundamentally, temporal beings. Yet we rarely pay attention to the passage of time in and for itself. We tend to think of time only in terms of the activities that fill it up. Or else we think about time negatively, in terms of having to wait, when there is something that we want right now. In his Performance, Hsieh stripped all these contents and contexts away, in order to experience something like time's pure passage. He did this by pushing to an extreme the way our society equates time with work. Hsieh used a time clock, that device of the workplace that mechanically divides time into precisely equal segments, and that mercilessly judges human accomplishment by the measure of time spent. He took on the work of punching the time clock, instead of using the clock to measure a different sort of work. In this way, the passage of time itself, devoid of any particular content, became the sole object of his labors. By pushing our society's reification of time to its ultimate point, Hsieh was able to rediscover an inner experience of time, a sense of pure eventless Duration.
For the third One Year Performance, known informally as the Outdoor Piece, Hsieh stayed out of doors for a whole year. He did not enter any building or roofed structure. Mostly, he roamed around Lower Manhattan. He relied on pay phones and chance meetings to keep in touch with his friends. Each day, he recorded his wanderings on a map, noting in particular the places where he ate and slept.
This third Performance can be viewed as the inverse of the first. Instead of withdrawing into a confined inner space, Hsieh opened himself up, as fully as possible, to the outside. The self can perish from exposure, as well as from confinement. For this piece, Hsieh cast himself adrift, and became a nomad. He tested his powers of survival in circumstances that were more than usually beyond his own control. What is the nature of a dwelling, after all? Why is it so basic a human need, symbolically as well as materially? How does one's dwelling contribute to one's identity? What happens when one is compelled to do without it? Without a home, one becomes nearly invisible, anonymous. Is there a freedom to such homelessness, as well as a deprivation? There are many involuntarily homeless people, compelled to live on the streets of New York City; what did it mean for Hsieh to willfully share their plight?
Hsieh's fourth One Year Performance, subtitled Art/Life, was a collaboration with Linda Montano. The two of them spent a year tied together by an 8-foot rope. At the same time, they tried to avoid actually touching, so that they could each maintain some sense of personal space. Hsieh and Montano did not know each other before the piece began. But once it started, they were never separated for the entire year. Each day, they kept records of their time together by taking photos and recording audiotapes.
This fourth Performance asks us to consider how human relationships work. The first and third Performances displayed the self in isolation from the rest of the world, or in antagonism with it. This piece explores the dimension of intimacy. What makes two separate people into a couple? How do they stand, in relation to one another, as well as to the rest of the world? What does it mean for them to remain in such proximity, for so long a period of time? How do we negotiate our needs, for both contact (embodied here by their being tied together) and privacy (embodied here by their not actually touching)? Where does the self end, and the other person begin? How close can two people get, and to what extent must they always remain strangers to one another?
Hsieh's fifth and final One Year Performance was, in a sense, the negation of the previous four. Hsieh spent an entire year without art --a year without making art, talking or reading about it, viewing it or in any other way participating in it. Rather, Hsieh "just went in life" for that year. Unlike the other One Year Performances, the documentation for this one is minimal. Since he was doing nothing special, there was nothing to record.
This fifth Performance is nonetheless significant, because of the way it puts the previous ones into perspective. How is experience changed by being designated as art? And how does art differ from ordinary life? All of Hsieh's work circles around these questions. In one sense, the work is an endeavor to make art and life coincide. But does this mean that life is transfigured, given a special richness and significance, by being turned into a work of art? Or does it rather mean that art is demystified and brought down to earth, by being absorbed into the textures and rhythms of everyday life? There is also the question of the unforeseen contingencies that make perfection of the life or of the work alike impossible. Nothing ever works out entirely as planned. Thus, during the second Performance, Hsieh overslept and missed a small number of clock punches; during the third Performance, he was compelled to spend a few hours indoors, when he was arrested after getting into a fight; during the fourth Performance, he and Montano touched one another by accident a few times. By designating the rigorous absence of art as itself a work of art, by making an art of just going in life, Hsieh reflects back on these dilemmas.
"Earth" is Hsieh's last project, and the one that went on the longest. It lasted all the way from his thirty-sixth birthday to his forty-ninth. It was documented, unlike the fifth Performance; but unlike the first four, the documentation only took place in retrospect. When Hsieh announced the piece, he said that he would make art, but only in secret. He did not reveal the content or the purpose of the performance until the day after it was over. Only then did he give his report: "I kept myself alive," he said, and made it through to the new millennium.
"Earth" was not about fulfilling particular conditions, in the way the first four One Year Performances were. Nor was it about negating such conditions, in the manner of the fifth One Year Performance. Rather, simple existence - surviving, persisting, continuing - became the object of the artist's affirmation. The work did nothing but double, imperceptibly, whatever was already going on in Hsieh's day-to-day existence. In this way, Hsieh once more reconfigured the relationship between art and life. "Earth" suggests another way of looking back at all of Hsieh's previous work. However extraordinary the tasks Hsieh had to perform, in each of his pieces, the most important thing about them was this: that through their repetition, and their absorption into daily routine, these tasks became as ordinary as anything else. And that is perhaps the most important transformation of all.
Tehching Hsieh's work invites us to an infinite meditation. It asks difficult questions, without giving us any answers. Hsieh's performances do not illustrate any theories, and do not propose any determinate concepts. Rather, they exemplify and embody the problems they raise. Whether Hsieh was concerned with solitude and isolation, with the self's boundaries and its relationships to others, or with the way our lives are embedded in time and space, he always sought to grasp the issues as concretely as possible. He did not just think about these fundamental dilemmas. He also lived them, in their full existential density, joy, and terror. Doing this required an incredible force of discipline and dedication. But it also required an extraordinary willingness to let go: to give oneself over to time and chance and materiality. The stubborn excess of the real, its refusal to be contained within the ideas we have of it: this is the true substance of Hsieh's art.
Each of Hsieh's performances was a singular event: an action, or series of actions, that unfolded in a particular space, during a particular span of time. Now that they are done, they cannot be recaptured or revived. All that's left of them are the traces and remnants that they left behind. These traces come in several forms. There are all the ideas inspired by Hsieh's pieces, such as the ones expressed in the present essay. And then there is the meticulous documentation of the performances: the posters and photos and videos and artists' statements, all preserved on this DVD-ROM. This large body of evidence is important, because Hsieh's work is not complete without a witness. Of course, no one else can know the artist's inner experience, all that he went through as he performed these six pieces. But for the performances to register in the world, they cannot remain entirely private. They have to face outward as well as inward. These pieces need to be witnessed, as well as enacted. It's like a tree falling in the forest: there must be someone to hear the sound of its crash. Hsieh has given the gift of his art to us, his witnesses. And we, as witnesses, have made that art possible, by receiving it. Artist and audience face one another over a vast divide, but each is necessary to the other.» - Steven Shaviro