I accompanied a friend to the Tehching Hsieh lecture a couple of days ago, being only vaguely familiar with his art beforehand. In case you don't know, Hsieh's body of work is mostly comprised of year-long performance pieces, spanning from the late seventies to the year 1999. These include: locking himself in a jail cell in his studio for one year and depriving himself of human interaction (a friend brought him meals and cleaned up after him, but they weren't allowed to speak), tying himself to another artist with a five-foot rope for one year but not allowing them to make physical contact, living on the streets for a year without being able to go inside any buildings, not being able to talk about, write about, or make any art for a year, and making art for thirteen years, but not talking about it or showing it to anyone.
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| The Rope Piece |
In order to verify the authenticity of these feats, Hsieh's work relies on a couple of things: a signed legal document stating that a lawyer was present/documentary evidence hasn't been tampered with, etc., and often, photography to document the process. I'm thinking, in particular, of a work he completed in '80-'81 called the "Time Clock Piece" in which he punches a time clock in his studio every hour for a year. He wears a laborer's outfit, and photographs himself immediately after punching the clock. In the lecture we viewed a video that had complied all of the photos. I believe it was about five or six minutes long, but it felt like an inffffinityyyy.
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| The Time Clock installation |
I found a little chunk of the photo-compilation here:
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/one-year-performance/video/1/
I was sad that I could not make it to that lecture because I was really curious to see how he interacted with people in the format of a lecture. I feel that it takes a unique person to undergo that sort of artistic practice and I figured that there would be some evidence of that in the way he addressed the audience. Anyhow, based on your post, I am most interested in this piece about connecting the two artists by a rope for an entire year. My mind can not even begin to understand that sort of commitment to a piece. It's remarkable. In terms of ownership, is it considered his piece, or their piece? And, do you know if he is friends with the other artist still? Or was he ever? Just some thoughts and questions. Thanks for the post.
ReplyDeleteHe was a cute little Chinese man with jokes. Haha. Seriously, he was realllly funny, which kind of contrasted against how intense and grueling his work was. The first question from in the audience in the Q&A was "will you go out for a drink with me later?" and he was really embarrassed. Ah!
ReplyDeleteThe time clock piece really gets to me. I didn't really think about it until later, but it's every hour for 24 hours in a day. Imagine trying to go to sleep when you have to get up in an hour to punch a fucking clock.
He basically said that the rope piece resembles the relationship between man and woman in a degrading marriage. Something I found really refreshing about his work was that it was so simple and his intentions never become convoluted. As to the lady-artist, her name came and went for me, because I wasn't really familiar with her before. There's a funny picture of them sitting at a picnic table with this other guy, and he says "and this is a photo of us with my friend Ai Weiwei." Ha.