In 1974 Tehching Hsieh jumped ship at a dock on the Delaware River, in Pennsylvania, from an oil tanker on which he’d worked as a seaman to flee Taiwan. With only a Super 8 camera in hand, he headed to Manhattan and, a few years later, between 1978 and 1986, staged a series of five yearlong “lifeworks,” at a time when performance art, with its anarchic economies of production and reception, occupied a marginal position in the art world. Radically indifferent to institutional sanction, Hsieh’s durational works transpired beyond the bounds of the then burgeoning art market as well as existing movements or scenes. This sense of outsiderness drew from Hsieh’s early years as an undocumented immigrant, as he eked out a living as a construction worker and dishwasher. It wasn’t until 14 years later, in 1988, that he was granted amnesty and citizenship.
In One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece), Hsieh lived in a cage he built in his loft on Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan for one year; refraining from reading, writing, watching television, and listening to the radio, he arranged for a friend to deliver food and remove waste daily. Following that was One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece), for which Hsieh punched a time clock every hour, 24 hours a day, for 365 days. The other three yearlong performances included living on the streets of Manhattan without stepping foot inside a building (in 1981); being rope-tied around the waist to the artist Linda Montano, whom he was not allowed to touch (1983); and, lastly, total abstention from creating, viewing, or speaking about art (1985).
In such works, extended duration allowed Hsieh to avoid the separation between art and life—and thus transcend merely performing, by fully embodying the passage of time. In its extremity and rigor, Hsieh’s persistent testing of the boundaries of life and art—and the psychological and physical risk that accompanied it—burned away any fat of sentimentalism and posturing. His durational works left behind material traces in the form of studiously preserved documentary photographs, but the visual evidence also seems to acknowledge its fundamental inadequacy in terms of showing us how time is truly lived and felt in a body.
On October 4, Dia Beacon will open a retrospective of Hsieh’s work that features the five yearlong performance pieces as well his final work, Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen Year Plan), for which the artist made numerous works that he pointedly withheld from the public. In a conversation convened in his studio in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, Hsieh talks about the exhibition, the allure of repetition, and how some of his core concepts have changed or remained the same over the years.
How are you thinking of your Dia retrospective in the context of your career? In some ways, your practice troubles the very notion of an artistic career in the way it deepens the relationship between art and time.
The Dia show is my first retrospective. It is like a newborn baby to me. People watch it grow—art has its own life. I don’t use the word career because it has simply just been life. These two things—time and art—are not too different to me because I use time whether I’m doing life or making art. They’re both drawing from the same material, which is time.
In your yearlong performance works, the aim was neither a total negation of art nor a romantic reconciliation with life, but a consummation of both. Have your ideas about the relationship between art and life changed since these performances?
I wouldn’t use the word change, which to me is just repetition until something happens, a kind of change that is detached from newness. To me, art is what happens when a “change” takes place but you can’t tell what prompted it or if it’s even something new. The point is that you need repetition to get there.
For me, your work is not only about the collapsing of art and life but also rigorous contemplation of death, through repetition.
My five “lifeworks” were all one year long because one year is the time that it takes for the earth to complete one orbit around the sun. This was a key aspect of repetition in my work. The way that I used repetition was not as a micro-concept, as something that we as humans “do,” but as a larger universal, abstract principle, like the cyclical nature of the world, of being, which includes death. Have you seen Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey? In the opening scene, an apelike hominid encounters and examines some animal bones. A bone suddenly becomes an object of purpose and meaning to him, and he realizes he can use it as a weapon, to smash other bones. And then through this imaginative leap, he becomes aware of the entire cycle of life and death, and of his place within this bigger picture. To me, this is like when freethinking finds a breakthrough in one’s artistic practice, letting intuition and instinct guide you rather than using ideas or concepts. You become conceptual about something, rather than using or borrowing a concept.
That famous opening scene in 2001 seems to be about the birth of imagination—and imagination as a gift and marvel that comes to us, rather than something that we “innovate.”
It is about imagination, yes, which goes in hand with our limits and fragility. My work has reflected this; I don’t use fast or slow speed, but something more natural, like the human heartbeat—a human speed.
That seems to counter some writings I’ve come across that frame your work as enacting an ethics of slowness, given the extended temporality of your performances.
To me, I’m not slow. By comparison to, say, computer time, my work might register as “slow.” But it’s all relative. If you’re on a highway and you’re driving slower than the car next to you, it might seem as if you’re experiencing yourself as “slow,” but in fact you’re driving 70 miles per hour. Personally, I’m impatient, and like to get through things faster than what is possible. So my work isn’t about slowness. In some ways, I’m an impatient person making patient works.
It’s interesting how sometimes we harbor our opposites and, in our work, have a desire to militate against our natural dispositions. Was impatience always a part of your personality?
Yes. I came here [to the United States] illegally partially because I couldn’t wait to get out of Taiwan. But on the positive side, being impatient has translated into a sort of mental freedom, and an ability to not make excuses for myself. For example, when I first got to the US I didn’t limit myself just because I didn’t have sufficient funds to realize a project. I went ahead and did it because I was impatient. But then, when it comes to success and recognition, I have always been very patient. I’m not a person who has much desire for status and fame.
New York in the 1980s must have been chaotic, with the hype of a booming art market and many artists self-professionalizing and rising to stardom. But it seems none of that really swayed you into wanting careerist success. Have you been always unmoved by the pressures and trappings of the art world?
Yes, you can say that. I didn’t go out looking for it. It was a very different art world at that time, but I still preferred living in New York [over] Taiwan, which has a complex Confucian worldview. It’s very strong and, though there are good people there, it would have been difficult to make the work I wanted [to] in Taiwan. People often try to read Eastern philosophy into my work—Zen, transcendentalism—but I’m not promoting a better way of being or offering guidance. I’m just passing time. No high or low. Just time. You make your own choice and then pass time until you finish your life.
The idea of freethinking has been important for your practice. Is freethinking still possible at the level of status and recognition you have achieved? Does freethinking as a concept now possess different meaning at this point in your career than in the past?
Freethinking is something everyone does. It has nothing to do with one’s occupation or whether one is an artist or not. We are talking about the more groundbreaking and creative part of freethinking. In fact, I did not do any more groundbreaking freethinking. I just live the rest of my life, passing time. Even if you’re in prison, you still have freethinking. Because freethinking means that nobody can stop you. It belongs to you only, and no one can take it away from you.
Your retrospective at Dia will include your final work, Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen Year Plan), in which you vowed to make art but not show it publicly during the designated time. How will this work be exhibited in relation to the other performances?
“Thirteen Year Plan”will have its own room, of 45 by 168 feet, in the retrospective. The five one-year performances will each be in other rooms of equal size, all 45 by 45 feet. The sizes of the exhibition rooms are calculated according to each performance’s length of time. For example, the actual size
of the room exhibiting “Thirteen Year Plan,” if strictly calculated with the ratio of time [13 years], should be 45 by 585 feet, but because there is not enough space, we designed it as 45 by 168 feet.
So you’re translating each performance’s duration into square footage at Dia. What kind of viewing experience do you hope for through this format?
The space in each room is Art Time, and the space between each room is Life Time. The whole exhibition is translated not just spatially, but temporally as well. When the viewer walks through the whole architectural installation, it will take about two hours. It’s like watching a movie that compresses 22 years of the artist’s lifeworks into two hours. I hope the audience will enjoy it. I do the work, and the audience does the thinking.
