Time For Art

In contrast to our previous reading, this week we reduced our focus to the oeuvre of a single artist, Tehching Hsieh, a ‘Life Artist’, or ‘Endurance Artist’ who worked on year-long performances during the 1980’s.

In contrast to Body Art, which uses the body as canvas and tests the limits of what a body can do or be, Life Works question what it means to live in a body, and provide a frame in which to explore, and play with, art, time, and life. Naming his output ‘Life Works’ troubles what we take for granted; both in terms of what we think about when we think of ‘living’, and in the concept of ‘a life’.

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Hsieh is notoriously unforthcoming about what his pieces ‘mean’, invoking the question “What kind of person would do this”? The work refutes and refuses this kind of subject/ification, with Hsieh simply implying the work is about a universality, and an exploration of time. However, because the artist is both in the work and of the work, are these statements part of them? What is intentional on the part of the artist? Also, by constantly and consistently attempting to blur boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘everyday’, the art has become his ‘everyday’, so how to define normality within this context, except by using the work as a frame of reference for our own experience of life?

Thinking in terms of the progression of his work, we can see how he develops as an artist: beginning with Cage Piece. This can be read as an artistic representation of his situation at the time, as an illegal immigrant – a classification that is, by definition, outside of the legal structures of the country of current occupancy yet situates the person into a very distinct category within that system – and the prison symbolism (bars, isolation, marks on the walls, daily ‘mugshots’), signify this sense of illegality.

Image Source: noshowmuseum.com

In, what is possibly Hsieh’s most well-known work, Time Clock Piece, we have a sense of his widening out of his ‘Cage’ – although he is not physically imprisoned, he is still restrained by the imperative to return to the clock each hour. In a costume reminiscent of a factory worker, Hsieh takes hourly photographs as he stamps the time card: this carries multiple connotations, including that of being a prisoner of labour (labour is time, time is money), a critique of labour structures which rely on meeting targets and time without care for the workers, a sense of increasing documentation which may reflect the experience of the immigrant attempting to become a citizen, and has ominous overtones of increasing surveillance and scrutiny.

After the Clock, Hsieh lived outdoors for a year in Outdoor Piece, in which he announced his intention to not enter any structure at all during this time. This work is documented through daily maps in which Hsieh noted where he walked, ate, slept, defecated, etc. In one respect this seems more personal as it depicts how he filled his ‘time’, however it is also less personal due to the lack of photographs that characterised previous work. Interestingly, during this time, he starts signing his work with his given name of Tehching, rather than the Americanised identity of Sam. Here we see his claiming of visibility and identity whilst invoking a situation (homelessness) which is a state of invisibility and non-identity.

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Another of Hsieh’s well-known works is Rope Piece. Tethered to Linda Montano for one year, the work causes questioning of how we negotiate our own needs, time, space, or boundaries with others. I find it interesting that the two artists interpret the work completely differently, and one example of this is in the aspect of gender, with Hsieh claiming that the fact the two artists were of different genders is irrelevant, and Montano reading it as the social imperative for a women to be ‘tied’ to a man or masculine society. I believe that Hsieh is being both his usual inscrutable self, but also making the point that gender doesn’t matter here because interpretations are multiple and would change according to the gender identity of the two people ties together, and indeed this work has been restaged several times with artists, students, and performers using it to explore power structures, negotiation, gender identity, and more.  

In Hsieh’s next piece he announced a No Art Piece. Now, I find this interesting because it invites a conceptual contradiction: framing the *not doing* of art as an experiment in art. In Hsieh’s no characteristic statement prior to beginning the piece, three words are blocked out. I believe the word is ‘will’, which is interesting as it places the gesture in the immediate present rather than an imagined future, and also gestures towards a broken language, reminiscent of the halting English spoken by the artist. Finally, Hsieh began Earth Piece, which acts as a summation of all of his previous works and, personally, I find too large to conceptualise or understand: the sheer span of time exceeds my capacity for interpretation here.

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In all of Hsieh’s pieces there is a curious privilege at play: firstly, the idea of choice – as much as the artist is ‘enduring’ the work, he has actively chosen to do this. Especially in Outdoor Piece, there is a sense of finality, and his ability to leave this situation, which is not enjoyed by the people whose situation he is invoking. Hsieh was also financially stable, supported by his family and friends, and had the space to work on these pieces which attempted to raise questions of how we filled our time.

Despite that, it is quite fascinating, and does cause scrutiny of what we choose to fill our time.