If you’re familiar at all with modern performance art, you’ve probably heard about Maria Abramović’s latest exhibition at MOMA — or you have at least some of the works that are being recreated there at one point or another. The exhibit is a retrospective, spanning her most well-known pieces, entitled “The Artist is Present.” The main piece is a live performance by Abramović — she sits at a chair every day and invites an audience member to sit across from her to lock eyes for as long as the spectator wishes to stay. She participates in this act for five hours every day (that MOMA is open to the public) and does not communicate throughout the duration (orally or otherwise). MOMA has a Flickr set that’s been updated with portraits of every single person who has been seated with Abramović. The third person who sat with her at the opening of her exhibit was none other than Tehching Hsieh. Until I saw this I had no idea he was even making rounds amongst artists; in fact, it was a shock to see how much he’s changed and aged from his appearance in his performances. He’s been out of the public eye for over a decade already.
“My work is kind of unknown, and I am not an artist anymore.”
Tehching Hsieh is a Taiwanese born artist who moved to New York City in the 70’s while enduring a short stint with painting. From there, he conceived of year-long live performance pieces from 1978 until 1986. Because of his questionable status in the country at the time, he was assertive in creating pieces that had lasting evidence to the existence of his work, as well as his own existence in the states, and had lawyers draft up documents, and had fellow artists and public figureheads (from various art institutions) verify and check the validity of his performance with extreme scrutiny. In these year-long performances, he lived in a small cage for an entire year while being unable to communicate to any viewers who were present, he recorded himself at a time clock every hour of every single day, he became nomadic in New York City and avoided shelter of any kind, he stayed connected with a female artist by a piece of rope (but they were never allowed to have any physical contact), and he stopped creating, seeing, reading, and speaking any art. The culmination of these acts became more of a conceptual piece; he then committed himself to thirteen years, from 1986 until 1999, of creating art in anonymity.
After his thirteen years of art and solitude, he stopped producing work altogether. In a recent New York Times article, he shared his thoughts on his legacy. “My work is kind of unknown, and I am not an artist anymore.” Despite this, Maria Abramović considered him a “personal hero.”
He’s become my personal hero in a way, too. The notion that one could create such a cohesive long-term motif through performance art is quite amazing, but it’s actually jaw-dropping because he did this while being an alien to a new country (though he was granted amnesty in 1988) and still was able to have such an impact on fellow artists. Hsieh was prolific. The series he created were filled with a wide range of challenges and seem to have been fleshed out so thoroughly. Another point, and quite frankly it’s the most obvious one, is that he’s Chinese. While Hsieh was apprehensive about the subject, the curator at the Guggenheim, Alexandra Munroe, did not hesitate. “Why was Tehching left out?” she said. “Because he was Chinese.”
One of my courses in art history at NYU introduced me to Hsieh’s Time Clock series; it sparked my interest in the convergence between performance art, internet message boards, technology (or the state of digital photography), and (to a certain extent) fashion. With accessibility to photography at an all-time high, we’re looking at memes that come to life and die overnight. Something like Noah Kalina’s Every Day is quite a remarkable feat — it’s a testament to some form of permanence in an online world of attention deficit disorder. I’m hoping that one day I’ll be able to complete a body of work that not only captures the attention of the world, but also has as much soul as the work of performance artists such as Tehching Hsieh.
Oh yeah. He was wearing raw jawns in his year-long performances, too.
“My understanding of time is that life is a life sentence. Life is passing time.” Tehching Hsieh
