Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance 1980-1981
As with his other One Year Performances, Hsieh shaved his head at the start of the performance and released a printed declaration of intent. Hsieh’s life during this year was ordered around the regulated, recurring act. He could not stray far from his New York studio-loft, nor could he sleep continuously for more than about fifty minutes. Sleep deprivation was pitted against the demand to be upright and visible. Every time he clocked in he also took a still image on a 16mm camera of his standing to attention beside the clock. His ordeal results in one of the most uncanny and extraordinary performance artefacts made by an artist: a six-minute film of Hsieh’s tremulous body floating beside a whirling clock, wracked by the rapid passage of an immense wave of time. Shot at twenty-four frames per second, each day was violently condensed into roughly a second of film.
The clock was sealed and signed by David Milne, an executive director of a New York arts foundation, who also acted as a witness verifying the authenticity of the punch cards. When the performance finally closed, these artefacts were meticulously archived and analysed by Hsieh: during the course of the year he was unable to perform only 133 of the possible 8,760 punch-ins.
About
Tehching Hsieh was born in 1950 in Nan-Chou, Taiwan and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Starting in the late 1970s, Hsieh made five One Year Performances and a Thirteen Year Plan in New York City. Using long durations, making art and life simultaneous, Hsieh achieved one of the most radical approaches in contemporary art.
WORK WORK WORK
During WORK WORK WORK, Frascati will open its doors as a museum for performance art for four days. Each day the building will be open for eight hours, representing a working day. Dries Verhoeven co-curates the programme with his own work and that of others into a large number of performance, fine art and video works about the relationship between employer, employee and (art) consumer. Together, the artists explore the politics of the working body now and in the future.