In 1974, Tehching Hsieh jumped from a dock on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, from an oil tanker, who was a seaman who fled Taiwan. He had only one Super 8 camera, and he headed to Manhattan, and a few years later, between 1978 and 1986, he staged a series of five-year “LifeWorks” when the performing arts and their anarchic production and reception economies were on the edge of the art world. Hsieh’s enduring work had no effect on institutional sanctions, beyond the scope of the emerging art market at the time, as well as existing movements or scenarios. This outsider feeling begins from the early days of Hsieh as an undocumented immigrant, as he makes a living with construction workers and dishwasher. He did not receive amnesty and citizenship until 14 years later in 1988.
exist 1978 – 1979 year performance (cage),,,,, Hsieh lives in a cage he built in a loft on Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan for a year. Avoid reading, writing, watching TV and listening to radio, he arranged for a friend to provide food every day and eliminate waste. After that 1980-1981 performance (Clock Tablet),,,,, Hsieh calls a time clock every day, 24 hours a day, 365 days a day. The other three years of performances included living on the streets of Manhattan without stepping into buildings (1981); being tied to the waist to the artist Linda Montano, who did not allow him to contact (1983); and finally, giving up creating, watching or talking about art altogether (1985).
In such works, the extended duration allows HSIEH to avoid the separation between art and life, thus transcending execution by fully embodying the passage of time. At its end and strict circumstances, Hsieh’s ongoing test of the boundaries of life and art (and the psychological and physical risks that follow) has left any sensualism and posture fat burning. His lasting work leaves material traces in the form of mean-preserved documentaries, but visual evidence also seems to acknowledge its inadequacy, as we show us how time truly lives and feels the body.
On October 4, Dia Beacon will review Hsieh’s work, which is based on five years of performance and his final work, i.e. Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen-year plan),,,,, To this end, the artist has done many works he pointed out. In his conversations he called in his studio in Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, Hsieh talks about the exhibition, the charm of repetition and how some of his core concepts have changed or remained the same over the years.
Tehching hsieh: 1978 – 1979 year performance (cage).
Photos of New York Claire Fergusson/Courtesy DIA Art Foundation/©tehching hsieh
How do you view the DIA retrospective of your career? In some ways, your practice can plague the concept of the art career, thus deepening the relationship between art and time.
DIA Show is my first review. To me, it’s like a newborn baby. People watch it grow – art has its own life. I don’t use this word Profession Because that’s just life. These two things – time and art – are not much different from me because whether I am doing life or art. They are all drawn from the same material, and this is time.
In your year-long performance, the purpose is neither a complete denial of art nor a romantic reconciliation with life, but both. Have your ideas about the relationship between art and life changed since these performances?
I won’t use this word ChangeFor me, it’s just a repetition until something happens, and this change is disconnected from the new one. For me, art is what happens when “change” happens, but you can’t tell what motivates it or what is new. The point is that you need to repeat to get there.
For me, your work is not only about art and the collapse of life, but also through repeated rigorous meditation on death.
My five “Lifeworks” are all year, because one year is the time it takes the Earth to complete an orbit around the Sun. This is a key aspect of my repetition of work. The way I use repetition is not as a micro concept, but as something we “do” as humans, but as a larger general, abstract principle, such as the periodic nature of the world, including death. You’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey? In the opening scene, an Apelike human encounters and examines some animal bones. The bone suddenly became the object of target and meaning, and he realized that he could use it as a weapon to smash other bones. Then, through this imaginative leap, he realized the entire cycle of life and death, and his place in this larger prospect. To me, it’s like free thinking finding breakthroughs in artistic practice, allowing intuition and instinct to guide you instead of using thoughts or concepts. You become a concept of something, not a concept of using or borrowing it.
Tehching hsieh: 1980-1981 performance (Clock slice).
Photo by Michael Shen/Dia Art Foundation in New York/©tehching Hsieh
That famous opening scene 2001 It seems to be about the birth of imagination, and imagination is our gift and miracle, not something we “innovate”.
Yes, yes, it has something to do with our limits and vulnerabilities. My work reflects this; I don’t use fast or slow speeds, but something more natural, like human heartbeat – a human speed.
Given the extended time of your performance, this seems to confront some of the works I encountered, as your work forms a kind of ethics of jogging.
For me, I’m not slow. By comparison, my job may be “slow” to register compared to computer time. But this is all relative. If you’re on a highway and you’re driving slower than the car next to you, you seem to be experiencing “slower”, but you’re actually driving 70 miles per hour. Personally, I’m impatient and like things that are faster than possible. So my job has nothing to do with jogging. In some ways, I am an impatient person who makes patients work.
It is interesting to see how sometimes we carry opposites and desire to oppose our natural tendencies in our work. Is impatient always a part of your personality?
Yes. I’m here [to the United States] The illegal part is because I can’t wait to leave Taiwan. But on the positive side, impatientness has transformed into a spiritual freedom and the ability to make excuses for oneself. For example, when I first arrived in the United States, I didn’t limit myself because I didn’t have enough funds to implement a project. I continued to do this because I was impatient. But, I have always been patient in terms of success and recognition. I am not a person who has a lot of desire for status and fame.
Tehching hsieh: 1981-1982 performance (Outdoor debris).
New York/© tehching hsieh’s photo
New York in the 1980s must have been chaotic, full of hype in the booming art market, with many artists self-specialization and becoming stars. But this doesn’t seem to really win you off as a professionalist success. Are you always unmoved by the pressures and pitfalls 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 the time, but I still like living in New York [over] Taiwan has a complex Confucian worldview. It’s very powerful and despite the good people there, it’s hard to do the job I want [to] In Taiwan. People often try to read Eastern philosophy into my work – Zen, transcendentism – but I have not promoted a better presence or provided a way of guidance. I’m just in the past. No high or low. Just time. You make your own choices and then take your time until you complete your life.
Free thinking ideas are important to your practice. Is free thinking still OK at the status and level of recognition you have gained? At this point in your career, does free thought have a different meaning than the past?
Free thinking is something everyone is doing. It has nothing to do with a person’s profession or an artist. We are talking about a more groundbreaking and creative part of free thinking. Actually, I didn’t do any groundbreaking free thinking. I just spent my whole life. Even if you are in prison, you still have radio frequency. Because free thinking means no one can stop you. It belongs only to you and no one can take it away from you.
Your review at DIA will include your final work, Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen-year-old plan), you vow to make the artwork, but not to display it publicly for the specified time. How will this work be related to other performances?
The retrospective “Thirteen Years Plan” will have its own room at 45 x 168 feet. Five year performances will be in other rooms of equal size, all 45 x 45 feet. The size of the exhibition room is calculated based on the length of time for each performance. For example, actual size
If calculated strictly in time proportions, the room showing the “13-year plan” [13 years]should be 45 x 585 feet, but since there is not enough space, we designed it to be 45 x 168 feet.
So you convert the duration of each show into square feet when DIA. What kind of viewing experience do you want to get with this format?
The space in each room is an era of art, and the space between each room is life span. The entire exhibition is translated not only in space, but also in time. It takes about two hours as the audience browses the entire building installation. It’s like watching a movie to compress the 22 years of the artist’s Lifeworks into two hours. I hope the audience will enjoy it. I did this work and the audience thought about it.
