Tehching Hsieh Turned Every Second Into Art

"The preferred currency of performance art is shock, or so the greatest hits tell us. Chris Burden had his arm blasted with a .22-calibre rifle. Vito Acconci masturbated under a wooden ramp and stalked people on the streets of New York City. Carolee Schneemann thrashed around in paint, raw meat, and dead fish, and pulled a scroll out of her vagina. Marina Abramović allowed gallery goers to abuse her for six hours."

"For everyone else, be advised that there is basically a perfect show about sixty miles outside New York City. Tailored to the artist's specifications, inside a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot converted parking garage, the exhibition does something that a lot of exhibitions pretend or promise to do but don't, which is change the way you experience space and time-namely, how you occupy one and spend the other."

"There are six works of art in the show and six rooms. This is the entirety of Hsieh's mature output: six pieces, created one after the other. The first five are a series of "One Year Performances," staged in New York City beginning in 1978 and ending in 1986. The final one is a thirteen-year performance that lasted from 1986 to 1999. After that, Hsieh stopped making art."

Tehching Hsieh executed a series of daring, often yearlong performances, including locking himself in a cage, refusing to go indoors, and tying himself to another artist. The performances treated the passage of time as the central medium and relied on strict self-imposed constraints. The mature output comprises six pieces presented in six rooms, with five consecutive One Year Performances staged in New York City from 1978 to 1986 and a final thirteen-year performance from 1986 to 1999. A Dia Beacon retrospective occupies a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot converted parking garage tailored to Hsieh's specifications and foregrounds changes in how space and time are experienced. After 1999, Hsieh ceased making art.

Read at The New Yorker