Tehching Hesih: The artist who didn’t sleep for a year
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by Hades for cheating death twice. His punishment was unique and gruelling – rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it fall back down when it neared the top, for an eternity. When we look at the trappings of modern culture, the endless uphill cycle of working life with all its associated repetition, we consider it Sisyphean. In 1980, Tehching Hsieh engaged in his own self-imposed Sisyphean punishment for the sake of conceptual art.
Eternity was swapped for a year; the boulder was exchanged for a clock he had to punch in every hour, 24 hours a day, for 365 days. Hsieh chronicled his performance art with 8,627 mugshot-style images that see him get increasingly longer hair and sunken, more sleep-deprived eyes.
Hsieh told The Guardian the concept of wasting time had been a continuous thread in his often needlessly gruelling conceptual pieces. “Before I had a studio, but I didn’t know what to create,” he explained. “I was just wasting time, thinking, for years. Then I turned wasting time into art. So I can say I come here to waste my time and I enjoy it. I’m not doing object-style art but I like thinking. I’m working hard but I’m doing almost nothing. That’s the way I like it.”
Despite the enormous physical and mental sacrifice his art required, Hsieh didn’t gain notoriety as a performance artist until the mid-2010s, 30 years after completing his first piece. In 2009, his work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art and was included in a group show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim.
It was around this time his extreme dedication to performance art gained traction. Naturally, Hsieh used his newfound attention to create his final piece: ‘Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen Year Plan)’, a performance that saw him refuse to exhibit art publicly for 13 years until the new millennium hit.
His work seems to touch on the worth of our time; the tedium and energy working life takes, but in increasingly experimental ways, with the idea of being trapped within a system his most enduring theme. In ‘Cage Piece’, he tackled this in a very oblique sense, physically trapping himself in solitary confinement in a cage in his studio for an entire 12 months.
‘Outdoor Piece’ was another year-long effort, where he spent his entire 365 days outdoors, followed by ‘Rope Piece,’ where he was tethered to another dedicated performance artist, Linda Montano, by an 8-foot rope for a year. Long passages of time are used at will and often at the expense of the now seminal artist. As the elusive Hsieh puts it himself: “I don’t what to do what the art world expects me to do. This is my exit. This is my freedom.”
