Tehching Hsieh’s exercises in struggle on show with Time Clock Piece

NO performance artist took the theme of time more seriously than Tehching Hsieh.

MUST CREDIT: SUPPLIED...ONE TIME USE... Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1978-1979 Life Image Tehching Hsieh Courtesy the...

THE distinction usually made between performance art and acting is that the latter entails the production of an illusion, while the former is the display of something that is really happening before our eyes. Not that this literal truth is superior to the poetic truth that may be conveyed by illusion: Plutarch memorably quotes Socrates’s contemporary Gorgias as saying that in the paradoxical order of the theatre, “the man who deceives is more just than the one who does not deceive, and the man who is deceived is wiser than the one who is not”.

In reality, the aesthetic scope of performance art is very narrow compared with the breadth and depth of great theatre. But it can have its own compelling interest, and like all forms of modernism, or indeed of earlier forms of art, needs to be understood within its historical and cultural setting. The great period of performance art was in the 1970s and 80s, when artists, facing the overwhelming tide of consumerist kitsch and the simultaneous commodification of contemporary high art, sought authenticity in minimal, conceptual and other forms of aesthetic expression.

All of these modes of art shared a certain austerity and a taste for reductive, almost ascetic spareness. In the case of performance art, the most natural way to convey the sense of reality was for the action to involve some kind of difficulty, pain or test of endurance. Most of the memorable acts of performance art, whether by Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden or our own Mike Parr, have been ordeals or even mortifications of the flesh. Some have involved instant, momentary physical pain, as when Burden had himself shot or Parr lit a fuse wire around his calf. Others, like the roaring match between Abramovic and her partner Ulay, were contests of attrition. But many have simply involved endurance through time, in which relatively low levels of discomfort, privation or boredom are magnified by duration.

And this reveals another difference between performance art and theatre (or cinema, which is the extension of theatre just as video art is the extension of performance art). The time of theatre is elastic, abstract, symbolic: the events of days or even months can be displayed in two or three hours of stage time, although Aristotle recommended that the plot of a tragedy should ideally unfold within a single day. Filmmakers too know that realism or suspense can be enhanced by slowing narrative pace to match the time that is meant to be represented.

In performance art, time is literal, and there is no distinction between narrative pace and an underlying, implicit chronology of events: the only event alluded to is the one before our eyes. So one of the interests of performance art is as a meditation on time and its passage: a phenomenon that is at once more real and ineluctable than any fact about the human condition, yet in another sense completely unreal or at least ineffable.

Philosophers have long speculated that time cannot be a property of ultimate reality or being but either the condition of a lower or secondary world in which we live or even a category of the human mind, which can experience reality only in a sequential fashion. Theologians have posited that time does not exist for the mind of God, and most traditions of wisdom, Eastern or Western, enjoin us to free ourselves from attachment, desire and fear, and seek to be in the present: to apprehend the wholeness of being as simultaneously extant.

This goal has always been hard for humans to achieve but is even more so today when the sense of one’s life passing through a cycle of ages and roles, from child to parent to grandparent, and within natural sequence of seasons and their tasks, which inherently leads one to accept and appreciate each of these moments and phases in turn, has been replaced by the consumer model of individualism, in which people think of themselves as progressively building something called a lifestyle. The other day a man was quoted in the paper, objecting to government proposals about pension ages, as saying that he had worked all his life with the aim of an early retirement: as though time, the process of ageing and the approach of death would then conveniently stop.

No one took the theme of time more seriously than Tehching Hsieh, an artist born in Taiwan but resident throughout his career in New York City, where he first worked under the name Sam Hsieh. From the beginning he evidently felt that the most challenging, decisive and complete interval of time in human experience was the year. So instead of performances lasting for hours or days, each of Hsieh’s was a full year in duration.

In the first, in 1978, he announced that he would lock himself in a cage within his studio for a full year, during which he would not speak to anyone (except presumably the friend who brought food and other necessities), read, write, watch TV or listen to the radio. It was, in other words, a kind of ascetic withdrawal from human communication, and almost an exercise in sensory deprivation, recalling the ordeals of stylites and other ascetics in religious traditions.

A year, then, without the constant flow of news, whether serious or trivial, in which our lives are constantly awash, without television dramas endlessly rehashing the same story-lines; without conversation or companionship with other humans; and even if in this emptiness ideas and insights arose in the mind, without pen and paper to write them down and pursue them down the labyrinth of thought. But was this year a marathon meditation session or simply a blank ordeal like that of a prisoner in solitary confinement?

In his second and best-known performance (1980-81), Hsieh punched a timecard, like the ones used in those days by workers at the start and end of a factory shift, every hour on the hour for a year. This meant, of course, he could never leave his studio for more than about 45 minutes, and much more important, that he could never sleep for anything like a full hour at any time for the duration of the performance.

The interruption to the normal rhythm of sleep was not merely an exhausting ordeal; it threw into complete confusion the most fundamental of the cycles through which we experience time, that of night and day. There was no longer any shape to the day, whose beginning, middle and end are normally like a reflection in miniature of the year itself: morning is a springtime, midday a summer, afternoon and evening an autumn. This was a year without days, a year broken down into thousands of desperate, disoriented moments of shapeless existence.

It evidently required huge determination to maintain the routine, and the following two performances were equally difficult in different ways. In the third performance (1981-82), Hsieh lived outdoors for a whole year without entering any building, and he did this not in a mild climate in which it would have been comparatively easy but once again in New York City.

In the fourth year-long performance (1983-84), Hsieh spent the whole time tethered by an 2m rope to another performance artist, Linda Montano. For the duration of the performance they had to remain in the same room, yet were not allowed to touch each other: they were thus condemned to all the inconveniences and none of the pleasures of proximity.

After this, Hsieh did a fifth one-year performance in which he abstained from any contact with art (1985-86), then embarked on a 13-year project during which he would make art but never show it. In the following year he declared, echoing Duchamp 75 years earlier, that he would cease making art altogether — indeed these last two phases seem to allude to Duchamp in reverse, for the latter secretly resumed making art late in his life, and the installation Etant donnés… was a surprise when revealed on the artist’s death in 1968.

It is thus a generation or so since Hsieh showed any work in public, but he has recently been rediscovered and Time-Clock Piece is now the object of a retrospective exhibition at Carriageworks. The installation itself is preceded by a little gallery showing the very small posters that Hsieh produced to publicise his projects, together with the letters setting out their terms. The first poster sets the pattern followed by the others: a photograph evoking the circumstances of the performance and below that a calendar of its duration, with the days of public viewing circled. In what is a perfect example of the principle that deviation from a regular pattern produces meaning, the final poster for the no-art project has a black rectangle in place of an image and no circled dates for viewing.

In the main room of the exhibition we find ourselves surrounded by thousands of tiny photographs of the artist, for he set up a 16mm film camera so that he could take a single frame shot of his head and shoulders after each punching. The resulting footage flickers on one wall with the whirring mechanical sound of the projector, while around the walls each of the punched cards is set above a column of the single frames taken every hour.

In theory there should be 24 shots under each card, but there are occasional gaps in the record: these are all accounted for, and their causes — mostly sleeping through the alarm clock — recorded in a display case in the centre of the room. Also in the display case are various documents attesting to the authenticity of the performance and the accuracy of the records.

The case also contains the neatly folded industrial uniform that Hsieh made for himself, as though he were a worker on a production line — bland and impersonal yet embroidered with his name. He shaved his head at the start of the performance, which added to the effect of industrial anonymity, but then let his hair grow after that, so that it gradually became an unkempt tangle, increasingly at odds with the uniform that he wears in every shot.

His face becomes worn with sleeplessness, but hardly ever betrays the slightest overt change of mood; the determination and stoicism are evident, but one remains unsure, again, whether the experience was a spiritual journey or simply an art event conducted in a spirit of stubborn inner blankness. Only in the very last photograph is there an almost imperceptible trace of satisfaction at having finally completed his ordeal.

Tehching Hsieh: Time Clock Piece

Carriageworks, Eveleigh, Sydney, to July 6