One Year Performances

Tehching "Sam" Hsieh did six extraordinary one-year performances before retiring from art.

His second one-year piece, Time Piece (1980-81), was to punch a card in a time clock, every hour on the hour twenty-four hours a day for one year. This meant he couldn't ever sleep for more than an hour or be more than 30 minutes away from his studio. Out of the 8,760 required punches, Sam only missed 134. The time cards were signed by a witness each day.

His other documentation of the piece is a six minute 16mm stop-motion film made by taking one frame each time he punched the clock. Here is an excerpt from that film:

Hsieh's last performance was to stop making art for a year, after which he found he couldn't start up again and retired from art. A DVD documenting his performances is available--it looks very interesting and interactive, but is a bit expensive ($45). Not incomparable to the cost of art books, but the production cost of DVDs are so much lower... it would be nice to have the savings passed on.

The Brooklyn Rail has an interesting interview with Hsieh.

Next up, MTAA's "update" of one of Hsieh's performances. (I have an earlier posting about MTAA's updating of On Kawara).