The Interaktionslabor will be working with a research libretto (Auf der anderen Seite des Spiegels / On the other Side of the Mirror) and also use various research materials for discussion and the process. In the following, we will indicate some links to arts and science projects the group is investigating, and we also cite excerpts from recently published material and reviews of artworks.
Out of Now
The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh
ed. Adrian Heathfield
Live Art Development Agency and MIT Press, London 2009
The figure convulses violently, his hair lurching this way and that. His body flutters in spasms too quick to be seen, jumping instantaneously across miniscule distances without moving through the space in between. Next to the figure, the hands of a clock spin alarmingly out of control: relentless, emotionless, like a machine lost in manic dream. And always, throughout this frenzy, a facial expression that gives nothing away, looking outward at us through the camera lens, seeming literally oblivious. Seeming literally to be facing oblivion.
This is a film, being projected onto a wall in a room full of artists, curators,
and academics. The event is the launch of the book Out of Now: The Lifeworks
of Tehching Hsieh, co-authored by Hsieh and Adrian Heathfield. The film was
produced over the duration of one of Hsieh's five year-long artworks, during
1980-1981, in which he pledged to punch a time clock every hour of every day
for 365 days. After doing this duty each hour, Hsieh stood next to the clock,
faced the camera, and exposed another frame of the film. He is always wearing
the same clothes, always wearing the same expression - only his hair, shaved
at the beginning of the year, seems to change. As a piece of work in itself,
the film has a quality which makes it difficult to watch; but watching it with
the knowledge of the full story makes it all the more unfathomable. What would
it mean to know nothing for a year except the intervals between this action?
To sleep, to think, to live, only in the time in between? How do you try to
comprehend this while watching the six or so minutes during which this film
speeds through a year of Hsieh's life?
Many of us will have heard of Hsieh's one year performances, which, in addition
to this year of measured time, included a year spent confined in close quarters,
a year spent without shelter of any kind, a year spent tied by eight-foot rope
to Linda Montano during which touch between the two was forbidden, and a year
spent avoiding any contact with the objects or institutions of art. But it is
one thing to know of these acts, and another to confront them: watching this
film is, in one way, an encounter with the magnitude of the work. Standing before
the film, I find myself face-to-face with the work. Except, of course, that
I am not. Watching the film at this comfortable art opening is nothing like
the work. The object of the film might have more of the residual power of Hsieh's
year-long gesture than, say, whatever internal preconception I have about the
work, or, for that matter, these words that you are now reading. But the gesture,
though evoked more effectively, is absent. This is the nature of Hsieh's work:
no one could ever have seen the work, or experienced the work, except Hsieh
himself. We can only ever experience it through mediation.
This problem of Hsieh's works - that they are only ever apprehended through
their traces, and that their traces are always inadequate compared to the magnitude
of the works - is a problem which Heathfield and Hsieh self-consciously address
in the production of the book, Out of Now. How does one do justice to these
works? How does one represent the works, when by their nature they exceed representability?
This is always an issue whatever a book's subject, but it seems most pointed
in the case of these lifeworks, which elude comprehension more than any other
artworks, perhaps, or at least any other work which did not result in the death
of its creator. Heathfield acknowledges this directly in his introduction: ‘To
speak of these acts here and now in writing requires a tentative voice, because
the acts themselves concern the limits of the sayable and the legible.'
In the face of this inherent impossibility of commensurability between the works
and their document, the book makes a mighty effort. Though its objecthood will
always be insignificant with regard to the experiences Hsieh underwent, it is
nonetheless a massive, magnificent object: it consists of nearly 400 pages,
including over 250 pages of photographs and other visual traces, and it's a
big, beautiful object - too big, in fact, to fit on the shelf with my other
illustrated books. As an example of its ambition, one way the book represents
the 1980-1981 work described above is by reproducing each and every film frame.
Even when the frames are shrunk to half the size of a postage stamp, it still
takes 30 pages, each with several hundred tiny images, to represent the year.
(There are some missing frames: Hsieh overslept and missed 133 out of the 8,760
hourly appointments with the clock, and more frequently, there were malfunctions
with the filmmaking apparatus.) Elsewhere in the book, Heathfield writes lovingly
and carefully about each of the one year performances, substantiating them with
historical contexts and philosophical ramifications. In his own reflection on
the film and the experience of watching it, for example, he describes the way
it produces a ‘nowhen', ‘a delirium of altered consciousness, both
for Hsieh in his long durational performance and for his observers, who are
left to piece together the parts.' No words, no images, no conceptual frameworks
would be adequate to describe Hsieh's work, but the scale and excessiveness
of this careful giant of a book are adequate, at least, to indicate the scope
of their insufficiency.
One final point seems necessary, on the topic of visibility. Much of Hsieh's
work is outside comprehension, outside comprehensibility, but on a more basic
level it is also outside sight: no one is there to see it. This is most the
case for Hsieh's thirteen-year project, the work which followed the five year-long
pieces. During these thirteen years, Hsieh pledged to make art but not to show
it publicly. He disappeared. Out of Now represents these thirteen years with
thirteen blank pages, like the black pages in Tristram Shandy, pointing only
to an absence about which nothing is sayable. But alongside this deliberate
engagement with invisibility, which we might characterise as being internal
to the work, Hsieh's work has also had an external, historical invisibility.
Heathfield writes, Hsieh's work has found itself in a peculiar
place - neither here nor there - within the art market, art institutions and
their circuits of exhibition, and within art and performance criticism and theory.
His work and its artefacts have remained largely uncollected and only scarcely
displayed. In art discourse he is rarely discussed: in the many books addressing
Conceptual Art and later conceptualist work his oeuvre goes wholly unmentioned
and in the major critical works focusing on Body Art, the performances are barely
traced.
This inattention to Hsieh's work may be because of prejudices based on nationality
or ethnicity, or because of the irrelevance of institutions to the work, or
perhaps as a consequence of its internal thematisation of invisibility. In any
case, Out of Now is a deliberate corrective to this marginalisation, and this
is at least one other function of its hefty size. Letters to Hsieh included
in the book, in which Marina Abramovic´, Tim Etchells, Peggy Phelan, and
Santiago Sierra acknowledge Hsieh's impact of their work and thought, are also
part of this restoration of attention. Amongst these corrective gestures, one
for which I found myself particularly grateful was the reproduction of a lengthy
written interview between Heathfield and Hsieh, conducted with painstaking commitment
to clarity and dependent on mediation through translation. It is evident that
a lot of thought and effort went into this extended conversation, and it feels
like a tremendous privilege to be able to read Hsieh's own thoughts about the
origins, meanings, and problems of his work. In relation to these incomprehensible
acts, what is stunning about Hsieh's words is the degree to which he seems fully
to have comprehended the magnitude of what he was undertaking. His knowing,
fearful, and courageous attitude toward what he did makes them all the more
remarkable.
Reviewed by: Theron Schmidt
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Ecouter – Space 7.
The Francesca Woodman Project
This is an evening workshop presentation of Ecouter – Space 7, on July 14, at 6:30 pm.
. American/ British theatre director and choreographer Allison
Troup-Jensen brings together an eclectic and exciting group of American and
UK cross-disciplinary artists to create seven new pieces of work inspired by
the black and white photography of the late American artist and photographer
Francesca Woodman. Participants include: Chloe Moss, 2009 winner of the Susan
Smith Blackburn Award; Duncan MacMillan, recipient of the Bruntwood Prize and
playwright-in-residence at Paines Plough; poet and playwrights Lisa Parry and
Matthew Keuter; Chris Cragin from the Emerging Writers Group at The Public Theater;
choreographer Camille A. Brown from The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre;
Olivier Award winning sound designer Paul Arditti (Billy Elliot and St. Joan);
and experimental pianist and performance artist Cassie Yukawa. For more details,
click here.
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave at 34th St. New York
* * *
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Texte und Kommentare zum Labor 2009 werden hier veröffentlicht
Texts and commentaries on the 2009 lab and related research subjects will be published here.