Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance 1980-1981 — Transcript

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1. 0:08So this is a a durational performance
2. 0:11work by a Taiwanese American artist
3. 0:13called During Sha and it's entitled
4. 0:16one-year performance 1980 to 1981 and
5. 0:20it's informally known as the time clock
6. 0:22piece and the departure point for the
7. 0:26work is a statement by the artist that
8. 0:29he will punch a time clock on the hour
9. 0:31every hour for the duration of a year.
10. 0:34Uh so in 1980 in Manhattan in the artist
11. 0:38studio he installed a time clock and
12. 0:41then proceeded to punch it once an hour
13. 0:43on the hour. So he never slept for
14. 0:46longer than about 50 minutes. He never
15. 0:48left the apartment for longer than about
16. 0:5050 minutes. And what we see here is the
17. 0:53documentation of that performance.
18. 0:56So there are punch cards for every day
19. 0:59of the year that he punched the time
20. 1:00clock. And then there are a series of
21. 1:03film strips. Every time he punched the
22. 1:05time clock, he had his photograph taken.
23. 1:08Um, and you
24. 1:10see around
25. 1:128,760, but then there are 133 instances
26. 1:16where he actually missed punching the
27. 1:18time clock. So um, so there's an element
28. 1:22of sort of failure built into the work.
29. 1:25And you can see the instances in the in
30. 1:27the film strips themselves where through
31. 1:30mechanical failure or human failure he
32. 1:32missed punching the time clock and
33. 1:34taking the photograph. And then all the
34. 1:36film strips are combined together in a
35. 1:3916 mm film that's 6 minutes long that is
36. 1:43is sort of sped up and gives a much more
37. 1:47sort of sense of the kind of
38. 1:49schizophrenic delirium that he'd entered
39. 1:53in undertaking this very uh singular uh
40. 1:57activity for a year. This work is the
41. 2:00second in a series of durational
42. 2:02performance, one-year performances that
43. 2:04Duching undertook. And he talks about
44. 2:07choosing the year
45. 2:09uh as a the year being a very human unit
46. 2:14of time. It's the time it takes for the
47. 2:16earth to revolve around the sun. Uh it's
48. 2:19it's the unit we speak in um in terms of
49. 2:22our ages and the passing of time. So
50. 2:25they that was how he sort of decided the
51. 2:28parameters for that work. I I see these
52. 2:32durational performances very much as
53. 2:35sort of philosophical investigations or
54. 2:38propositions into the nature of time,
55. 2:41life and being. Um Ding thinks very
56. 2:44philosophically about these works. I
57. 2:46mean I think they often do have a
58. 2:49political dimension to them.
59. 2:52Particularly this work because with its
60. 2:54with its uh motif of the punching of the
61. 2:57time clock, it invokes the idea of sort
62. 2:59of industrialized labor and the
63. 3:01situation of say a factory worker and
64. 3:04and even aesthetically with his shaved
65. 3:06head and the the gray uniform. There is
66. 3:09that sort of suggestion, but Duching is
67. 3:11very keen to play down
68. 3:14uh that political element in favor of
69. 3:17something more broadly philosophical or
70. 3:19sort of you know he an interest in on
71. 3:22ontology in the philosophy of sort of
72. 3:25being really and being in
73. 3:27time. So that's the sort of standpoint
74. 3:30he's coming from. He often uh speaks
75. 3:33about the myth of Cephus pushing the
76. 3:35boulder up the hill and I think that is
77. 3:40useful in terms of thinking of the the
78. 3:42philosophical framework. This this quite
79. 3:44punishing activity but one in which
80. 3:47there is a sort of satisfaction or
81. 3:49gratification of
82. 3:54sorts. Life is a life sentence. Life is
83. 3:58passing time. That is the free thinking.
84. 4:00So that's is basically my work from this
85. 4:04this philos philosopher you know it's
86. 4:08consumer time until die that I I'm not
87. 4:11trying to to make a uh concepts about
88. 4:15how to passion time I'm just basically
89. 4:18passioning time so person you working
90. 4:21hard or
91. 4:22ley or very creat or less create it's
92. 4:27all same about passing time of course
93. 4:29you want to say For example, this piece
94. 4:31time clock piece every hour punch time
95. 4:34every hour on the hour it's repetition
96. 4:36right but you know every
97. 4:38time our change is very different in
98. 4:43human to deal with time we know time you
99. 4:47don't stop it it's
100. 4:49a what's we call moving right continuous
101. 4:53means a every minute every hour it's
102. 4:56different you don't you cannot go back
103. 4:58right so every time is different and
104. 5:02also but it's the same thing we do same
105. 5:06thing but every hour is different you
106. 5:10know so it's it's that way we understand
107. 5:13in life you know
108. 5:16one of the most interesting things about
109. 5:18duching is that he was making this work
110. 5:20you know all of these durational
111. 5:21performances in the late 70s and early
112. 5:2380s largely in isolation
113. 5:26um they involved very very solitary
114. 5:30work and he for a time he was something
115. 5:33of an outsider artist. I mean for many
116. 5:34decades in fact he these works had a
117. 5:37very limited audience and his biographer
118. 5:40Adrienne Heathfield talks about them as
119. 5:42sort of existing on the edges of public
120. 5:45visibility and it's only very recently
121. 5:48that uh the audience for these works has
122. 5:51grown and that duching has has received
123. 5:54the sort of recognition and and been
124. 5:56written into those official art
125. 5:57histories and um collected by you know
126. 6:01the relevant institutions And so I I
127. 6:05personally find one of the more
128. 6:07interesting aspects of this the work is
129. 6:09this very dogged persistence
130. 6:13um and relentless dedication to this
131. 6:15project largely undertaken in isolation.
132. 6:19Ding would often cite Russian literature
133. 6:21as being an influence and um writers
134. 6:25such as Dosstoyki and Kfka, but there's
135. 6:27almost something also a bit
136. 6:30bettian about this work and the level of
137. 6:34sort of abstraction and stylization, but
138. 6:37also the sort of pathos.
139. 6:41Maybe maybe not so much the humor, but
140. 6:45yeah, I think there is this kind of
141. 6:46tension between
142. 6:50uh the systematic undertaking of of this
143. 6:55very single-minded
144. 6:56activity and the clear physical and
145. 7:01psychological toll that's taken on him,
146. 7:03which I guess the formal formal nature
147. 7:06of the the documentation
148. 7:09uh encapsulates quite
149. 7:11succinctly. What I found particularly
150. 7:14interesting actually is learning that
151. 7:16with these year-long performances, he
152. 7:18undertook a week's long rehearsal before
153. 7:21he committed to them to get a sense of
154. 7:25whether he was confident he could
155. 7:26achieve the project. And he was saying
156. 7:29if if he was sort of 70% sure he could
157. 7:32achieve it, then he'd proceed.
158. 7:35But he got a good sense from that week
159. 7:37about whether whether he could handle it
160. 7:40sort of physically and psychologically.
161. 7:42He's clearly
162. 7:44uh he talks about being interested in
163. 7:46probing the universal circumstances of
164. 7:51uh human beings. And there is something
165. 7:54so fundamental about this um but at the
166. 7:57same time very
167. 7:59um they're they're existential
168. 8:02investigations but they're they're also
169. 8:04very material. They're very highly
170. 8:06invested physical experiences that are
171. 8:10sort of
172. 8:11exploring human existence. In that
173. 8:14context it the failures which are become
174. 8:17much more apparent when you look at them
175. 8:19in in a grid have much more kind of
176. 8:21resonance. Absolutely. And he sort of he
177. 8:24talks about um you know most of the
178. 8:27projects involved 100% effort for
179. 8:3095%
180. 8:32success. And he he says that a little
181. 8:35bit of damage is good for the
182. 8:37system. So I think the I find that the
183. 8:41element of failure in the works very
184. 8:43interesting and the way they're
185. 8:45inscribed into the presentation and
186. 8:47acknowledged
187. 8:49um is really key.