Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance: Art Documents 1978-1999 (review)

No one could possibly watch the hunger artist continuously, day and night, and so no one could produce first-hand evidence that the fast had really been rigorous and continuous; only the artist himself could know that, he was therefore bound to be the sole completely satisfied spectator of his own fast.

-Franz Kafka, "The Hunger Artist" ([1971] 1983:269-70)

Tehching Hsieh's DVD-ROM, Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance: Art Documents 1978-1999, begins with a misspelling of the artist's name: Theching Hsieh. This momentary editorial slip, renaming, again, an artist who renamed himself in his earliest One Year Performances from "Tehching" to "Sam," becomes a moment of visual slippage as well, reminding the viewer that this digitized compendium to and of Hsieh's work is, like the work itself, at least partially predicated upon the fact of something being missed. This isn't entirely inappropriate, dependent as Hsieh's works are on a mutual trust assumed between artist and intermittent spectator. For Hsieh's first One Year Performance, colloquially known as "Cage Piece" (1978/79), he allowed visitors to only 19 of the 365 days it entailed; for the second, "Time Clock Piece" (1980/81), only 14; and, for the third, "Outdoor Piece" (1981/82), only one, on 20 March 1982.

While the DVD-ROM allows a viewer seemingly unlimited access to what in its introduction Steven Shaviro refers to as a "body of evidence," the experience becomes as guided by that which is not there as that which is: the missing images from Days 273 through 281 in "Cage Piece"; the "Record of Missed Punches" in "Time Clock Piece" (comprising only 134 missed punches out of a possible 8,760 punches, or 1.54 percent); and, perhaps most poetically elusive, the sealed audiotapes from Hsieh's collaboration with Linda Montano, Art/Life One Year Performance, or "Rope Piece" (1983/84). Never meant to be played, Hsieh's and Montano's muted words are eulogized here as visual objects. These absences seem only to enhance the feeling that moving through that which is present on the DVD-ROM feels strangely akin to stealing back time.

The DVD-ROM includes all five of Hsieh's One Year Performances-those aforementioned as well as "No Art Piece" (1985/86) and Hsieh's quietly epic endeavor Tehching Hsieh 1986-1999, "The Thirteen Year Plan"-enabling some unlikely juxtapositions not otherwise available. Clicking on each individual mark Hsieh scratched in the wall for his first One Year Performance displays a series of daily photographs of the artist, moving through the time of the year he spent in self-imposed solitary confinement. A confrontation with affective solitude, this click-by-click happens at the viewer's time, progressing as neatly or disjointedly as she prefers. Watching the six-minute stop-motion film of Hsieh's self-portraits during "Time Clock Piece," however, forces time upon the viewer, much as it is forced upon Hsieh. While the images in "Cage Piece" are discrete entities, the film condenses Hsieh's year into spasms of time, his body jerking and twitching as the clock to his right fast-forwards smoothly through the hours.

The DVD-ROM also allows for different readings of time's passing in a broader sense when considering "Outside Piece" and "Rope Piece" together. In both, the year experienced is marked by external, environmental characteristics; but whereas "Outside Piece" becomes as much a picture-postcard narrative of New York City as Hsieh navigates it entirely out of doors (excepting the 15 hours he spent detained by the NYPD, evidenced at the end of the video included on the DVD), the implied domesticity documented throughout the photographs from "Rope Piece" marks the changing seasons more intimately as tank tops become T-shirts, then sweaters and scarves.

Kafka's Hunger Artist strives to challenge both himself and his audience, desiring to maintain his fast beyond his allotted 40 days...