sinethetamagazine:Time Clock Piece by Tehching (Sam)Hsieh (謝德慶).Performance. 1980-1981.Hsieh’s
sinethetamagazine:Time Clock Piece by Tehching (Sam)Hsieh (謝德慶).Performance. 1980-1981.Hsieh’s extreme performance piece consists ofpunching a time clock and taking a picture of himself every hour, on the hour for 12 months. He shaved his headbald and started the piece on April 11, 1980 at 7pm and ended on April 11, 1981at 6pm. A total of 8627 mugshots were taken in his Manhattan studio, each shot with thesame unsmiling, monotonous expression. His unruly hair growth and increasingly blearyeyes were captured as the shots accumulated, used to observed the passage oftime. In the photos, Hsieh wears the same gray uniform and adheres to a strict routine,subjecting himself to extreme sleep deprivation to investigate the nature of time.While he must not leave his studio or sleep past 59 minutes every hour, hemissed only 133 clock-ins, mostly due to sleeping past the hour. Time Clock Piece recalls the gruelinglabours of Sisyphus in Greek mythology, where he was forced to roll a boulder up amountain just to watch it repeatedly roll back down again. Although the piece seemsto convey the tedium and conformity of industrial labour, Hsieh states that heis not a political artist and is interested in the universal circumstances ofhuman life. Remaining as Hsieh’s most documented work, this performance was compressed into a six-minute time lapse film.Tehching (Sam) Hsieh, born in 1950, is aTaiwanese performance artist, known for being a pivotal figure in durationalperformance art. Growing up in Nan-Chou, Hsieh left for New York City as anillegal immigrant in 1974. Hsieh’s personal projects are not feats of staminaor motivated by the desire to suffer, but they rather explore the humancondition and the relation between time, existence and struggle. While Hsieh declared in 2000 that he is no longer an artist, his unfaltering commitment and extraordinary self-discipline in completing his work between the 1970s and 2000 only gained worldwide recognition during the recent years.Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture -- source link
#art#hmmmm