One Year Performance 1978-1979, Life Images. Photo Cheng Wei Kuong

Less than a year after buying its first live performance work (Tino Sehgal’s Kiss, 2003), MoMA has launched a pioneering new series focused on contemporary art’s most volatile form. The first exhibition, Performance 1: Tehching Hsieh, which runs through May 18, introduces the Taiwan-born, New York City-based performance art master Tehching Hsieh through the records and remnants of his seminal Cage Piece (1978-79). Taking both time-based art and personal deprivation to new extremes, Hsieh locked himself inside a cage in his Tribeca studio for a full year. Now, thirty years later, MoMA’s Klaus Biesenbach and Jenny Schlenzka have finally given the 58-year-old artist his first solo exhibition. VMAN talked with Schlenzka about the artist’s beginnings, his attempts at capturing the passage of time through obsessive documentation, and his long-awaited institutional recognition.

Simon Castets: How did MoMA decide to organize a two-year program focused on performance art, and how will the series be different from the museum’s previous exploration of the medium?
Jenny Schlenzka: Performance art is a crucial but often overlooked chapter of twentieth-century art history which has seen a strong resurgence in current art production. The series will bring documentation of historical performances and new commissioned live performances to the museum. MoMA has a long tradition of showing performances, but they always took place more on the side during extra programs. Now we are putting a real focus on performance art and plan to start preserving and even collecting performance-based art works. Tehching seemed to be the right artist to start off with. His work shows how powerful and intriguing performance art can be, even thirty years after it took place.

Tehching Hsieh was not aware of performance and conceptual art when he arrived in the U.S. How did he start working and how did his beginnings inform his practice?
Hsieh was born in Taiwan in 1950. He jumped off a boat in the New York harbor when he was 24, swam to the land and lived here for many years as an illegal immigrant. When he was 28, he decided to lock himself up in a cage in near solitary confinement for an entire year. Tehching considers this piece, One Year Performance 1978-1979 [also known as Cage Piece] to be his first mature work. As a young artist in Taiwan before he came to the US , he had done a couple of paintings and pieces which could be described as actions. For example, in 1973, he did Jump Piece, in which he jumped from the second floor window. There were similarities to what Yves Klein did in the 60s, but while Klein’s Leap into the Void was staged, Hsieh broke both his ankles. He still deals with the repercussions of that piece today. Living as an artist in Taiwan, he had heard words like “happening” and “conceptual art,” but did not know of any specific works or artists. He told me that he was just done with painting and was looking for an alternative way to make art.

One Year Performance 1978–1979, 365 Self-portraits. Day 1 (left) and Day 365. Photos Cheng Wei Kuong

This is Hsieh’s first solo exhibition. How do explain the relative lack of institutional interest in his work for so long?
I was stunned when we visited his studio and he told us that he had never had a solo museum exhibition in the U.S. His work has been so influential for subsequent generations of artists. Interestingly, he is not unknown. Many people know his work from their art history classes. Usually, the reason performance artists are not exhibited in art institutions is that their work is so difficult to convey to the audience after the performance is over. All that is left are photos, video recordings, or anecdotes from people who witnessed them. However, Hsieh’s work rises to the challenge of documenting fugitive performance art. Every time I look at the 365 self-portraits he made of himself during Cage Piece, it is obvious to me that his attempt to represent his experience of living in a cage for an entire year fails. And yet there is a strength in the documentation that allows me to glimpse at the monstrosity of the time he spent in this cell. Another reason he hasn’t been shown that much is that his work required him to withdraw from the art world. In One Year Performance 1985-1986 [also known as No Art Piece] he decided to not make art, not talk about it, look at it, or engage with it in any other way. And for Thirteen Year Plan (1986-1999), he decided to not show art publicly for thirteen years. So, in a way, his work has only been accessible since the year 2000.

Since he finished Thirteen-Year Plan, he has not produced any new work—nor has he declared his lack of production to be a piece. Has he stopped for good, or is this show an incentive to start working again?
As far as I know, Hsieh has not produced any work since 1986, the day he started his withdrawal from the art world, even though he considers Thirteen Year Plan to be a piece of art. He did make a single attempt in 1991. After deciding that his disappearance from the art world did not feel radical enough, he started another piece in which he tried to physically disappear, leaving New York for Alaska and starting a completely new life. But he did not follow through his plan and came back. Hsieh does not consider this piece to be work of art because he did not finish it. He is very strict. That is why he is not a conceptual artist. He is a performance artist. He does things.

Performance 1: Tehching Hsieh runs through May 18.

KEYWORDS: art, MoMA, performance art, Tehching Hsieh

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