On 11 April 1980, Tehching Hsieh, a Taiwanese artist based in New York, installed a time clock in his studio, the type utilised by factories to monitor the arrival and departure of workers. He imposed upon himself a rule: to clock in on the hour, twenty-four hours a day, for an entire year. Each time he clocked in, a film camera captured a single frame of him beside the clock. He adhered to the rule, with his omissions, until 11 April 1981. Exactly one year: eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours, each punctuated by the act of walking to the clock and marking the card.
Consider the implications for the body. No sleep of more than one hour is possible: one must wake, rise, approach the clock, clock in, allow the camera to capture its frame, and return to rest, knowing that in less than sixty minutes the process must be repeated. For one year, Hsieh did not sleep a single full night. He failed ninety-four times out of eight thousand seven hundred and sixty, almost always because sleep overcame him, and those failures were not concealed: they form part of the work, recorded in a document of missed clock-ins, as exposed as the successful ones. The work includes its own non-compliance, which constitutes a rare honesty.
At the outset, Hsieh shaved his head completely. Throughout the year, he allowed his hair to grow freely. The thousands of frames, projected subsequently one after another as a film, last little more than six minutes: an entire year compressed into the duration of a song. In that accelerated film, one observes the man standing always in the same posture, in the same uniform, beside the same clock, while only one thing changes visibly from beginning to end: the hair, which grows. There are two clocks in the work, and this is its most subtle concept. One is the time clock, which measures administrative time, the time of the factory, the time counted in identical and interchangeable hours. The other is his own body, the hair that grows, which measures the same year but in a different manner: that of lived time, which cannot be accelerated, halted, or clocked.
The feat is evident, and it would be simple to remain in awe of the physical endurance, yet to reduce it to a triumph of stamina would be to impoverish it. This work consisted of living in a specific manner for a specific duration, and therefore it existed only while it was being lived. Now, in a museum, the clock, the cards, the uniform, and the film are exhibited. But that is not the work. The work was the year, hour by hour, and the year has passed and does not return. What hangs on the wall is not the performance: it is its marks, its remnants, the evidence that it occurred. Like the ashes of a fire that attest to the fact that there was a fire, but are not the fire itself.
This is the distinction that separates this form of art from a painting or a sculpture. A painting is the work: it is present, it endures, it may be viewed again. Hsieh’s performance is not present; it occurred. What endures are documents that signify it, which allow for its reconstruction in the imagination, yet they do not contain it. No one observing the cards and the film today is viewing the work; they are viewing what remains of it, and knowing, through those remnants, what it was. The work lived in time, in the exhausted body of a man who rose every hour, and that time cannot be hung upon a wall. It may be documented, recounted, certified. But the thing itself, the year lived in such a manner, resides in no museum, for it concluded on 11 April 1981 and left no body other than that one.
We tend to consider a work of art as a lasting object, something preserved for future observation. Hsieh pursued the opposite: a work defined by pure duration, consisting of self-expenditure over time, accepting from the outset that the year itself would not remain, only its trace. This is an unsettling concept, as it compels us to acknowledge that certain works cannot be witnessed, only known. They existed, they transpired, and all that reaches us is the evidence that they were. This is not insignificant, yet it is distinct from standing in their presence. Before Hsieh’s time cards, we do not contemplate his year; we contemplate its absence, meticulously documented.
On the open conversation
This text takes as its starting point a verified work, Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980-1981, to reflect upon art that exists only while it occurs and of which only traces remain. I distinguish the fact—he clocked in every hour for a year, with 94 omissions out of 8,760, all documented—from the interpretation, avoiding both the sensationalism of the feat and the reductive readings, such as capitalism or immigration, which the artist himself does not declare. This is the inaugural text of this notebook on performance and ephemeral art, a field I intend to explore. Should anyone wish to contribute from the perspectives of action art, performance theory, or the conservation of the ephemeral, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece), from 11 April 1980 to 11 April 1981. Artist’s official archive; collections of Tate (T13875) and M+ (Hong Kong).
Clock-in tally: Vivian L. Huang, 'The Rigour of Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance', Frieze (2023): 8,666 clock-ins completed out of 8,760 scheduled (94 omitted).
Artist statements: 'I am recording time'; 'transfer life time to art time'.
The shaved head and hair growth as a temporal record: documentation from Media Art Net and M+.