In Terms Of

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  • Life Is Changed

    Tehching Hsieh
    Tuesday, March 3, 2015
    Artists at the Institute
    Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, James B. Duke House, New York

    Tehching Hsieh speaks at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Tehching Hsieh created among the most radical, strenuous, and bizarre bodies of work in all of art history. Only prisoners with life sentences or captured soldiers could ever relate to the parameters Hsieh set for himself for his five One Year Performances, which he described in chronological order during his lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts. Prisoners of crime or war rarely elect to put themselves in a position that isolated themselves, mentally and physically, for long periods of time.

    Speaking broken English in a thick Asian accent, Hsieh told his life story as an artist. Born and raised in Taiwan, he “jumped ship” in Philadelphia on July 13, 1974, while serving with the Taiwanese Merchant Marine (and after his compulsory three-year military service). Hsieh headed for New York, where he lived for fourteen years as an illegal immigrant as he tried to establish himself in the downtown art scene. In fact, he even made an artwork resembling a US Immigration Service “wanted poster” four years after surreptitiously slipping into the country.

    Poster for Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance (1978–79) (artwork © Tehching Hsieh)

    For his first One Year Performance (1978–79), also known as Cage Piece, Hsieh (using the first name Sam) built a mock jail cell, about one hundred square feet, in his TriBeCa loft, where he lived without speaking, reading, writing, listening to the radio, or watching television for an entire year.1 After reading the brief explanation of the piece from the digital image of a typewritten manuscript projected onscreen, Hsieh explained how he rationalized his cramped quarters: “Space—I try to create bigger…. I try to make so this corner become my home. Opposite corner become outside. So every day I can go out, take a walk, and come home.” He held visiting hours, but not many people came to visit this human zoo. For his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009, he reconstructed the cell, which was displayed with documentation of the project.2

    Presenting his career chronologically, Hsieh described the second One Year Performance (1980–81), also known as Time Clock Piece, in which the artist set a goal to punch a time clock on the hour, every hour, for 365 consecutive days. Hsieh screened a video of the film he made at the time—a six-and-a-half-minute succession of single 16mm film frames taken every time he punched the clock. As the hours and days progressed, the hair on Hsieh’s shaved head grew out, and he looked considerably tired toward the end. What struck me the most was how Hsieh just stood there, in the silent room at the institute, with an expressionless look on his face, blinking occasionally as he watched the rapidly changing stills of himself from thirty-five years ago.

    Tehching Hsieh watches himself on film (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    For his third One Year Performance (1981–82), Hsieh—now using his real first name, Tehching—spent the entire year without entering an indoor space. Almost. The New York City police detained him briefly, and a video clip of Outdoor Piece that Hsieh showed included footage from the day when cops dragged him into the station house after a vagrancy arrest. Again, Hsieh’s face was expressionless as he watched his younger self, screaming hysterically.

    The fourth One Year Performance (1983–84) was subtitled Art/Life or Rope Piece. For the project, Hsieh tied himself to a fellow performance artist, Linda Montano, with an eight-foot-long rope. “She like to do meditation, but I don’t quite … feeling,” he joked as he showed a photograph—one of several hundred taken during the span of the performance—of a grumpy-looking next to an absorbed Montano. While Hsieh didn’t hold a job for his first three pieces, he did construction work during the fourth to make a little money, and he traveled with Montano to Philadelphia, where she taught. Many of their conversations were audiotaped, Hsieh said, flashing an image of ordinary cassettes sealed in plastic cases—intended never to be heard. Like the previous pieces, the artist never described what it was like in the midst of the performance, providing us only with basic facts—and limited ones at that. What was, for example, the significance of the start and end date of July 4?

    Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, One Year Performance, 1983–84 (artwork © Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano)

    The fifth One Year Performance (1985–86), in which Hsieh did not see, talk, or read about art, but “just go in life,” preceded the sixth, called Thirteen Year Plan or Earth, which lasted from his thirty-sixth to his forty-ninth birthday. From December 31, 1986 to December 31, 1999, Hsieh stated that he would make art but not show it. He tried to “disappear” in Alaska but only made it as far as Seattle, working the same kind of jobs he did in New York when fresh off the boat. (He also sold his early paintings for $500,000 and bought a building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that housed a residency program for artists.) A poster for each project is the only documentation we have of how Hsieh spent his time. Onscreen he showed digital renditions of his desired retrospective, a timeline of his work in eighteen equally size rooms, one for each year of his performances. In his proposed exhibition, visitors would walk through and become aware their own personal time, thinking about their own life experiences.

    Tehching Hsieh presented a diagram of his ideal retrospective (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the audience Q&A, an audience member asked Hsieh which performance had the strongest impact for him? Hsieh skirted the question, explicating further his concept of separating “art time” and “life time,” the latter of which happens between performances, and of thinking about present time. “I don’t want people to see my work as document,” he said, considering the documentation as the proverbial tip of an iceberg.

    One audience member quizzed the artist about his reconstruction of Cage Piece at MoMA—some folks get really hung up on originals and re-creations—but what is more interesting to me is if that performance can be restaged under the same conditions. Ten years ago Marina Abramović covered five classic works of 1960s and 1970s performance art—by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, VALIE EXPORT, Joseph Beuys, and Bruce Nauman—in Seven Easy Pieces (2005), which took place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum during the first iteration of Performa, the New York–based biennial of performance art. Can you imagine her or anyone else punching a time clock every hour for a year or staying outdoors for 365 days? Even if someone were crazy enough to redo Cage Piece, that person’s experience would be completely different that Hsieh’s.

    A thoughtful attendee asked Hsieh how he first conceived time as his medium, so Hsieh started from the beginning. Reminiscing about his early days in Taiwan, “I’m very good for abstract painting,” he laughed, “express my emotion.” After college friends who had traveled to the West described Conceptual art to him, he experimented on his own, including a jump from a second-floor window (a la Yves Klein) and exposing one hundred newspapers that were laid on the ground with paint. In New York Hsieh worked as a dishwasher from 1974 to 1978, an experience he considered a “four year wasting time experience,” during which he thought about life. “I don’t go looking for it,” he explained his realization. “I already in the situation. I just repeat wasting time one more year. I will catch it. I just create a form. I did it in a cage.” Hsieh deems himself to be best at wasting time, a time of freedom during which “freethinking” can happen. “Life is difficult, but you’re still freethinking.”

    Hsieh avoided confirming the audience’s interpretations of his work: fear and bureaucracy as form, the legal medium, and so on. Instead, he responded, “I’m more like caveman.” Hsieh’s work may concern Zen Buddhism, the penal system, and political asylum, and the artist is content to let others elucidate its meaning. Critics and historians have done a good job. Colby Chamberlain recently wrote: “By pledging to imprison himself in his studio, or to punch a time-clock at hourly intervals, or to stay outdoors, Hsieh imposed on his own body strictures that reverberated with wider regimes of control: incarceration, labor, homelessness (and, perhaps, in the case of his collaboration with Linda Montano, marriage).”3 And six years ago, Roberta Smith assessed Hsieh’s succession of performances: “For ‘Cage Piece’ Mr. Hsieh deprived himself of nearly all contact with the world. In the next four pieces he eliminated, in succession, concentration, shelter, privacy and finally art itself. In each case he altered the nature of time radically for himself and, retrospectively, us.”4 She is right—he made this work, putting himself through these strenuous activities, so we don’t have to. And neither does he: Hsieh more or less retired from making art on January 1, 2000, after concluding the Thirteen Year Plan.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

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    Ryan Kleiner, “Tehching Hsieh Artist Lecture,” Ryan Kleiner Digital Media Portfolio, May 13, 2015.

    Jake Peck, “Tehching Hsieh Artist Lecture Spring 2015 UNR,” Art 350, May 7, 2015.

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    1 Hsieh does not consider the scratch marks on the wall for each passing day to be writing.

    2 For more on the MoMA exhibition, see Roberta Smith, “A Year in a Cage: A Life Shrunk to Expand Art,” New York Times, February 18, 2009; and Deborah Sontag, “A Caged Man Breaks Out at Last,” New York Times, March 1, 2009.

    3 Colby Chamberlain, “Barely Legal,” Artforum.com, March 4, 2015.

    4 Smith, “A Year in a Cage.”

  • They’re Still Out to Get You

    They Know Everything about You: Privacy, Security, and Democracy in a Data-Driven Age
    Monday, March 2, 2015
    New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University, Cantor Film Center, New York

    The government has no compelling case for mass surveillance, proclaimed Robert Scheer, a longtime journalist and the editor in chief of Truth Dig. In the predigital days of snooping on the bad guys, he said, “All you needed was a half-sober cop to go sit in a car outside their house and figure out what they’re up to.” American authorities, Scheer continued, were already aware of the Boston Marathon bombers and Charlie Hedbo gunmen before their attacks, and preemptive surveillance by the government is “a betrayal of the American tradition,” to the audience’s applause. He defined this tradition as embracing transparency, honesty, open debate, consumer choice, and the ability to defend oneself within a legal system.

    Robert Scheer, They Know Everything about You (2015)

    Scheer said that his new book, They Know Everything about You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy (2015), whose release was being celebrated tonight, doesn’t attack technology but rather highlights how it is liberating and can save democracy. He feels a sense of loss regarding how technology’s marvelous potential is being squandered. Tonight’s panel, “They Know Everything about You: Privacy, Security, and Democracy in a Data-Driven Age,” cosponsored by the Nation Institute, highlighted how far we have come since the days of stakeouts, wiretaps, and dusty, sloppily transcribed files kept by the Stasi and FBI.

    Noticing a chilling effect on free speech and intellectual inquiry online, Helen Nissenbaum, professor of media, culture, communication, and computer science at New York University, explained how the digital surveillance of the online habits of Americans can predict if someone is a Democrat or Republican—a process known as voter targeting. With this information, marketers can influence a person’s political views. This “highly tailored” message, she said, drowns out conversation in the public sphere.

    Jen Lowe, an independent data scientist and researcher, argued that complex surveillance develops invisibly and so quickly that regular people can hardly keep up. “We are absolutely having fewer and fewer unobserved moments,” Lowe said. “We are being observed in our homes by our devices.” Advocating informed consent, Lowe pleaded for more “froth and dissent in democracy.”

    Edward W. Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, stated that although algorithmic predictors offer customization and personalization, they serve interests that aren’t your own. “Predictors tend to work best if you’re very much like everyone else,” he said. Felton said that we live like public figures, editing our lives and strategizing our behavior in fear of the consequences of making a mistake.

    In an article he wrote in the late 1990s, Scheer remembered observing that “there is no other profit model of any substance” on the internet. “Basically we convinced people that giving up their information would enhance their shopping experience,” he said, “and we didn’t think what it might do to their self-censorship, to their citizenship, and so on.” And until Edward Snowden’s findings were made public, Scheer said, we didn’t know how massive post–September 11 government surveillance had become.

    “Where are the protests?” asked Mattathias Schwartz, a staff writer for the New Yorker who served as the panel’s moderator. “Is anyone quitting Facebook?” Felten claimed that individuals “feel powerless to change it.” Nissenbaum said the back end of data mining is complex. People might revolt if surveillance becomes more visible, Lowe offered, but she defended Facebook for being good at community: “There’s value that people don’t want to walk away from.”

    Turning back to politics, Felten stated that “we are still far from understanding the implications of the Snowden documents,” many of which, he said, have not been released. He believes the best stuff has yet to come: “That pot will continue to boil for quite a while.” Felten also brought up the recent revelation that American and British forces stole or cracked 2 billion SIM cards, which makes it easy for government agents to listen to calls and rewriting software to turn a smart phone into a recording or tracking device—even when it’s turned off. Scheer argued that technology simultaneously intimidates and seduces the masses. Younger Americans today think the government is benign, he said, but foreign-born students who have personally experienced repressive government regimes see things differently. But, he lamented, “As long as society can disperse the goodies, everything is fine.”

    Lowe doesn’t believe in Google’s rhetoric (“do no evil”), and Nissenbaum doesn’t trust “mammoth” companies more than she does the government. Felten said private companies want fences protecting themselves from government surveillance but noted that the feds can always buy data from companies and piggyback on existing surveillance technologies. Scheer somewhat agreed with the three others: “I hate to be reduced to hoping that Google and Apple and Facebook will do the right thing, but I give them a better shot than I do the NSA.” A misuse of data scandal, he conceded, might cause Facebook to collapse. Nissenbaum weighed the traditional right-to-be-left-alone versus the obligation to share information in a social society, but Felten reminded us that citizens freely give their information to data companies. He also noted that observation by surveillance cameras in public spaces, as well as via smartphone locational devices, is a given in society, not a choice.

    Scheer warned against collusions between business and government, like when privately held companies such as Palantir and In-Q-Tel analyze and sell data to law-enforcement agencies. “A wall has been breached,” he finished, “between the public and the private sector.” Palantir was founded with CIA money, he said, and the federal agency was its only client for three years. Lowe added that the Chicago Police Department has begun predictive policing, identifying criminals by algorithm and knocking on their doors, basically saying “We’re watching you.” The same police department, it was recently discovered, has been operating a black-site prison and interrogation building. “We’re being sold the story that data is unbiased,” Lowe said, “but it’s not magic either.” We shouldn’t forget about human error and bias.

    Schwartz asked about using Tor, PGP, torrents, Tails, and encryption, as well as the judicial system. Nissenbaum reminded us that the government isn’t monolithic; some agencies with good values conduct solid research and take positive action. To help thwart questionable surveillance, she suggested flooding online interactions to obfuscate the system, such as TrackMeNot, which she helped to create. People are more aware of encryption and privacy-enhancing technology, Felten said, and these tools are becoming more practical for ordinary users. “We’re seeing a growth of interest in these things beyond the tin-foil-hat crowd,” he joked. “And that demand is being responded to by, I think, a lot of public-minded researchers who want to try to improve the technical tools.” With hope in the power of the individual, not the corporation, Lowe advocated more education and tutorials for encryption. Deep Lab at Carnegie Mellon University is a new research group that is helping. Scheer said that every government claims to have enemies to justify its actions but implored, “If your cause is right, freedom will serve it.”

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