Art / Life: One Year Performance
Linda Montana and Tehching Hsieh
LINDA MONTANA AND TEHCHING HSIEH, 1983-1984.
On July 4th 1983, Linda Montana and Tehching Hsieh fastened either end of an 8 foot rope around each other's waists and spent the following 365 days tied together. Two performance artists whose work pushed the boundaries of their bodies and questioned the meaning of art itself, Art/Life was the most ambitious and personally difficult work of their careers. Hsieh had done a number of time based works previously, most notably Time Clock Piece which saw him punch a timecard every hour for a year. Yet while Time Clock was an act of solitary punishment, Art/Life is a work about the limits of human connection. The rules of the artwork required them to be in the same room at all time, except when they showered and one would wait on the other side of the door, and, most importantly, that they never intentionally touch for the duration of the year. Hsieh wanted to confront his issues with human relationships, and bring himself out of the lonely fear he had built around him. “I wanted to do one piece about human beings and their struggle with each other. We cannot go into life alone, without people. But we are together so we become each other’s cage.”