BY Chong Jing Gan ILLUSTRATION Chong Jing Gan DESIGN Alex Westfall
CAGED LIVES REVISITING TEHCHING HSIEH'S CAGE PIECE DURING SELF-QUARANTINE On September 30, 1978, a man walks alone into a cage in a small studio in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. The cage measures 11 and a half feet long, nine feet wide, and eight feet tall, and contains nothing but a bed, a sink, and a pail for excrement. The door closes behind him. A lawyer steps forward and locks the door, and sticks on a tiny slip of paper with Tehching Hsieh’s signature scrawled on it as a seal. He does the same to the bars of the cage, which are constructed from pine dowels. Any attempt to breach the walls or door of the cage will tear the seals. The lawyer also carries with him a statement signed by the man, which forbids him from talking, reading, writing, listening to the radio, or watching television while he is in the cage. Having finished his task, the lawyer takes a last look at the man, silent in the cage, and leaves. The door closes. It will not open again for a year. +++ The suffering of illness is inseparable from the pain of isolation; this intimate correlation is best documented in poetry written about sickness. In “Visiting Hour,” Norman McCaig writes of visiting a loved one who is sick and warded in the hospital: “And between her and me / distance shrinks till there is none left / but the distance of pain that neither she nor I / can cross.” Other poets write first-hand of their own experiences of isolation while confined in the hospital: in poems like Elizabeth Jenning’s “Sequence in Hospital,” in which she describes “the healthy world / Held at a distance, on a rope,” or in Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips,” in which she speaks of water that “comes from a country as far away as health.” Illness seems to literally as well as figuratively transport the sufferer into a distant world—not only the cold confines of the hospital ward but also a world dominated by the sensation of pain— cutting them off from their former life and stranding them in sickness, alone. Now, distance asserts itself all the more violently, forcibly rewriting the rules of care that we have toward our most vulnerable. No longer can we tend to our sick in the comfort of their own beds and homes, or keep watch over them in their struggle. In the pandemic we’re living through, the ill are separated not only by the veil of their own disease, but also the sealed spaces of isolation wards. And this isolation, like the disease that demands it, is ever-growing, spreading throughout our whole society. Doctors disappear for month-long shifts in the isolation wards in Hong Kong to minimize the risk of transmission with the outside world. In Atlanta, Doctor Michelle Au, whose work in a specialist airway team directly exposes her to the virus, has one mask to reuse throughout an entire day. In her home, she confines herself to the basement beyond a demarcated line that her husband and children are forbidden to cross. Social workers are needing to radically adapt strategies of care for those who rely upon their presence. At-risk children are now isolated from supervision and communities at school, cut off from social worker home visits, and trapped at home with potential abusers. With many shelters, soup kitchens, and publicly accessible bathrooms closing, homeless people and other economically vulnerable individuals are dangerously untethered to sources of aid; in this crisis, the distance between the lives of the upper and lower class has only grown wider. In a lesser but nonetheless transformative way, even those of us who are fortunate enough to be sheltered from the worst consequences of the virus are
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having to radically reimagine what constitutes our lives. The movements and activities that once gave our days a rhythm, a pulse, have been stripped away. The little things that we took for granted as a given fact of our existence. A long-awaited concert or movie. A walk in the park, the air crowded with the throng of humanity enjoying a warm Friday evening together. Going to work or school, the painful and yet necessary grind of it. A meal, a conversation, a moment of intimacy with a loved one; the sound of their voice, the touch of their hand. All these things that make you feel connected, driven, intensely and presently alive, are now gone, and we as a collective humanity are now contemplating what it means to live a confined life. To find a way to move ourselves, to move on, even as we are forced to stay still: that is the imperative that we seem to have issued for ourselves. How do we resume our lives? How do we let things become normal again? +++ Perhaps one answer lies in the story of a man, living quiet and alone, in a cage for an entire year. His name is Tehching Hsieh, a Taiwanese-born artist who dropped out of high school to further his creative pursuits and migrated to America illegally in 1974 to pursue his art career. This work, entitled “One Year Performance 1978-1979,” better known as “Cage Piece,” is the first of a series of performance works spanning the rest of the century. Each work takes a similar form: Hsieh constructs strict guidelines that set extreme restrictions upon his life. For the duration of each piece, he follows these rules (with the exception of his final work, every work lasts one year exactly). In order to ensure that Hsieh abides by his rules, the entire process is extensively documented, accounted for, and even notarized, as it was by a lawyer for “Cage Piece.” That is the performance: Hsieh’s life for an entire year. Can we call this a performance? The notion of something performed suggests a conscious artifice, that the performer assumed a certain persona that differs from their ‘normal’ self. Moreover, the audience is traditionally aware of the artifice. We are mentally primed to acknowledge what we see as something outside of our everyday lives: a moment of escape, of immersion into something fictive, the illusory space of a performance in which the rules of society and even reality are briefly suspended. But there is no audience in Hsieh’s work, because no one could possibly be there watching Hsieh for an entire year. His work consumes his life for that year, such that it strips away any performative behavior. He isn’t putting on an act. Another way to understand Hsieh’s works is to think of them not as performance, but as excruciating mental and physical acts of endurance. Solitary confinement of over 15 days is considered torture by the United Nations, never mind the full year that Hsieh subjects himself to in “Cage Piece” (1978-1979). In the following year, Hsieh performs “Time Clock Piece” (1980-1981), forcing himself to punch a time clock every hour on the dot for one whole year. Never able to sleep, let alone concentrate on any other task for more than an hour consecutively, Hsieh’s life is reduced into the act of waiting—for the next hour to strike, for the next punch of the clock, day after day, month after month, until the year is finished. The year after that, in “Outdoor Piece” (1981-1982), Hsieh decides that he will not be allowed to enter into any sheltered building or facility for a whole year, and lives his life outdoors, on the streets of Manhattan, over one of the coldest
winters on record. Even in the midst of these extreme living conditions, life—and what Hsieh calls “life time”—asserts itself, in the form of the menial, mundane routines and patterns of our everyday. His life is reduced to its bare essence, and revolves around the seemingly trivial markers of our lived experiences: eating, sleeping, bathing, and defecating. We tend to distance these basic functions of life from the realm of art and “art time”, which is determined by the fixed length of a performance or the amount of time we spend appreciating a piece. Hsieh merges art time and life time such that it becomes clear that what he is engaged in is the simple act of continuing to live. He does not subvert the conditions which he has imposed upon himself, does not do anything that, on the surface, seems radical, revolutionary, or engaging in some extraordinary feat of artistic genius. Instead, he goes on with his life in spite of his self-imposed suffering. Hsieh finds a way to make the time pass with every day, every meal, every breath. This is what is so extraordinary about Hsieh’s work—something so simple that it tends to become overstated in discourse about his oeuvre. Hsieh’s work is not so much subversive as it is distilling. He distills the essence of art, of work, of living, down to one singular action: the passing of time. Hsieh’s simple mantra encapsulates the attitude that he embodies in his works: “Life is a life sentence; life is passing time; life is freethinking.” In these three statements, Hsieh documents a philosophical journey that he has lived out in his works. We begin on a pessimistic, despairing note: life as a life sentence. Hsieh was particularly moved by Albert Camus’ tragic image of Sisyphus in the eponymous existential meditation, The Myth of Sisyphus. Drawn from Greek mythology, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock up a hill every day only to see it tumble back down. The insurmountable slope, the futility and anguish of the man’s efforts, the knowledge that one is doomed to repeat this fate the next day, and the day after that, ad infinitum. Much like how the fate of Sisyphus is Camus’ metaphor for the existential fruitlessness of human endeavor, the rules and conditions that Hsieh sets for himself remain deeply symbolic. In their extreme restrictions on his behavior, Hsieh seeks to not only make visible but hyperbolize different forms of confinement and suffering that undergird our fundamental experience of life. In enacting these trials over the course of an entire year, such that it becomes his life, we come to see his works as a twisted mirror for our own reality. +++ Perhaps this is the answer that “Cage Piece” presents to us, as we ask “how do we go back to the way things were?” Maybe the truth is that this is, and has always been, the way that things were: that to live is to be confined, and this moment is nothing but a forced and heightened confrontation with the fate that we strive so hard to ignore. When you peel back the little things that we cling onto that give us a sense of comfort, this life, of confinement and isolation, frustration and loneliness, is what lies beneath. And in a way, isn’t our desperation to return to a state of ignorance that we call “normalcy” a statement of privilege? Privilege that isn’t afforded to individuals with undocumented status, the economically disadvantaged, incarcerated, or otherwise marginalized groups of people for whom a confined life is a normal life. The struggle of the under-privileged is especially
10 APR 2020
