The art of ‘wasting time’: Inside the book that documents Tehching Hsieh’s year spent in a cage

A new book from the Athens-based publisher Void begins with a portrait of a man staring straight down the lens of the camera. His head and face are fully shaved, he’s wearing a white shirt with his name and a number stamped across his chest, his face bears no emotion. The next nearly 365 images in the book are near identical (bar seven which instead feature a black page that reads ‘damaged negative’). The only thing that changes is the growing length of the figure’s hair, the appearance of some facial hair and the creases in his shirt. As you may have now guessed, each of these images was taken every day for a year, without break.

The man in the photos is Tehching Hsieh, a performance artist born in Taiwan who, immediately after serving three years of military service, moved to New York in 1973, where he built his life and artistic career. The images in the book are compiled from the artist’s first One Year Performance, spanning 1978-1979. For a year the artist willingly lived in a cage, with nothing but a bed, sink and bucket, with a friend bringing him food, clothes and removing his waste. The performance, the first of five, would come to cement him as one of the most celebrated practitioners of performance art, and now – over 45 years later – the unnerving piece is the subject of a new book.

As the title indicates, a key point of exploration for Tehching has always been time – its immaterial nature, but also the many ways humans try to rationalise it and make it material. “A year is a human calculation, a human philosophy,” says Tehching. It’s true, it’s a human philosophy steeped in importance; birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, Eid, New Year – a year dictates the start of something new, and the end of something old, marked by celebration as one ends and another begins. To make time tangible and show its passage, at the start of the performance Tehching shaved his head and face. He wanted to get across that “it’s not just a performance, I live in it. It’s life,” he tells It’s Nice That.

But Tehching didn’t only want to draw attention to the nature of time, he wanted to dissect the way humans refer to time, the way we perceive it, understand it and frame it. The artist often describes his work with the well trodden euphemism of ‘wasting time’, playing on the idea that most people would likely view his performance as such. But, one key caveat is important for him – if one were to add financial gain into the situation, it would likely be a different story. To reiterate his point, Tehching refers back to his second One Year Performance, Time Clock Piece, which involved him punching a time clock for every hour, for a year. “When I punched sheets every hour, it’s something that you might do for your job – I just didn’t get paid to do it,” says Tehching. “But if, for example, you punch it for every hour of every day and get paid one million dollars, of course then, you’re not wasting time. You’re making money.” He continues: “Nobody wants to be ‘wasting time’, and I let that become my concept. Passing time, doing time and wasting time.”

What makes this act even more absurd, Tehching realises, is that he didn’t really have any money in the first place. He was, as he refers to himself, an “illegal”, who’d come to New York from Taiwan and saved enough money to do his first performance working odd jobs like pot washing. “I wasn’t a rich artist, I was a poor artist,” he says. “For a year I didn’t have a job! I was living and not making money. That was expensive.” While expressly avoiding wanting to make his work ‘political’ – instead leaving interpretation up to his audience – it’s hard to escape the fact that Tehching’s work can be seen as a firm denouncement of capitalism, and a clear (be it extreme) example of the fact we deem time spent as worthwhile if it has a fiscal number attached to it. Here, even think about the term, ‘time spent’.

While, as you’ve just read, interpretations can be made of Tehching’s work, there’s something to be said for how little we truly know about Tehching’s true ‘reasoning’ behind the works (if there is one), what they ‘represent’, or, how he felt when performing. He’s not interested in translating the why or the how – he’s always been vocal about not wanting to delve into his concept. Instead, he says: “I make people think, but people don’t need to know what I’m thinking.” And, quite frankly, he’s not too precious about what people might think.

Bar the opening and closing performances on 30 September 1978 and 20 September 1979, there were 17 set days that the public could attend Tehching’s performance. The book’s cover features a year-long calendar, with each viewing date circled. There’s one recorded instance of a woman coming to the show, and, utterly bemused, going up to the bars of the cage and asking “where’s the art?”. When asked about the interaction, Tehching is amused, and not bothered in the slightest. “You need to be open to different people’s points and ways of seeing my work,” he says. “That’s just the way! We understand each other in different ways.” It even seems that Tehching has respect for more critical views of his work. “To write a good review is easy,” he continues, “to write a bad one is more difficult!”

In one sense the book could be classified as a ‘photobook’ – it is full of photographs – but for Tehching, photography has never been something that really concerns him, or that he considers himself very ‘good’ at. At the time, his set up involved a very simple camera, and a tripod – nothing more. And while he took nearly every single photo in the book he says “I’m not very good with a camera.” He continues: “When I’m doing a performance piece, I don’t want someone else documenting – or this idea of someone following me.” That’s why Tehching never refers to his photographs as “documentation”, but “witnessing”, or “evidence” – evidence of the fact that he did perform, he did spend a year in a cage. In fact, outside of his performances, Tehching doesn’t touch cameras. “I don’t even take pictures of my exhibitions!” he says, “I ask the museum for them.”

Tehching is enamoured with the book, and states how impressed he is by the folk at Void creating something so “beautiful”. The timing of its publication is also something that has been cause for thought for the artist. “It’s now 2025; in 1979, no one came to me about a book!” says Tehching. “Because I was illegal, I’d been [in the US] for 14 years, and most of my work I’d done was illegal. If it had been an American artist, this book would probably have come out a few years after the performance.” If anything, this final reflection is a reinstatement of the core of the artist’s work: the fact that time – a thing we often deem so intangible – can be physical, political, capitalist, and it has power over the world we live in, and the way we live our lives.