Alien duration: Tehching Hsieh, 1978-99

The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the
same time, outside and inside the juridical order.
--Giorgio Agamben

Between 1978 and 1986, Tehching Hsieh performed a series of five One Year Performances in New York. (1) These were: Cage Piece (1978-79), in which he inhabited an eleven-and-a-half-by-nine-by-eight-foot cage inside his apartment for a year, neither conversing, reading, writing, listening to the radio, nor watching television, while a friend took charge of his food, clothing, and waste; Time Piece (1980-81), in which he punched a time clock, on the hour every hour, twenty-four hours a day, for 365 days (missing only 134 of 8,760 potential punches); Outdoor Piece (1981-82), in which Hsieh spent an entire year living outdoors, intending not to go into any building, subway, train, car, airplane, ship, cave, or tent (a plan disrupted only by Hsieh's being briefly arrested and taken into a police station after a fight: film documentation makes his distress quite clear); Rope Piece (1983-84), in which Hsieh spent a year tied by an eight-foot rope to another artist, Linda Montano: they were never alone, they were always in the same room at the same time when they were indoors, and they were never to touch (though there was occasional accidental, incidental contact); and finally the fifth in the series (1985-86), in which Hsieh spent a year without art (not doing it, talking about it, reading about it, not going to galleries or museums, "just going in life" ).Then, between December 31, 1986, and December 31, 1999, Hsieh made art in secret during Earth, to announce on January 1, 2000, "I kept myself alive." (2)

There is the tendency to ask, especially of the five one-year performances, what was Hsieh like? What kind of person would put himself through such things? This is understandable, especially if the material of performance art, as we are often told, is the self or subjectivity more generally. (3) Typically, for instance, in a review of Hsieh's work from 2001, Jill Johnston describes performance as "a genre virtually defined by its bias for autobiographical source material." (4) Much of the critical reflection on performance art written in the last decade or so confirms this, to the extent that it provides elaborations of the social construction of subjectivity. (5) Even when such reflection insists that performance art participates in important ways in the fragmentation or dispersal of a coherent (usually modernist) subject, it nevertheless accepts subjectivity as the principal matter of performance art. (6) Yet there is significant work, by artists including Hsieh and, for example, Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic, that takes the self as its material only insofar as it resists subjectivity as a central problematic in more thoroughgoing ways. Hsieh's work is perhaps the best case in point, its nearly unimaginable and yet mundane duration providing cover for his escape from a series of categories upon which subjectivity depends. Hsieh's near-systematic negation of subjectivity, staking out a position along the intersecting limits of economic, juridical, and political orders, in the end gives rise to a counterintuitive and critical inversion of sovereignty.

In relation to like and kind, Hsieh was in fact a very particular kind of person, though not in the psychological (or psychopathological) terms anticipated by such questions. Hsieh arrived in the United States as an illegal alien from Taiwan in 1974 and remained illegal until an amnesty in 1988. (7) So for the period of the one-year performances and over two years into Earth, he occupied that dual position: illegal and alien. "Illegal alien" is a phrase that shouldn't be taken for granted. An "alien" is someone who is not a citizen or national of the United States. According to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), an illegal alien is one "who has entered the United States illegally and is deportable if apprehended, or an alien who entered the United States legally but who has fallen 'out of status' and is deportable." (8) It is interesting to note that a Google search for definitions of "illegal alien" leads one to the IRS before the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which might suggest that this is significantly an economic category. (9) The fact that when Hsieh was illegal the INS was part of the Department of Justice, but it is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, that is, that the definition of "illegal alien" was once a matter of justice and is now a matter of security, also seems telling. The Department of Homeland Security provides a similar definition, but under the more consequence-oriented term "Deportable Alien." (10) What these definitions suggest, in their institutional and rhetorical frames, is a subject at that intersection of economic, juridical, and political systems mentioned above. This position is confirmed in sociological terms by Saskia Sassen's analysis of the demand for undocumented labor as an integral element of shifts in employment patterns that are consequences of the management and service requirement of globalized industries. (11)