Tehching Hsieh Exhibition

This week in Slack, Matt encouraged us to visit a museum for a couple hours during the work day.

We live ~30 minutes from Dia:Beacon, which I visited twice even before we moved here.

I messaged a couple coworkers who live in the area to see if they were free and wanted to join me. Automattic is a remote company, so I haven’t met the majority of my coworkers in person, only virtually. Ben Janes joined me and had heard great things about the new Tehching Hsieh exhibit.

It didn’t disappoint.

Tehching Hsieh is a performance artist, best known for his year-long performances of locking himself in a cell, punching a time clock hourly, living completely outside, being tethered to someone but unable to touch, and eschewing all art.

I’m not usually into performance art, but the way the projects were displayed at this exhibition made me reconsider.

In the prison cell gallery, I was drawn in by seeing the actual wooden cell, bed, and bucket, and imagining what daily life must have been like.

In the time clock gallery, I was delighted that you could see the pattern of missed hours by looking at the bottom of the rows. It might have been even more striking if they placed the empty spaced where the missed hours were, seeing blanks at random spaces around the room. Did he have an uberman sleep schedule or just a good alarm?

I was also captured by the timelapse video of the snapshots and seeing the timestamps work their way up the cards behind him. The pile of ~5280 chads was neat, too.

In the outdoor gallery, I couldn’t stop thinking about how difficult it must have been to take care of private things outdoors. I loved the maps he recorded daily, a forebearer to Foursquare and Strava.

In the tether gallery, I was less interested in the daily recordings and more deep in thought about the psychological consequences of the lack of physical contact, despite the proximity.

In the no art gallery, the emptiness made sense, but the artist statement sheet having the colors inverted was a nice touch.

The 13 years of private art gallery being the long empty gallery was nice as well.

At the end, I loved the visualization of the timeline, to scale by the day, of Hsieh’s performance art between 1978 and 1999. It put the galleries in perspective.

In all, a really well done exhibition that will stick in my mind for a long time, alongside the Sol LeWitt retrospective at MASSMoCA, the Matisse paper cuts exhibition a MoMA, and the Picasso museum in Malaga.

While at Dia:Beacon, I couldn’t help but walk though the Richard Serra pieces again. My favorite.

While I walked through them, there was a mother, grandfather, and a 3 year old in the space, too. The 3 year old was joyfully listening to her shouts echo, which reminded me of when I took Charlie there in 2022, when he was 9 months old, and he enjoyed listening to his little “ah!”s echos, too.

I also liked some aspects of the Renée Green exhibition, primarily around color assignments.