Thoughts on reading about an art exhibit recently...

Would you call it art when

• A recluse decides to voluntarily shut oneself from the world deciding that they function best sans human contact?
• Guantánamo prisoners undergoing solitary confinement for long stretches at a time?
• A lonely factory worker is faced with the prospect of making the same widget every day for the next 20 years?
• Terrorism suspects undergo extreme sensory deprivation and are forced to remain awake many many nights in a row?
• That unwilling bride faces a prospect of living a lifetime with someone she does not know just because she was 'given away' by her family in an 'arranged' marriage?
  

Chinese artist Tehching Hsieh decided to perform variations of the above scenarios voluntarily. His art is being celebrated at the MoMA now.

In the fall of 1978 Mr. Hsieh, then 28, constructed his cell-like cage of pine dowels inside a loft in TriBeCa. He furnished it with a cot, a sink and a bucket. Before he shut himself inside, he issued a terse manifesto, typed on white paper: “I shall NOT converse, read, write, listen to the radio or watch television until I unseal myself on September 29, 1979.” Mr. Hsieh’s loft mate, Cheng Wei Kuong, who had studied with the same painting teacher in Taiwan, brought his food and removed his waste. After weeks of beef and broccoli, Mr. Hsieh said, he wordlessly threw one meal to the floor when it was delivered; later he felt bad about that. Each day Mr. Hsieh scratched a line in the wall with his fingernail, which made 365 hatch marks at the end. Each day, with his hair infinitesimally longer, he stood on his traced footprints to be photographed. Every three weeks he allowed spectators, but he did not acknowledge them. He was too busy thinking — about his past, his art, the passing of time and the boundaries of space. He was thinking about how his physical confinement liberated his mind.

To this day, he said, “wasting time is my concept of life,” clarifying: “Living is nothing but consuming time until you die.” Read the whole article here.

Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, two artists who did not know each other spent a year tied to each other by a 8 foot long rope. Among conditions they set up for this piece was that they could not touch one another.
Titled: Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (known as Rope Piece)