For the last week I’ve been returning to a page from Tehching Hsieh’s retrospective publication, Out Of Now. The spread contains eight photographs, one for each day between July 12 and July 19, 1983. They document an early stretch of Hsieh and Linda Montano’s One Year Piece 1983-1984 (Rope Piece), during the second and third weeks of a performance that began on July 4, 1983. For one year, they chose to remain tied together by an eight-foot rope and agreed not to touch one another.
In each of the eight photographs, a date-stamp is burned into the bottom right corner. Hsieh, then 32, and Montano, 41, provide one image from each day. They navigate a doorway. They eat at a diner. Montano speaks with a guest while Hsieh sleeps. They work side by side. They cook together. They walk through the city. Hsieh waits as Montano prepares in front of a mirror. They eat in a park. In every frame, the rope remains visible.
At the beginning of the week, I focused on what I could see in the photographs. I thought about commitment. Two people bound by agreement. I thought about the small decisions required to move through a day together. How to navigate disagreement. How one body’s movement shapes another’s. I thought about relationship as a structure, about work unfolding inside daily life, and about performance under the awareness of documentation. Then, endurance, and Hsieh and Montano’s commitment to duration as a medium.
By midweek, recalling the spread, I began thinking about the intensity of a year shared between two individuals with different art practices, different lives, and different temperaments. That thought lingered with me. But when I returned to the photographs, I could see signs of shared commitment to the project. The matching shaved heads. The attention and curiosity with which Hsieh and Montano look at each other with in the bottom two images. There’s a care there, a sense of camaraderie that exists beyond the rope and the structure they agreed to. But the photographs are only eight days.
By the end of the week, I find it difficult to look at only July 12 through 19 without thinking about what comes after. Eight photographs across eight days. The date-stamps create a rhythm. The eye moves across the spread and projects my mind forward past July 19. Roland Barthes writes that every photograph carries the sense of this will have been, that the moment has already passed and the subject will inevitably change or disappear. It begins to feel like looking at a past that still contains its future. It pulls me forward to imagine the next day, and the next, like a ghost that has not yet visited. I cannot look at July 12 without thinking about August, September, January. I cannot look at the rope without wondering what it costs.
I keep returning to the page the way one returns to the beginning of something you already know the outcome of. The year is documented. The photographs exist. Hsieh and Montano made it. But knowing that does not change what the spread of July 12-19 feels like to look at. The weight of the year ahead is still there, still pressing forward out of the frame, regardless of what the next page holds. This is what I have been sitting with all week. The strange experience of watching something unfold that has already unfolded. The rope is already off. The year is already over. And still I cannot look at July 12 without feeling like I am staring at something that does not yet know it has already happened.
“83.07.12-83.07.19” is from Out Of Now by Tehching Hsieh, Adrian Heathfield. Published by the Live Art Development Agency and MIT Press in 2015.
Link to Tehching Hsieh’s website:
https://www.tehchinghsieh.net/
Link to Linda Montano’s archived website:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/7078/20181022145139/https://www.lindamontano.com/
A Week With is a weekly writing series focused on a single image from my art and photobook library. I spend seven days returning to the image and write about what it brings into focus about culture and the present moment.