Tehching Hsieh incarcerated himself in a cage for a full year as art.

Evidence

The performance artist Tehching Hsieh would have likely been accepted as a disciple of Diogenes. In 1978, he built a roughly nine-foot-square cage in his studio for Cage Piece, a performance in which he would remain inside the cage for exactly a year. Every day, a friend would visit to bring food and remove waste. Beyond that, Hsieh drew up some draconian terms for himself: He was not allowed to talk, read, or write (except for marking each day on the wall); no television or radio was allowed. In fact, the only other thing in the cell besides the bed and the sink was a clock. The performance was open to the public once or twice a month; otherwise, he was alone. Asked later how he spent his time, Hsieh said that he had kept himself alive and thought about his art. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 271

Categorization

• SHARE: Send to the friend who works on endurance/performance art or on the phenomenology of time-marking (the single clock and daily wall-mark evoke calendrical desperation).
• QUESTION: Hsieh’s cage is voluntarily suffered — does this instance or strain against Odell’s criticism that refusal culture requires privilege? Notably he needed a friend to feed him and remove waste.
• XREF: connects to: Tehching Hsieh’s yearlong isolation was an experiment in emptying out time — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 273; Tehching Hsieh’s year-long pieces are experiments in subtraction, not endurance feats — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 273
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Tehching Hsieh’s yearlong isolation was an experiment in emptying out time — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 273; Tehching Hsieh’s year-long pieces are experiments in subtraction, not endurance feats — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 273