Time Piece: One Year Performance 1980-1981
Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock in his studio every hour on the hour for a year, completing a piece called “One Year Performance.” He performed the piece twice, and the video above is documentation of the second of these performances. I’d read about this piece, but hadn’t previously seen the video. He shaved his head at the beginning of the performance so that the passage of time would be more visible. The documentation consists of one frame taken each time he punched the clock. The performance of an everyday ritual by a person who does not need to engage in the ritual is a sort of drag; the artist in this case is in some way rendering a dramatic performance of working class labor practice.
I’ve been thinking a lot about time as it relates to labor lately. I wonder, for example, if the elimination of punch clock-type work time keeping has actually increased the number of hours most of us work. It’s rare to have a job that you are allowed to fully check out of at the end of your shift or workday, and those that let you really go off the clock tend to pay poorly. The last job I had that I could truly go home from was a retail job that, after I had given a year of diligent service, paid me the generous fee of eight dollars hourly with no sick days, no benefits, and a 15-minute break for every four hours spent sorting out rubber balls and ringing up kites.