CONFOUNDING SOLIDARITY singular, universal and particular subjects in the artworks of tehching hsieh and the politics of the new left

Abstract

This essay takes the performance artworks of Tehching Hsieh as instructive allegories for a global ethics as theorized by a variety of left academics (including Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) who ground universalism in a singularity that escapes the predicates of identity. Hsieh's projects, I argue, also place universal estrangement in the service of liberation for particular marginalized groups whose lives confound our fantasies of recognition. At the same time, they illustrate some of the challenges facing attempts to treat particular struggles as embodiments of universal conflicts.

Keywords:

• Tehching Hsieh
• singular-universal
• Balibar
• Rancière
• Žižek
• Badiou

Notes

Several people contributed ideas and suggestions to this essay. I especially acknowledge the following individuals: Adam Lerner, who introduced me to Hsieh's projects and encouraged me to engage with them; Isabella Winkler, for her generous readings of several drafts; and an anonymous reviewer whose detailed comments and questions helped me to refine my argument.

1 Eighteen visits were allowed during the cage piece, but no talking was allowed (Bajo and Carey).

2 As documented, he missed 133 punches (out of 8760) by sleeping through, punching early or late.

3 The one exception occurred when he was forcibly brought inside a police station for some fifteen hours when he was arrested following a scuffle.

4 During this time, he apparently tried to “disappear” into anonymity, moving to Seattle and working as a laborer for a time before giving it up and returning to New York, where he sold some early paintings and bought his studio in Brooklyn (see Heathfield and Hsieh 338; cf. Sontag).

5 More recently he has made slightly different, albeit still cryptic, remarks: “To this day, he said, “wasting time is my concept of life,” clarifying: “Living is nothing but consuming time until you die” (qtd in Sontag). Sontag concludes by contrasting Munroe's admittedly bombastic claim that Hsieh has “transcended” art with his own speculation that “I am not so creative. I don't have many good ideas.”

6 Prior to these performances, Hsieh had been a painter in Taiwan, and dabbled with performance art, leaping off a second story, jumping into horse manure, and eating rice until throwing up (see Sontag).

7 Hsieh admits that his experience is conditioned by his history and legal status. However, he suggests, “A person living at the bottom might show his pains and his resentments politically. But as an artist, he should have the ability to transform basic living conditions into art works in which to ponder life, art and being” (Heathfield and Hsieh 326).

8 Steven Shaviro flirts with this temptation. He writes:

Work time now coincided with inner, subjective time. Hsieh's life was transformed. He grew intimate with time. He felt it weighing down upon his body, at every instant, in every motion he made. His life was all work, but this work was entirely his own. There was no difference between what he did, and who he was. Isn't that a rare state of grace? (N. pag.)

9 I am thinking here of his example of the doctor who refuses triage and treats the first patient he encounters using every available technique regardless of cost (and of consequence for other patients, medical institutions, etc.) (see Badiou, Ethics 15).

10 It is worth noting that after he returned to “life,” Hsieh sold his earlier paintings, bought a building with the proceeds, and created a space for visiting foreign artists (see Bajo and Carey).

11 For Badiou, charisma or “the gift of grace” is identified with a universal capacity for singular action (that is, action without antecedent) (see Badiou, St. Paul. 77–78).

12 Here one could also consider analogies between Hsieh's blocked singularity and the subjective emotional “opacity” that Bishop finds exhibited in Artur Zmijewski's “Singing Lesson” (Bishop, “Social Turn” 182).