Two works in the Tate Trienial I liked a lot - Wallead Beshty's glass cubes (which I'd seen already in the Whitney Biennial last year) and Simon Starling's Three White Desks. What links them is the way that each sets up a process then lets the world and the action/decisions of other people take their course - the result of this framed resignation being the work. Beshty's glass cubes are perfect glass constructions packed into fedex boxes and shipped without further ado (and with no extra packaging) to galleries for exhibition. Arriving smashed, cracked, and with corners crushed to varying degrees they're displayed on their boxes, their properties as objects arising in large part from the accidents in their shipping. The title of this piece gets longer with each showing, the name being a trace of the journey the works have undertaken - a travel itinerary which produces and describes the pieces. A second work by Beshty, and one I hadn't seen before, uses much the same modus operandi and comprises large photographic prints made after he has sent blank/unused films fedex from one country to another - the films bearing the trace of the X-Ray damage as the packages cross security screening, the prints swathes of discolouration and patterning arising from the journey. Not so much art objects as indices for the side-effects of transit, marks/maps of events we can only imagine, guess at the works describe a wasteland, an anoymous transit zone without picturing it in any way.

Simon Starling's work in the Trienial I liked a lot too. You're confronted with three desks, two of them undeniably white, but the third made from unpainted/unvarnished timber. The title - Three White Desks - already serves as a kind of problem/question. You notice that the desks are similar in some ways... descending in size and (as with the Beshty) displayed on the packing crates in which you assume they've arrived at the gallery, still bearing stickers for their delivery to Starling. Each desk looks somewhat like the others but in the details, scales and materials there are clear differences, degradations, fallings away. In the end it's one of those works where you more or less have to read the wall label to get much further (unless you already know that narrative of its origin from another source).  In this case the text confirms that these are three desks made by three different fabricators at the instruction of Starling, who's 'plans' supplied to them comprised only photographs at different resolutions of a desk designed by Francis Bacon. The larger desk, with most detail arose from the biggest of the images. This mapping of properties in real objects to levels of digital compression rang a lot of bells for me, both re The Broken World and some fragments I've been working on since which confuse the ontological systems of real physical and digital/filmic spaces. More on that another time no doubt.

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Vlatka sent links to this work by Ruth van Beek which we both liked a lot. The collages, especially 'Mensen' are lovely. In London we also saw a good works-on-paper show by Abigail Reynolds at Seventeen gallery on Kingsland Road - it runs to March 14th. At the other end of Kingsland Road was an interesting show at The Russian Club Gallery from John Stezaker & William Horner. It just ended though.

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Listening to Adrian Klumpes - Be Still. It's been in my iTunes for more than a year I think but I never listened to it until earlier this week. I don't even recall who gave it to me. It's lovely.

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I know I am not often linking to fashion designers from this notebook. But this collection from Christopher Kane stopped me in my tracks. There's video here too, second item in a longer clip... the part where the models all walk together is pretty great.

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Picture at the very top above is Simon Starling, Three White Desks, 2008-09. Photo: Tate Photography

Unhelpfully headlined but long and otherwise very nice Guardian piece on Forced Entertainment by Lyn Gardener here as the company prepares to revive the second durational performance we ever made Speak Bitterness. First presented in 1994 the work has been shown in its long version only three or four times, the last of them in Frankfurt about 5 years ago. I'm really looking forward to going back to it and have been busy collecting and writing new confessions. 

We argued about small items on the bill, complaining that we ought to pay less than our colleagues because we'd drunk tap water not mineral water, or because they'd had deserts and we had not. We went around local stores asking them to donate prizes in a raffle that didnt really exist. We were ghostwriters. We were graverobbers. Under our leadership the company made an operating loss in its auto operations of 150 billion yen, or $1.7 billion, for the fiscal year ending March 31 - the company’s first annual operating loss since 1938, a year after the company was founded, and a staggering reversal of the 2.3 trillion yen, or $28 billion, in operating profit which had been earned in the previous year. We were unprofessional. We were completely incompetent. After a period of reflection on the comments we made, we called a hasty press conference and took back every word. We apologised for any offence or embarrassment that we undoubtedly caused. We said that it was not our intention to make unfounded and distressing allegations and to make clear that we retracted our comments without reservation. We orchestrated the first worldwide Ponzi scheme — a complex pyramid fraud that lasted longer, reached wider and cut deeper than any similar scheme in history. When telling a story we lacked the skill of abbreviation. We confess to X-Boxes, Gamecubes, Megadrives, PSPs and PS3s. We put our feet in the footsteps of those who went just before us. We didnt make our own route, we just traipsed along behind. We got sent back to the past to stop the future from happening. We got sent to the future to ask them for help, guidance or a powerful weapon of some kind but when we got there we found the place deserted.  We offered miserable discounts. We offered support and down-home guidance to our staff. We filmed a frog’s leg, twitching on a slab. We just wanted to work for the Beckhams. We sowed a horses head onto the body of a cholera patient, replacing his feet with hooves and his hands with the tentacles of an octopus - he didn't last long but once cleaned, pickled and placed in an outsized jar he made an excellent attraction. We had sex in the visionary position – sat far apart on opposite sides of the room and gazing and, masturbating, staring at each other in a mixture of fear, desire and disbelief, certain in the knowledge that even if we came together we would not come together at all. We worked at Guantanamo. We worked at Abu Ghraib.We designed the Millennium Dome. We were Neocons. We lived in condos. We drove the planes right into the towers - it was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful and it changed the world. We lost our grip. When daylight came we lost our limited charm.  

Speak Bitterness is on 28 February, from 6:00 - 12.00 midnight (European time) at  PACT Zollverein, Essen, Germany.

There will also be a live webcast of the whole event on the Forced Entertainment website here from 5pm to 11pm (UK time) 

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You can find a work of mine amongst the many in this show in Manchester:

‘THE KISS OF A LIFETIME’
{Part 1} Curated by Mike Chavez-Dawson

14th-28th Feb 2009. Rogue Project Space – Rogue Artists Studios.

66-72 Chapeltown Street, Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 2WH

Opening Times: Wed – Fri 1pm – 4pm. Sat – Sun 2pm – 5pm/

Press release info:

The Kiss of a Lifetime is a limited edition print show featuring the work of both internationally renowned artists and emerging talent from the UK and abroad. The show aspires to give an overview to what the ‘Kiss’ signifies within our contemporary culture in the broadest sense, from the romantic to the lifesaving, from the prosaic to the violent. The show is presented salon style, with the artists proofs pinned to the wall – like that of a love forlorn bedroom covered in posters of idolisation.

With over ninety artists the show features; Mark Applegate, Magda Archer, Edward Barton, Dave Beech, Divyesh Bhanderi, Simon Blackmore, Andrew Bracey, Brass Art, Lee Campbell, Paul Caton, Suki Chan, Lucienne Cole, Jane Chavez-Dawson, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Sandy Christie, Faye Claridge, Nick Crowe, Sophia Crilly, Antony Crook, Gordon Dalton, Alexandra David, Jo David, Stephen Davids, Gary Daly, Paul Davis, [deletia], Sarah Doyle, Sam Ely, Tim Etchells, Freee, Doug Fishbone, Bec Garland, Dom Garwood, Dave Gledhill, David Griffiths, S Mark Gubb, David Hancock, Shona Hadley, Lynn Harris, Paul Harfleet, Richard Healy, Andy Hewitt, Len Horsey, Rachael House, Stewart Home, Hilary Jack, Mel Jordan, Naomi Kashiwagi, Mark Kennard, Serena Korda, Abigail Lane, Jean-Pierre Lapeyre, Wiebke Leister, Chara Lewis, Charles Lindsay, Katrin Lock, Tessa Lynch, Jo McGonigal, Mark McGowan, Jude Macpherson, Melanie Manchot, Jim Medway, Alexis Milne, Jason Minsky, KristinMojsiewicz, David Molloy, Franz Otto Novotny, Joerg Obergfell, Matthew Pawson, Gary Peploe, Vinca Petersen, Anneké Pettican, Harry Pye, Brian Reed, Katy Richardson, Isabel Rock, Kenny Schachter, David Shrigley, Pamela So, Lisa Solminski, Paul Stanley, Chris Taylor, William Titley, James Topple, Jessica Voorsanger, Charlotte Young, Kai-Oi Jay Yung, John Walsh, Simon Woolham, Andrea Zapp, + Further Special Guests TBA.

I, Sam Hsieh, plan to do a one year performance piece. 

I shall punch a Time Clock in my studio every hour on the hour for one year. 

I shall immediately leave my Time Clock room, each time after I punch the Time Clock.

The performance shall begin on April 11, 1980 at 7p.m. and continue until April 11, 1981 at 6p.m.

Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance: 1980-1981

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My friend and collaborator on various projects Adrian Heathfield is about to publish a new book - Out of Now, the first major publication on the extraordinary, influential (and until recently rather overlooked) Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh. I made a small contribution to the book, in the form of a letter to Tehching, a short excerpt from which is below.

The UK Public launch for Out of Now (published by the Live Art Development Agency and The MIT Press) takes place on Monday 2 March at 14.30 at Club Row Gallery, Rochelle School, Club Row, London E2 7ES. There will be presentations by both Tehching and Adrian, who'll do his performance-lecture Walking Out of Life, discussing the aesthetics of duration and questioning the models of time through which performance art has predominantly been interpreted.

Here's the press release info:

In the vibrant downtown Manhattan art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Tehching Hsieh made an exceptional series of artworks: five separate one-year-long performances that were unprecedented in their use of physical difficulty over extreme durations and in their absolute conception of art and life as simultaneous processes. After years of near-invisibility Hsieh has now collaborated with the writer and curator Adrian Heathfield to create this meticulous and visually arresting record of the complete body of his artworks from 1978-1999. With contributions from the art theorists Peggy Phelan and Carol Becker, and the internationally acclaimed artists Marina Abramovic, Santiago Sierra, and Tim Etchells.

(I'm doing my level best to feel like a natural part of that line-up!)

Ticket info: Bookings for the public launch event are essential. Tickets £5 (includes a free drink). Book by phone +44 (207) 033 0275 (credit/debit card payments) or email enquiries to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Adrian and Tehching have made Out of Now a great publication - a meticulous and evocative documentation and an insightful creative evaluation of what I think are some of most challenging, extraordinary and simple performances ever made. I hope what I've written for the book gives some idea of the work and what significance it has for me.

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The work is also, of course, about extraordinary acts of prolonged yet voluntary subjection, about living life in ways that would normally only be endured coercively, as during incarceration, or as a consequence of extreme socio-economic and/or cultural relegation. It’s about the voluntary imposition of limits to freedom, comfort, opportunity and experience, creating what are in effect unimaginable conditions of physical and mental duress, isolation or hardship. Think monastery, religious order, messed-up cult, labor camp and terrible prison but done quietly, with love and for art. You were living inside the simplest, and harshest of self-made rules.

I was thinking a lot about waste; about apparently wasted time, wasted potential, wasted life. About denial (self-denial, social denial) as a core mode of artistic operation. If capitalism’s structures are repeated in your work they are mirrored without the key element of productivity. It is different in each of the projects of course, but in the “Time Clock” performance especially, the violence is felt instantly in the lack of any product at all (or any actual “labor”). There is only the submission or control of body, time and space, the endless regulation and tracking of (human) resources. The work is time served. A perfect model of late capitalism in fact, in its product-less purity. All the discipline without the pay-off of an object. Prison labor organized by Samuel Beckett. Pointless non-manufacture. Absurd. The act of being is what’s regulated in an extreme form here but it is disciplined to produce nothing.
 
I was thinking also that at the core of each project is denial. The rules or framing statements you make for each work are mostly prescriptive negations. You create an economy of denial which puts itself squarely at odds with the capitalist orthodoxy, an orthodoxy which for growth requires (and manufactures) endless and expansive micro and macro change–a tedious infinity of new demands, needs, consumptions, social interactions and lifestyle options which must all in turn be facilitated by yet more movement, devices, products, human labor and built spaces.
 
The work is a direct affront to the quadruple towers of commonsense: productivity and usefulness, self-expression and consumption. A systematic Dada nothing, 365 days a year. A no. A no thank you. Or Bartleby’s “I’d prefer not to” writ large. But always (to be clear) a refusal framed and ordered in the terms of the ruling institution–a reified reiteration–the kind of extreme and profound negation that I guess can only be produced by excessive compliance.

From Time Served, Letter to Teching Hsieh, in Out of Now.

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Brainard Carey (Rail): Let’s talk about your first one-year performance when you built a cage that you lived in without reading writing or talking. Did you have many visitors, that is, an audience?

Tehching Hsieh: I only let people come in 18 times, not 365 days. It was scheduled. People found out through posters, talking or neighbors. My friend put posters in the street.

Delia Bajo (Rail): Why one year?

Hsieh: Because one year is the largest single unit of how we count time. It takes the earth a year to move around the sun. Three years, four years is something else. It is about being human, how we explain time, how we measure our existence.

From a 2003 interview with Tehching at The Brooklyn Rail, here.

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New York Times review here of Tehching's 'Cage Piece' documentation currently at MoMA in New York.  His 'Time Clock' documentation is meanwhile at the Guggenheim right now in their show "The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989.”

A dream about X's child. I'm at their house. The kid daughter is playing with some strange creature, a toy, that is in some way animated/electronic, in the form of a dog. In the game the dog creature seizes the daughter by the wrist. they push and pull, the daughter is released. The dog robot thing chases catches her again. there's laughter but there's something wrong in the scene, hard to tell what. Later in the dream the daughter sits at the table with us to eat and in the background the robot dog thing continues to play... only now there's a second robotic figure playing the role that the daughter occupied previously in the game. glimpsing this from the corner of my eye I realise how like the daughter this second robot is but im not sure if that's been noticed by the others. I'm also not sure if the the girl, in her game, 'plays at' being (takes on the role of) the second robot or if the robot and its actions are somehow in any case modeled on her.

One of those confusing dreams in any case. In which late on (stlll dreaming) I realise that I would like to write this down. So in the dream already I am searching for words, dream tongue testing sentences, over and over and with each of them I seem (or fear) to get further from the truth of what I have seen.