One cannot witness the lifework without some part of the work being experienced as missing. —Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh, Out of Now

Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. —José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

I remember where I sat in the studio in the Performance Studies (PS) wing on the sixth floor of the Tisch building. It was the summer of 2008. I had just moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to take part in this graduate program at New York University. I had no idea what I was getting into. That day, the chair of the department screened a video, a performance document. The concept of the performance was simple: the artist punched into a work clock every hour, on the hour, for one year. Wearing a utilitarian jumpsuit, the artist took a photograph of himself standing beside the clock immediately after punching in. The year of daily photographs was then compiled into a video, compressing the one-year performance into six minutes. That summer day, with this performance document as the only light source in a windowless room, I learned of Tehching Hsieh’s work for the first time. Watching his image flicker, his contour spasm as the video progresses into his year of shallow sleep, I felt my breathing change. I could not put words to the sensation, but Hsieh’s virtuosic performance in time moved me. I noticed my heart beating.

I sensed an inscrutable approach to life and creativity, one whose splendor, if not its details, could be shared with others. I felt my face redden in the dark. The artist’s Asianness hit me with shameful desire of reflection in performance art. Artist Simon Fujiwara has described his moment of gay recognition upon the viewing of a Mark Rothko color field painting. As I sat in the PS studio, Hsieh’s work offered me queer interpellation as an Asian form—hailing me through an open-ended mode of desiring that this book articulates as a surface relation. By way of concluding this book, I will engage another year-long performance by Tehching Hsieh, one fulfilled in collaboration with artist Linda Montano, to think through the forms of sociality that can or cannot be represented in performance, and the productive trouble that inscrutability presents to the thinking of time and the writing of history.

Visualizing Everyday Collaboration in Rope Piece

From 1978 to 2000, the artist by the names of 謝德慶, Sam Hsieh, and Tehching Hsieh created and executed six durational works that have defied categorization and comparability in art history. These performance works, which his coauthor Adrian Heathfield calls lifeworks, have disrupted conventions of life and art, notions of time and the body, of endurance and vulnerability. The first five pieces were each of one year’s length, completed with varying months in between for rest, recovery, and preparation. Like the other artists studied in this book, Hsieh produces work as a solo artist. Solo is significant here not only in the discreteness of his name but also in his virtuosic experiments with isolation.

Experiments with social being were central to Hsieh’s endurance art. Hsieh’s inaugurating Cage Piece was an extreme form of social deprivation, containing himself physically to the confines of a cell and culturally to the absence of media, eye contact, and conversation. The next year was the aforementioned Clock Piece, in which his time was diligently managed and his social calendar was restricted accordingly. His third year-long performance, Outdoors Piece, excluded him from shelters ranging from a cave to a subway train to a building. His environmental security took the form of a sleeping bag. As scholars have noted, this commitment to vagrant living invites commentary on his undocumented status in the United States and the belonging of what Charles Garoian has called his “Asian-alien body.”[1]

These sublime endurance works of intense temporal and spatial manipulation gave way to his fourth year-long piece. From July 4, 1983, to July 4, 1984, Hsieh and Linda Montano collaborated for a performance commonly referred to as Rope Piece (see figure C.1). This moniker comes from the 8-foot, preshrunk, nylon rope that connected them from the waist, pulling to a taut 5.5 feet between them.[2] A solo artist in her own right, Montano was no stranger to collaborative or endurance work. Their collaboration follows the templates of Hsieh’s preceding performances in many respects. Like Hsieh’s five other durational works, Rope Piece was announced with a contractual statement of the artwork’s rules, with Hsieh’s signature use of legal templates.[3] Both artists agreed to be in the same room when inside and both artists agreed not to touch for the length of the year. The artists also documented the performance daily. Though the initial statement does not make clear the parameters of art documentation, Hsieh and Montano have since released a photo diary of the year. Hsieh’s calculating approach to performance documentation continues in Rope Piece, with daily photographs and daily audio recordings of the performance. The photo diary includes photographs of themselves each day of the year as well as photographs of the cassette tapes they recorded whenever one of them spoke.

In the artist monograph Out of Now, the year is visualized through two photo series. In the first, the 367 days of the performance (1984 was a leap year) are each represented by one photograph, dated in the bottom right corner (see figure C.2). Eight photos fill a page in the monograph. Often Hsieh and Montano are both figured in the photographs, sometimes with friends and animals, often doing mundane things like sitting on the subway, cleaning the house, lying in bed, standing in the kitchen, or enduring yet another morning bathroom routine. Many appear candid while others are posed with friends seated or standing between the two artists. The artists have since confirmed that they made use of a tripod to take many of the photographs, suggesting the photographs were largely composed by the artists themselves. Other times, the placement of the rope makes clear that one artist is taking a photograph of the other.

Looking at the daily photographs, the minutiae of two lives lived together, never alone, is routine and unsentimental. The eve and day of the 1984 new year are represented by a kitchen workout and tv lounging. Recurring scenes include art galleries and familiar New York backdrops, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Square Park, or a subway platform. Montano’s dog Betty is often pictured, attesting to the trio’s three daily walks. These quotidian scenes take on a comedic tone with the rope seen between them: Hsieh trims his toenails while Montano writes at the desk (5/10). Montano sits at the bathroom threshold watching television while Hsieh showers (5/8). Hsieh extends a tape recorder toward the camera (6/15). Hsieh plays arcade games (6/10) and Montano performs a tarot reading (7/2). Montano gets an eye exam and Hsieh takes a photograph (11/23). They look at each other and smile, the rope out of the frame (5/6). They turn their backs to one another in another photograph, the rope pulled taut (1/9). In his underwear, Hsieh drapes a blanket on a sleeping Montano (11/17). The artists prepare (6/19) and post flyers of their studio opening (10/24). They pose with a couple at a party (10/15). They stop at an ATM (9/26). They pick out cereal at the supermarket (7/3). They sit before a fire by the river, reminding viewers of Hsieh’s Outdoor Piece (1/12). They attend street fairs (9/24). He stands at the stove, she at the sink (8/2). They go for a run (7/29 and 5/3); they ride bikes (6/26). They sit at the movies with Martha Wilson and go to the Met. They prepare to board a plane (3/10). They both talk on the phone (3/26). They lie in separate single beds, often. Hsieh enters an elevator while Montano remains outside its threshold (perhaps documenting one of the more dangerous moments the artists later reference, when they arguably broke the rule of being in the same room and faced physical risk) (2/6).

Taken as a group, these photographs give a sense of temporal coverage. There are indications of the activities and people that filled their time, the moments that cumulatively create a life. More simply, taking photography as a form of truth documentation, a viewer can see that, yes, the two artists did as they said they would: they are indeed tied together with this rope, in the same room, not touching. Each photo allows a glimpse, a tiny keyhole through which viewers can briefly sense what that year was about.

Sometimes these glimpses are complicated by the absence of the artists’ bodies. Though it is rare in the series, at times neither of the artists is figured. A television monitor and slide projector are featured (11/2), with the artists nowhere to be seen. Children hold onto a many-stringed rope as they cross the street (9/23). These photographs give a sense of looking away from the other and themselves, of focusing on their surroundings. Every so often a dark photo appears, with only the camera’s orange date stamp visible in the corner. Other days are explicitly marked with the word “FIGHT,” such as on 1/28/84 and 1/29/84, suggesting that the artists were not in the mood for an otherwise composed photograph. These blank photos attest to a mood, a moodiness that affects the performance, even as the performance continues with its visual archive. The photographs without the artists figured trouble the use of the photograph as proof. They point to the omissions and absences that pervade the photography series, gesturing to all that cannot be visualized and recorded through photograph.

What That Year Was Actually Like

The question of what is not captured in the daily life photographs can easily remain unasked because of the abundance of photos and the details they hold. The impressive seriality of photographs is enough to capture a viewer’s attention for years. One could get lost in the careful composition of each photograph, and marvel at the recurrence of places, activities, outfits, and people. The visual record allows for a voyeuristic glimpse at the intimacy between the two artists, sparking curiosity for the strange relationality it might have occasioned. What might that year have felt like from a first-person perspective? What were they thinking? What would it be like to have such a physical connection with another, not in the name of desire or love but in the name of art? How did being tied to one another affect their social lives otherwise? The 367 photos are so evocative that the viewer may be disheartened to realize that she actually has no idea what that year was like. Hsieh and Montano’s Rope Piece gives no shared sense of performance to an audience despite the artists’ rigorous documentation.

I am not alone in being entranced by Rope Piece or the fact that the quality of Hsieh and Montano’s year tied together remains a mystery. Though there are no examples given as evidence, critical reception of Rope Piece narrates conflict into the performance. Paul Laster writes, “Montano and Hsieh had to do everything together and disagreed on most.”[4] Laster continues, “They documented the piece with daily snapshots and audio recordings, though the latter have not been released.”[5] When Emma-Louise Tovey asks Montano about her year with Hsieh, the artist responds: “That’s a closed chapter of my life.”[6] Tovey writes in Sleek: “They didn’t always get along. In fact, both sides seem to delicately avoid the subject of what that year was actually like.”[7] The juxtaposition of these two sentences suggests a causal relationship between them; that the artists did not always get along is proven by the fact that neither discusses “what that year was actually like.” Does a closed chapter indicate conflict or disagreement? Not necessarily, especially when the performance was designed to end from the beginning. Despite—or maybe because of—the abundance of performance documents, viewers want more access, suggesting that documentation not only divulges but also withholds information.

This reception of being left out, of not having access to the actual experience, is reflective of responses to Hsieh’s other works. As Frazer Ward writes, “What begins to emerge in Outdoor Piece is the insufficiency of the documentary evidence to the brute facts of Hsieh’s experience.”[8] Ward further comments, “The evidence continues to tell us neither what the experience for Hsieh was ‘really like,’ nor why Hsieh did it.”[9] Ward’s and other critics’ comments construct a fraught relationship between evidence and experience, one that withholds content and justification. The presentation of format, then, the rigorous documentation of scheduled time and place (whether through a camera’s date stamp, a punch clock’s hour, a map’s red-lined path, a person’s hair length, or a calendar’s circles), creates a surplus of form. These material structures outline a life lived within its frames, so the work is never presumed empty of meaning. Rather, the shape that meaning could take exists in the visual record, circulates, and is abundantly evident as external matter. At the same time, the content of those years, the interiority of Hsieh’s experience, remains unknown.

By reiterating these aesthetics of external display and internal withholding, Hsieh’s aggressive documentation practices for his durational performances support what this book has formulated as aesthetic modes of inscrutability, where a social relation is premised on a dynamic of knowing and obfuscating knowledge. Another way to read these critical reviews is to hear the desire there to know, to have access to the pulse of those bodies in time. In this sense, Hsieh’s oeuvre teases the viewer. As Ward writes, “‘Prefacing an interview with Hsieh and Montano, Alex and Allyson Grey remark of Rope Piece that it is ‘one of the most highly publicized works of performance art,’ but that ‘it retains an impenetrable privacy. No one will ever know ‘what it was like’ but the artists themselves.’”[10] Ward describes this withheld information as a “representational shortfall,” suggesting it is “a metaphor for the misunderstanding of the plight of those who are socially marginalized, whether illegal aliens, the poor, or the homeless.”[11]

The larger question of “what it was like” is perhaps all the more poignant and beguiling with Rope Piece, since the constant witness of another (Montano) was instrumental to the performance. The focus shifts, then, not just to Hsieh and Rope Piece as one in a series of his works but to the larger question of that plural subjective “we” who writes the artist statement of Rope Piece. If Hsieh’s performances of inscrutability notoriously withhold more than they reveal and create this “representational shortfall,” then how does one make sense of this impenetrability when another person is present? How is it that, even when someone else could theoretically speak to the experience of being “inside” a year-long performance with Hsieh, viewers still remain “outside” it?

It is remarkable that Ward interprets this representational shortfall as still representing something. With few givens to the piece, reviews of Hsieh’s work often defer to the biographical. Ward continues in a similar vein: “If the rope literalized relationality itself, Rope Piece was an experiment in sociality, in communication and negotiation, but one posited by an artist who was, in terms of another, larger set of negotiations with the state, still several years away from having a leg to stand on.”[12] Ward does not go on to elaborate or clarify his point here or the significance of that “but” in referencing Hsieh’s undocumented status and his experiment in sociality. Ward is not alone in foregrounding Hsieh’s alien status, one that to me risks relying on his undocumented legal status to interpret the effects of his work. A critic’s commitment to an identitarian marker of any sort seems to run short on utility fairly quickly when it comes to Hsieh’s work because that representational shortfall is so insistent. As Susette Min writes of Hsieh and Montano, “While their work was not at all intended to be an ethnography, the artists, I want to suggest, were nonetheless interpellated by critics and scholars as native informants and objects of an ethnography of a world of their own making, delineated and bounded by a rope and with each other.”[13]

It seems to me that biography, or how we can constellate a person’s life under knowable terms, misses the point of Hsieh’s project as the artist would have it. This does not mean Hsieh denies relevance of social identifiers. In an interview with Heathfield, Hsieh has said of Rope Piece, “The concept made no limitations of gender, race and familiarity, but in executing this it was necessary for me to make some choices. As an Asian male I chose to cooperate with a white female.”[14] And, indeed, some social distinctions could be spelled out: Montano uses a female pronoun, Hsieh a male one. Montano is a US citizen and Hsieh was an undocumented immigrant in the United States from Taiwan during the length of Rope Piece. Montano grew up in a Roman Catholic tradition, and Hsieh is not self-avowedly religious. Hsieh is photographed reading newspapers in Chinese, Montano in English. Montano cannot speak Mandarin, and Hsieh can speak English. More could be said here to note distinctions that are not without weight. Rather than pursue this line of thought, however, I wish to highlight the limits of the biographical, and, in fact, how normative identity categories constrain the conceptual social work of Rope Piece.

Significantly, just as there is a repeated impulse to make sense of Rope Piece through artist biography, there is also a desire to make sense of the artists’ relationship. Comparing the piece to work between performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen), Heathfield writes, “Hsieh and Montano’s piece is less concerned with the torques of desire in heterosexual union and more focused on a terrain of questions to do with other intersecting elemental dynamics of social relation: hospitality, civility and ethics. Hsieh and Montano were not only different genders; they were working from quite distinct perspectives around aesthetics and the social and spiritual functions of art.”[15] Common frameworks for understanding couplings emphasize connections forged through sex, romance, and blood. However, Hsieh and Montano were not friends, lovers, life partners, or family. Rope Piece troubles the linguistic frameworks we have for social life, reiterating the interpretive trouble of Hsieh’s endurance works.

The performance does not provide language for understanding what happened or why. Rather, viewers must rely on the visual through the series of daily photographs for context. The reliance of the visual in performance documentation also gestures to the limits of photography. Joan Kee describes Cheng Wei Kuong’s photo of the tally marks for Cage Piece: “This close cropping of the photograph indicates that there is something more to the scene than what the picture shows, namely, durational, lived experiences that all still photographs are ill-equipped to relate.”[16] The capacity for photography to point to the “something more” takes another form in Rope Piece. Rope Piece troubles such ocularcentric and textual evidencing, which we will now consider through the second photography series produced: that of the sealed audiotapes.

“Defining but Inaccessible” Witnesses

An observant viewer of these “Daily Life Pictures,” as Frazer Ward refers to them, might note that the rope around the artists’ waist was not the only string encircling their bodies.[17] Throughout the photo series, one of the two artists is shown wearing a cross-body sling attaching a cassette recorder that hangs at waist level. Viewers catch glimpses of the cassette tapes in the daily photograph series. On January 21, 1984, a row of cassettes is shown with a blurry foreground image of Montano’s hand holding a calligraphy pen, perhaps to sign the seal label (the date verifies this assumption). More regularly the image of the recorder appears, a shared weight that transfers from Hsieh’s hip to Montano’s. These cue an aural archive of Rope Piece as well as the second photography archive of this piece in Out of Now, showing the 665 cassette tapes, each labeled as “TALKING” as well as by date, tape sequence, and minutes of recording (see figure C.3). One such label reads:

ART/LIFE/ONE YEAR PERFORMANCE

LINDA MONTANO & TEHCHING HSIEH

JULY 4, 1983 – 1984, 4 JULY

TAPE: (77A) DATE (9/18) MINS: (224)

The labels combine the artists’ names for the piece. (Hsieh’s duration works are each officially titled One Year Performance 19##–19## and Montano has referred to Rope Piece as Art/Life.) Note the symmetry in the date presentation, where the hyphen is a sign representative of all that connects one date from the other, a visual mime of the rope between the artists. As the number 665 suggests, most days in the year of Rope Piece saw more than one cassette’s fill of sound. These cassettes each hold an additional label with the separate date of their subsequent sealing, varyingly done about once a month, with fifteen total sealing dates. The shortest time they went before sealing was seven days (the first sealing) and the longest was from 3/26 to 5/14, for fifty days (the thirteenth sealing).

This second photography series of the sealed cassette tapes is exemplary of the role of withholding in Hsieh and Montano’s performance. These tapes are a departure from the documentation in Hsieh’s other lifeworks since they materialize and withhold the aural. These tapes insist on the fact of conversation that cannot be shared publicly but must be remembered as something that did in fact take place and take time. In lyrical letters addressed to Hsieh and published in Out of Now, Peggy Phelan writes: “You both spoke into a tape recorder, the machine Warhol called the most revolutionary emotional technology of our age, and then sealed the tapes forever. The whispered secret of what they might say reminds us we cannot possess the performance or think we ‘understand’ it. The tapes put it, permanently, beyond us.”[18] The sealed tapes refuse possession and understanding as well as a futurity of possession or understanding. Phelan continues, “‘Rope Piece’ transferred the thick twine you draped between your body and her body for a year to the thin ribbon between the two bobbins of the tape recorder. That ribbon ages in the archive as we abandon reel to reel in favor of the digital pulse. Archaic and archival, the tapes seal the performance but point to the part we missed.”[19] Heathfield writes, “Hsieh and Montano recorded daily testimonies of their yearlong performances on numbered and dated tape cassettes, but their co-signed sealing of each tape withdraws from audition the oral testimony of their exchanges within the work, and it does so for all time. In withholding this testimony of their exchange of differences, whose presence is keenly felt in its absence, the work calls attention to a defining but inaccessible and now inaudible locus.”[20]

Over and again, critics employ these rhetorics of inscrutability: inaccessible, inaudible, withholding, absent. Heathfield describes the “withdrawn oral recordings” as a “self-negating” form and an “extensive spoken disclosure permanently withdrawn from hearing.”[21] It is this “zone of insensibility and unrepresentability” that “thereby preserves something of its singularity.”[22] Heathfield connects Rope Piece to Cage Piece in their “enduring presentation of silence” and “through the sealing up, in perpetuity, of the recorded speech acts that are integral to the work.”[23] Put into question, he writes, are “the capacities of language to approach the meaningful force of the artwork, which will remain unspeakable.”[24]

In an interview with Heathfield, Hsieh has spoken of the audiotapes: “We used tapes to document our conversations across the whole year and sealed them. These tapes are the witness of the ‘Rope Piece,’ they are like the aircraft’s black box. We keep them sealed to keep our privacy, like Pandora’s box they cannot be opened. They make a question; they give you imagination.”[25] The similes here configure the audiotapes as boxes: “like the aircraft’s black box” and “like Pandora’s box.” These are somewhat contradictory analogies but they both configure the audiotapes as a multidimensional inscrutable space, with reflective exteriority and inaccessible interiority. Unlike an aircraft’s black box and Pandora’s box, Hsieh and Montano’s audiotapes are sealed and not to be heard, ever. By withholding the content of the talking tapes, Hsieh and Montano retain the life of their communication in the time of their recording. By recording the tapes and taking photographs of them, moreover, Hsieh and Montano project a future for their circulation, one that is visually witnessed even if the audio is withheld. The cassette tape photographs offer visual documentation for the year Hsieh and Montano lived and breathed together, whose contents are only for the performers to know.

Ephemera of Inscrutability

José Esteban Muñoz writes, “Queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence. Historically, evidence of queerness has been used to penalize and discipline queer desires, connections, and acts.”[26] Inscrutability and queerness both account for minoritarian modes of living that navigate regimes of visual surveillance. Hsieh and Montano’s withholding and prolific documentation constitute a queer act, which Muñoz tasks with those anti-identitarian modes that “contest and rewrite the protocols of critical writing.”[27] Rope Piece expands an anti-assimilatory sense of historiography, world-making, and sociality, one that cannot be understood as a romantic couple or queer friendship.

If majoritarian cultures cannot recognize Asian American life, it is because of the ephemeral forms of Asian inscrutability. Muñoz writes in Cruising Uto­pia that the “key to queer evidence, and by that I mean the ways in which we prove queerness and read queerness, is by suturing it to the concept of ephemera. Think of ephemera as trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor.”[28] Muñoz explains that ephemera is “modality of anti-rigor and anti-evidence that, far from filtering materiality out of cultural studies, reformulates and expands our understandings of materiality.”[29] Ephemera “is all of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself”; “it does not rest on epistemological foundations but is instead interested in following traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things.”[30] Ephemera is a powerful response to critical insistence on evidencing experience. Surely the stakes of such discussion lie in the writing of history and the mattering of life-forms. Joan W. Scott’s well-known 1991 article “The Evidence of Experience” critiques a historical strategy that depends on experience as foundational and instead advocates a literary approach to studying the role of experience. Scott writes, “What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, and always therefore political. The study of experience, therefore, must call into question its originary status in historical explanation.”[31]

Muñoz elsewhere critiques Heather DuBrow’s introduction to a PMLA issue on evidence when he notes a belief “complicit with a dominant institutional logic: an imperative to maintain the stability of evidence despite the acknowledgment that evidence is always already contingent under the pressure of post-structuralist and post-axiological inquiry.”[32] It is politically urgent to insist on ephemera as evidence, Muñoz suggests, because “evidence’s limit becomes clearly visible when we attempt to describe and imagine contemporary identities that do not fit into a single preestablished archive of evidence.”[33]

I make a point to foreground these critical discussions on ephemera and evidence to make a case for Rope Piece as a performance of inscrutable sociality that surface aesthetics make glimpsable. Rope Piece is a durational performance made glimpsable through strategic withholding. Following Scott’s initial read of Samuel Delany’s bathhouse scene, one could interpret the daily life photographs of Rope Piece as a kind of ocularcentric truth telling, where the matter of each day is represented and proven by its image. To consider the photographs as their own movement of light, however, following Karen Swann’s reading of Delany, is to imagine the photographs as traces, as ephemera of a being in time, being in art, that dislodges a reliance on sight, facticity, and authenticity of experience.

Hsieh asserts that the documentation serves as a trace of the performance; the photographs are not the work itself. In an interview with Karlyn De Jongh, the artist says, “For me the documentation is only a trace of the work.”[34] Rather than pursue what the work is, I advocate methods of performance studies to consider what it is that Rope Piece does. As Muñoz advises, “Performance studies, as a modality of inquiry, can surpass the play of interpretation and the limits of epistemology and open new ground by focusing on what acts and objects do in a social matrix rather than what they might possibly mean.”[35] Inscrutability in performance studies is one such modality of inquiry.

Besides, With-holding

What Rope Piece does, I argue, is index the inscrutability of being with and beside another, the particularities of all that talking, all that silence, and all that other stuff. Muñoz helpfully distills Jean-Luc Nancy’s thesis in Being Singular Plural as such: “For Nancy the post-phenomenological category of being singular plural addresses the way in which the singularity that marks a singular existence is always coterminously plural—which is to say that an entity registers as both particular in its difference but at the same time always relational to other singularities. Thus, if one attempts to render the ontological signature of queerness through Nancy’s critical apparatus, it needs to be grasped as both antirelational and relational.”[36] In this way, we can imagine how inscrutable modes are both antirelational and relational.

The daily life photograph series of Rope Piece could be testifying to a sociality between Hsieh and Montano, defending against narratives that conflate singularity with antirelational solitude. Here we may connect impulses across queer theory and Asian American studies that focus on the minority-identified subject as a melancholic agent who can forgo social conscriptions by self-sacrificing or, in the idiom of Lee Edelman, self-shattering. As earlier chapters have discussed, the nonappearance and “productive invisibility” of Asian American visuality could be read as a form of self-sacrifice. At the same time, while Rope Piece may be read as a performance of alien sociality, the ephemera of Rope Piece is consistent with Hsieh’s larger body of work in suggesting that solitude is a fiction and a difficult endurance performance that modern technologies might posture as ontological precondition. The decision to begin and end the performance on July 4, or Independence Day in the United States, is provocative not only for the focus on a rhetoric of independence but also for the history of empire and settler colonialism that Independence Day marks. Of course, Hsieh and Montano depended on one another for the felicity of this performance. But, too, Betty (Montano’s dog), their communities who are photographed in some of the daily photographs, and the viewer might be imagined as other collaborators.

Inscrutability as a racialized discourse creates an existential phenomenon that both produces a sense of isolating exceptionalism as well as indexes an a priori relational reading practice. I return to the sealed cassette tapes, those objects whose use value needs to be something other than the designed ability to play sound. The cassette tapes do not need to be heard, for in their objecthood they already register a collective effort—both between the artists in producing these ephemeral traces of the performance and also in giving the viewer some foothold for desire and curiosity. These performance traces of that year, tied together, voice a collective refusal to be satisfied by a product that claims totality or wholeness. The wholeness of experience—the quality of that year, the “what that year was like” that critics refer to time and again—cannot be shared. While there may be grief in its unshareability, the wholeness both exists for itself and renders attempts to engage all the more poignant.

Following Scott’s and Muñoz’s differing approaches to the “stuff” of experience, then, and the queer historiographic work of ephemera, I suggest that discourses of inscrutability constitute ephemera of relationality. Relationality does not follow singularity. Rather, inscrutability is a critical withholding, and being requires a “with-holding.” Singularity, and romances of an isolated solitude, are traces of intimacy that already exist. As Nancy writes, “If Being is being-with, then it is, in its being-with, the ‘with’ that constitutes Being; the with is not simply an addition.”[37] Or, as Donna Haraway writes, “To be one is always to become with many.”[38]

The being-with or, as I am positing it, the withholding of Hsieh and Montano to me is materialized in the cassette tapes. The sealed tapes render those A sides and B sides visible, locatable, and yet utterly unknowable. There is an aside-ness and a beside-ness to Rope Piece that puts pressure on the prepositional becoming of being. Here the a- may resonate with the a- of asexuality and aromanticism, of being to the side without the common social frameworks that render coupledom legible. The rope conjoining Hsieh and Montano, along with the promise to be in the same room at the same time, assured the two would be aside, beside, one another. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes: “Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.”[39] The stakes of complicating relationality lie in insisting on an anti-assimilative method for accounting for difference without essentializing or fixing it through time and space. As Sedgwick reminds us, “A number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them.”[40] This spatial preposition of “beside” allows multiple and simultaneous relations without erasing distinctions and contingencies. Sedgwick emphasizes that “its interest does not, however, depend on a fantasy of metonymically egalitarian or even pacific relations, as any child knows who’s shared a bed with siblings.”[41] Nancy elaborates on “with” as such: “‘With’ does not indicate the sharing of a common situation any more than the juxtaposition of pure exteriorities does (for example, a bench with a tree with a dog with a passer-by).”[42] The conjoined sameness of temporal and spatial coordinates in Rope Piece does not deny difference or insist on a utopic “we” without social context—to be sure, critics’ consistent framing of Hsieh’s and Montano’s national, racial, and gender identities ensure this.

The being aside, being beside, and being with (and Haraway’s theories of companion species are relevant here, too, considering the role that Betty played in the year) give “with” much of the prepositional glory. “With” covers a host of relational contingencies, both temporal and spatial. Often “with” indexes something that is everywhere and nowhere indexed. Nancy includes a telling parenthetical in his preface: “(By the way, the logic of ‘with’ often requires heavy-handed syntax in order to say ‘being-with-one-another.’ You may suffer from it as you read these pages. But perhaps it is not an accident that language does not easily lend itself to showing the ‘with’ as such, for it is itself the address and not what must be addressed.)”[43]

A quick definition of preposition reminds us that a preposition relates one word to another. This seems nicely vague to me, since it is not that a preposition relates one specific part of speech to another specific part of speech. Prepositions have been described as locators in time and space, something reinforced by Nancy: “‘With’ is the sharing of time-space; it is the at-the-same-time-in-the-same-place as itself, in itself, shattered.”[44] A preposition is a rope, distinct from a conjunction. Beside and aside are spatially evocative. The title of Heathfield and Hsieh’s monograph (Out of Now) suggests “out” as a central preposition—one that rings relevant to LGBTQ+ discourses of “coming out” but also brings an important confluence between the being-in-time and the possibility of being-out-of-time. Hsieh and Montano’s sealed cassette tapes are a kind of dangling preposition, recorded to be heard by another—and yet foreclosed by the same bodies that speak into it: a proposition, the preposition.

Withholding as a minoritarian mode of inscrutability should not be read merely as privacy, insularity, or individualism. Particularly when withholding is attributed to Asian American performance, this mode can be enfolded into white assimilationist narratives of complacency, passivity, and model minoritarian antiblackness. It is all the more important, then, to imagine the social forms of withholding, the social performance that underlines and abets solo performance. Hsieh’s endurance works are structured by rigorous documentation and disclosures as well as by the banal passing of time that cannot find external witness. Rope Piece is pivotal to consider the work of sociality and witness across his lifeworks. Even when we might imagine that the constant companionship of their work together would allow some measure of witness, Rope Piece underscores the impossibility of sharing time/space outside the present as anything other than a document that gestures to but cannot render experience consumable. The social experiment of Rope Piece is conjured for the two of the performers through the act of performance. It resists consolidation as a thing to know outside the performance.

In other words, Rope Piece is not “about” anything. “It’s Not about Anything” is the title of Kandice Chuh’s contribution to “Being With,” the special issue of Social Text in honor of José Esteban Muñoz. Chuh understands Muñoz’s concept of disidentification to mean “an intimate but dissident relationship to the given present.”[45] To ask about the aboutness of something, including Rope Piece, is to miss out on encountering that thing in other ways. Chuh shows how disciplinary distinctions and developments from the Enlightenment forward have reinforced and produced a knowing modern subject, a good productive laboring academic, a racialized model minoritarian worker. As Chuh argues, it’s not about anything.

Inscrutable subjectivity is not about a coherent, self-knowing subject whose political and psychic traction lies in studied and quantifiable articulation. Instead, inscrutability as an approximation of an aesthetic category through which these subjects come to the fore is near, nearer. Hsieh teaches me about this nearly as a timely affinity. Time is always about the now, about the endurance of the now through aesthetic practice. For Hsieh, life and performance are both about wasting time, of passing the time. But wasted time is not a threat when it is done “with”—it is okay that the precision of experience will be lost to history, even with rigorous documentation. Withholding honors that some things cannot be captured.

Withholding also opportunes not already knowing the result of something. By performing, one figures out what not-knowing can bring. Hsieh’s comments are remarkable: “As artists we [Linda and I] made a powerful piece, but as human beings we were failed collaborators.”[46] He asserts that Montano and he were “failed collaborators” in life, drawing a distinction between the terms of collaborative success in and out of the framework of art. There is something to be said about their contractual agreement not to touch during the year. Indeed, the failure of this performance was that, occasionally, Hsieh and Montano touched by accident. The endurance of their year tied together was not like any other sort of union (though juxtapositions have been posed of marriage, sadomasochist relationality, servitude, there alluding to relationalities that are legally, sexually, and economically marked) but was one that aesthetically explored the performativity of being singular-plural. Their privacy comes to feel like something else than property, as in, they are not together because they are legally recognized partners or sexual partners (for they are neither) or legally recognized family, the usual ways in which property is inherited and cosigned and consolidated. No, their reasons for sharing space and sharing life and sharing time are because of art. Social forms belong to artistic practice.

In this book, I have studied the ways in which photography, literature, video art, and performance art can hail an audience-participant precisely through aesthetics of inscrutability; but what Hsieh and Montano do with Rope Piece is something else, something about extending the vulnerability of a chance, though staged, encounter where the agreement for a sustained aesthetic project seems to change the feeling of vulnerability and solitude. Subjective experience takes on different possibility. Particularities are not dissolved. These social differences are a deliberate component of the piece. One’s view emerges in juxtaposition with another’s, whose will may conflict with your own.

As Hsieh has said, he had to “struggle for the value of [his] view.”[47] This is an interesting way to put it since the value of one’s view (and what constitutes a singular view) is the stuff of aesthetic judgment. The question of aesthetic judgment is in the prospect of there being something wholly subjective without dependence on objective verification. The ability for aesthetic subjectivity, then, depends on having taste and asserting one’s view as universally held. Inscrutability upsets this subjective constitution since its terms of aesthetic judgment (this thing is inscrutable!) concede a knowing tasteful subject. As Sianne Ngai writes in Our Aesthetic Categories, an aesthetic “call[s] forth not only specific subjective capacities for feeling and acting but also specific ways of relating to other subjects and the larger social arrangements these ways of relating presuppose. In doing so, they are compelling reminders of the general fact of social difference and conflict underlying the entire system of aesthetic judgment or taste.”[48]

The fact that Hsieh and Montano do not elaborate on what their experience was during that year and in the years following, for that matter, gestures to the aesthetic ambiguity of Rope Piece. There is no one who has the most official perspective on the piece, not even an agreed-upon collaborative statement to stand by. The “we” of the artist statement is a utopic pronoun. The piece itself, then, is about the incommensurability of their two views, even as they dedicate the year to sharing a view, side by side. This proximity without touching speaks to a mindfulness against assimilation or the liberal impulse to homogenize experience. The rope does not make them one, does not link their bodily systems even as it informs their movements. At the same time, differing views emerge and endure in relation.

Performances of Inscrutability

Hsieh’s work can be collectively framed by the concept of inscrutability and his alien tactics. I turn to Rope Piece because it makes glimpsable the social ties we hold, temporary though they may be. At the same time as the fact of the rope and the photographs index the unthinkable intimacy of Hsieh and Montano in that one year, the cassette tapes archive the unknowability of that experience. The significance of recognizing its being is incalculable, just as the possibility of its being contained or represented is not one. Being is never exactly being alone; it is always a withholding.

Hsieh is clear about some things. For one, Hsieh insists that performance is the proper medium of his work. He has said: “My work is performance. I created one kind of art form, lived within [it] and passed time: the process of passing time itself is the artwork. There are similarities between the ways I document the performances and the ways conceptual artists document the concepts, but for me documentation is only a trace of the work.”[49] Strikingly, he says, “Time is beyond my understanding; I just pass time.”[50]

Time, then, is the inscrutable other for Hsieh’s work. Some measurements of time contain it, thus the duration of one year. In Mousse Magazine, Hsieh is quoted: “One year is the basic 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.”[51] As Heathfield notes, “Duration is constituted here by the giving over of one’s time to the time of another. Habituation remains incomplete. Each cannot choose the time of their agency since it is dependent on the other’s time. They live therefore in a time frequented by the phenomena of waiting and deferral. A year of two lives is spent in a time attendant to an Other time.”[52] Being-with, then, is always about attending to time and about enduring the time of another. Enduring another’s time is not about translating it or repurposing it or consuming it. It is about holding it as something one is in relation to. This shared endurance, where shared does not suggest an equivalence of experience, cannot be encapsulated. A plural time-being is in the domain not of history, then, but of performance. The ontology of performance is not necessarily in its disappearance, as Peggy Phelan famously asserts, but in its withholding, in its singular and plural being inescapably in time. This withholding is also the utopian hail in inscrutability, where the sounds forever silenced in Rope Piece’s audiotapes are gesturing not to a threat but to a hopeful curiosity that the being-with signaled; there is an intimacy beyond present understanding. Understanding does not change the fact of its existence.

In Immanuel Kant’s sublime, the overpowering feeling of being at the edge of one’s senses is triggered by the figure of a recluse on some island unknown to the rest of the world. This island may be unknown to the rest of the world, as written from the perspective of an outsider, but the person who lives on it knows that world. And the island is not unknown to the rest of the world because an outsider is writing about it, imagining it, fantasizing about it. This primary imaginary reckoning is everything to imagining inscrutability otherwise. Kant seems just as fascinated by this singularity and solitude; it is a towering feeling that could undo you. But it is also that undoing that is pivotal, transformational; it is a brink that Asian racialization confronts you with because that coming to subjectivity is a confrontation with discourses of homogeneity and assimilation. Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano help me realize that those fictions of homogeneity really are covering an anxiety about the inscrutable social form that Asianness occasions and calls into being. Indeed, as Rope Piece shows, there is an open-endedness to the social splendor possible—and no one can ever know all about it.

The charge of withholding information, whether trivial or significant, is often pinned to performances of inscrutability studied throughout this book. A national fear and suspicion toward the silent, the nonvisible, the unreliable, the flat and flexible, and the distant pervades US and Western discourses of modern subjectivity and nation building. But the surface relations of Asian American sociality, as these chapters show, reveal the significant role that Asiatic racialization has played in the long and tenuous American century, where the variously deployed erasure of Asian study has also occasioned more fugitive forms of being, becoming, and writing. By focusing on some details over others, Tehching Hsieh’s meticulously documented performance works critique a fetish of material mastery and, instead, expose the endemic inscrutability of life’s lived complexity as something that cannot be contained or communicated through language.

I close this book with a meditation on withholding as a different orientation to Asiatic inscrutability to show the ethical and political dimensions of surface relations. Asian racialization in the United States has historically held, and continues in our contemporary world to hold, a space for mutable figures of foreign threat, in the ways that long-standing resource wars, military occupations, exploitative labor-based immigration policies, and representative erasure have become normalized as though the closure or compartmentalization of the Asian other demands these violent practices and ideologies. In turn, Asian subjects are constructed with the function of holding a lot that has little public discourse.

Asian Americans and Asian diasporic subjects, this book suggests, are configured, made socially legible, like a sexual closet, ripe with sexual deviance and necessarily relegated to the periphery while tasked with the storage of what often does not see the light of public consciousness, of what cannot be parted with but equally cannot be shown. Until scholars in gender, race, ethnicity, and American studies grapple with the cultures and histories of Asianness in the United States, Asian Americans will continue to live with this valence of shame and psychic burden of not feeling seen. My contention in this book is not to do away with the shame but to offer it curiosity, space, and time. Instead, I hope to show—particularly for the sake of readers who come into being as Asian Americans and have no choice but to contend with its racializing effects—how surface aesthetics do not only foreclose but also expand possibilities of relationality. As I have shown in these chapters of permissive socialities of Asian inscrutability, actively engaging surface aesthetics need not be merely isolating and depressing. Performing inscrutably may in fact open out other modes and occasion other relationalities that may yet escape language but that exist and create lifeworlds and histories in excess of their identification. 

Note on figures: To view the figures, please click on "Buy the book" on this page to access the original book chapter as published by Duke University Press.

Notes

[1] Garoian, “Performing a Pedagogy of Endurance,” 164.

[2] Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 47.

[3] See Kee, “Orders of Law in the One Year Performances of Tehching Hsieh.”

[4] Laster, “Tehching Hsieh,” 119.

[5] Laster, “Tehching Hsieh,” 119–20.

[6] Tovey, “Superstuck,” 151.

[7] Tovey, “Superstuck,” 151.

[8] Ward, “Alien Duration,” 14.

[9] Ward, “Alien Duration,” 14.

[10] Ward, “Alien Duration,” 14, 16, emphasis mine. See also Grey and Grey, “The Year of the Rope,” 30.

[11] Ward, “Alien Duration,” 14.

[12] Ward, “Alien Duration,” 16.

[13] Min, Unnameable, 171.

[14] Heathfield and Hsieh, Out of Now, 335.

[15] Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 51.

[16] Kee, “Orders of Law in the One Year Performances of Tehching Hsieh,” 80.

[17] Ward, “Alien Duration,” 14.

[18] Heathfield and Hsieh, Out of Now, 347.

[19] Heathfield and Hsieh, Out of Now, 347.

[20] Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 52.

[21] Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 52, 53.

[22] Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 53.

[23] Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 57.

[24] Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 57.

[25] Heathfield and Hsieh, Out of Now, 336.

[26] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 65.

[27] Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 7.

[28] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 65.

[29] Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 10.

[30] Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 10.

[31] Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 797.

[32] Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 8.

[33] Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 9.

[34] De Jongh, “Art/Life,” 7.

[35] Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 12.

[36] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 11.

[37] Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 30.

[38] Haraway, When Species Meet, 4.

[39] Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 8.

[40] Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 8.

[41] Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 8.

[42] Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 35.

[43] Nancy, Being Singular Plural, xvi.

[44] Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 35.

[45] Chuh, “It’s Not about Anything,” 126.

[46] Heathfield and Hsieh, Out of Now, 335.

[47] De Jongh, “Art/Life,” 7.

[48] S. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 11.

[49] De Jongh, “Art/Life,” 7.

[50] De Jongh, “Art/Life,” 5.

[51] Ardia, “NYC-Based Artist Tehching Hsieh.”

[52] Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 49.