6 minutes (wax paper things)

6 minutes

The video entitled Noah takes a photo of himself everyday for 6 years has already become one of the most viewed on YouTube this month. With a relatively self-explanatory title, we are greeted with 6 minutes of a melancholic piano tune that seems to match Noah's weary eyes in the sequence of pictures taken over a span of 6 years.

Many viewers have pointed out that this was actually based on another video, also available on YouTube, of an asian girl who took a picture of herself everyday for 3 years. But neither are a novel thing, and the first reference that struck me when I saw both these videos was Tehching Hsieh, a Taiwanese NYC-based artist known for his One Year Performances during the 80s.

In one performance nicknamed "The Time Piece", Tehching punched a time clock every hour of the day, 24 hours a day, between April 11th 1980 and April 11th 1981. Wearing the same factory uniform, he would take a picture of himself at every hour, what later resulted in a 6 minute-long stop-motion film. Tehching had also shaved his head to better represent the passing of time through the growing hair, which ended up at shoulder's length.

This video is not available online, but there's a short sample at one-year-performance.com. The result is mesmerizing, and the image of the artist through the passing hours, becoming ever more tired of the repetitive labour, strikes the viewer with the imprisonments of time and life.

Interestingly enough, in one occasion Tehching identifies in Sisyphus his main model, who in Greek Mythology had been punished to eternally roll a giant rock up to the peak of a mountain, where it would inevitably roll back down again. Camus, in an essay entitled The Myth of Sisyphus, will eventually regard him as the great existential hero - a hero of the absurd, and a fitting metaphor to modern life futile jobs at the factory or the office.

Asked wether his work was about loneliness and the difficulty of survival, Tehching told The Brooklyn Rail back in 2003 that he was trying to touch the truth in someway:

We pretend to smile. We are all taught to say everything is OK, we are in control, even if we are not. There is a need to be positive in public. But art is not doing that. We try to tell the truth in someway, to touch a part of it, to not be so typical. This kind of work is not about suffering, it is about existence.

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Posted by Gabriel Pillar on September 16, 2006 9:31 PM | Permalink

wax paper things

art, tech and fragments of urban life

6 minutes

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