My last name, Calway-Fagen, was an initial and essential indication, to me, that I wasn’t only one person. Further evidence emerges in the presence of the hyphen, tying the two together, a bridge between, an umbilical. I find it strange now, my parents having divorced very recently, that those two names remain mine, determined to return them both back to the body of the one.
This more than likely would not be a thought I would share publicly except that a great many of us are now thinking quite feverishly about bodies, your own and those of others. Just as, if not more critical is the analysis of one’s proximity to the bodies, others.
Similarly structured and equally as unpredictable is an undertaking of Taiwanese-American artist, Tehching Hsieh. The enterprise: Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984 (Rope Piece). The misleadingly straightforward title masks its own tautological complexity. Hsieh wants the simple to be the complex, and it is, it’s both.
The most direct path between two points is a straight line, and when those points are people, Tehching Hsieh and his invited collaborator Linda Montano, that line becomes a rope. For an entire year these two artists were bound together, forming one inconvenient organism.
Parameters set forth were few, but decisive. They had agreed that the 8-foot length of rope would remain fastened around each’s waist, that although they would never be further away from one another than the rope would allow they were never to touch, and that for the duration of the performance, one calendar year, they were forbidden to leave the single room they occupied for any reason.
(pause for effect)
Montano and Hsieh had only cursory interactions prior to their tying the knot, so to speak. They were strangers by normative cultural standards, but they quickly and voluntarily bucked their individuated autonomy opting instead for fusion and dependency. They had engineered each facet to render their new shared presence immutable. This seemingly inert state was in fact the exact conditions to enable a broad interrogation of fixedness, of stability; as those qualities define me, you, everyone, and everything.
Even as it all shapeshifts.
We all become kin.
- Mike Calway-Fagen
