After walking through the southern end of Central Park - and after stopping into Henri Bendel for the free (1/2) brownie from Chocolate Bar - I headed back to MoMA.
I checked out the new
Jasper Johns exhibit, and made another pass through
REBUS. However, I found myself quite unexpectedly fascinated by
Performance 1: Tehching Hsieh.
When I first read the description of the exhibit, I did not find the prospect of viewing the documentation about a performance art piece all the interesting. Boy, was I wrong! In essence...
"This exhibition focuses on the artist's earliest performance, commonly called his Cage Piece (1978–79), with 365 photographs meticulously documenting the daily passing of time."Basically, the artist locked himself in a cage for a year. He had an assistant take a picture of him everyday - and those pics line the walls of the gallery. Additionally, MoMA has recreated the cage, as well as displayed some of the posters for the artist's various "pieces". It's not a "pretty" exhibit, nor is it "ugly". It's just one of those things that gets one to thinking: How could someone choose to live in a cage for a year? How could someone even think up such a thing? Could I possibly ever do that?... And thinking...
*Since the artist shaves his head at the start of each year-long "performance", you can track his progress according the length of his hair - even though he mostly maintains the same neutral expression from day to day, picture to picture.
