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In the Clinton Hill neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, sits a nondescript eatery called The Market. The restaurant, like many small New York City restaurants, is unremarkable. Little evidence exists to capitalize on the reputation of its owner, famed performance artist Tehching Hsieh. This article examines Tehching Hsieh's The Market as a continuation of the artist's renowned oeuvre to consider how the restaurant might represent Hsieh's lifelong negotiation of the boundary between art and life. By examining the restaurant as a continuation of Hsieh's work, I consider how understandings of Hsieh's life and work are constructed upon binaries of immigrant idealism and art world genius, which exemplify the tension between artistry and livelihoods. In arguing that The Market represents a full collapse of art and life, I consider how the restaurant both refuses such binaries and continues the interrogations of labour, withdrawal, and repetition that are present in Hsieh's lifeworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a notion of time-specificity of performance. It begins by taking a temporal approach to performance through the philosophy of Henri Bergson. It looks at three artists/collectives: Tehching Hsieh; Every House Has a Door and Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša. Their practices play with notions of the present, past and future, and by doing so set new terms for a temporal aesthetics of experience. Time-specificity opens up reconsiderations of pivotal notions within performance such as repetition, documentation and freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes the performance artworks of Tehching Hsieh as instructive allegories for a global ethics as theorized by a variety of left academics (including Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) who ground universalism in a singularity that escapes the predicates of identity. Hsieh's projects, I argue, also place universal estrangement in the service of liberation for particular marginalized groups whose lives confound our fantasies of recognition. At the same time, they illustrate some of the challenges facing attempts to treat particular struggles as embodiments of universal conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci offers a brief meditation on the gestural performances of assembly-line workers who, rather than become subordinate to the disciplinary flow of the machine, cultivate perfectly timed gestures that allow workers to hide in plain sight: or, in other words, to inhabit the scene of management otherwise. Rather than extend Gramsci's investment in virtuosic, masterful performances of gesture, this article considers the potentiality of gesture through Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's performances of bad timing. As different as these performances are in terms of genre and historical situation, each uses gesture as a technique to performatively divide the labor process, producing fleeting temporalities of waste within rhythms marshaled toward production and accumulation. While it tracks the effects of these itinerant gestures, this article reconsiders the oppositions between productive and reproductive work, rationality and emotionality, and work and home that sustain Gramsci's theory, as well as how the collapse of such oppositions introduces alternative historical and artistic trajectories into theories of precariousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]