A year ago (whilst I was working at Hoop) I was commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency to design a monograph written by my friend Adrian Heathfield about the Taiwanese/US performance artist Tehching Hsieh. At the time I knew little about Tehching or his work but from the off the project seemed unusual and intriguing. During the 70s, living as an illegal immigrant in New York, Tehching undertook an extraordinary and gruelling series of time-based performances that redefined the concepts of endurance in performance and the idea of ‘life as art’. Over a period of five consecutive years Tehching subjected himself to unbelievable forms of deprivation and hardship, and meticulously catalogued and recorded the entire process.

Year 1: (78-79) Locked in a cage, solitary confinement. No conversation, nothing to read, nothing to watch. Every day recorded with a photo and a mark etched on the wall. Year 2: (80-81) Installed in his studio, Tehching punches into a time clock that takes his photo every hour for a year, day and night. Year 3: (81-82) Tehching spends a year living and sleeping rough in Manhattan. No shelter. He endures a sub-zero winter outdoors and records his experience in a sequence of powerful black and white photos taken with a tripod and timer. Year 4: (83-84) Rope Piece. Tehching spends a year tethered to artist Linda Montana by a 7 foot rope. They are not allowed to touch. Their daily conversations are recorded on cassette and then sealed. Relations between the two were strained to say the least by the end of the year. Year 5: (85-86) In an act of creative self-negation, Tehching denies art, and refuses to make it or view it in any way for a year. For the next thirteen years, Tehching drops out of view, stops making art and starts cataloguing his lifeworks.

Tehching has been overlooked and marginalised by the art establishment, not only for racial reasons, but also because his work was too difficult to either quantify or consume. However, his status amongst the performance art world borders on the legendary, and the publication this week of his lifeworks in the book OUT OF NOW, coinciding with an installation of his work at MoMA suggest his impact on the art world is ripe for reappraisal. This self-effacing and charming visionary seems to be finally getting the attention his work deserves.

OUT OF NOW is available to buy from Unbound and MoMA.

Read Tim Etchells beautiful toast to Tehching from last Monday’s launch event here.

Read the recent article on Tehching in the New York Times.

Author Adrian Heathfield, artist Tehching Hsieh and designer David Caines

I was at the Guildhall last night helping out with the Man Booker Prize dinner. The Indian writer Aravind Adiga won the prize for his debut novel ‘The White Tiger’. He was handed the trophy which I designed, but left it sitting lonely on the lectern when he left the stage. The trophy will now be engraved before it follows Aravind back to Mumbai.

Aravind with the lovely trophy

I have been working for some time now rebranding the Man Booker Prizes for Hoop Associates. This is to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the literary prize, and to bring the relatively new International Prize (two winners so far, Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe and the Albanian Ismail Kadaré) into the family. As part of the project I got to design new trophies for all the prizes (see below) one of which is now on display at London’s V&A (Modern Room) as part of a small exhibition about the prize.

The “bonkers” decision to ban a poster featuring an 800-year old painting of a naked woman (deemed “obscene”) designed by yours truly has now been reversed by TfL. You can read about it here. In case you wondered what all the fuss was about here’s a detail of the painting.

Avert your eyes!

Amazingly TfL have done a bit of a U-turn and are now going to allow the Cranach poster design to be displayed in all it’s gauzy glory on the Underground.

“It’s the poster that overturned the obscenity laws!” Royal Academy of Arts

The poster I have designed for the forthcoming ‘Cranach’ exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (below) has been banned by TfL from the London Underground. Apparently the (undoubtedly provocative) 800-year old nude is guilty of “obscenity”. There has been a fair amount of press coverage including this article in the Evening Standard.

Cranach poster

The Some Dusty Things section of my site now features over 120 hand-picked images of objects from my collection of ephemera. Each image has a direct meaning or reference to my life and experiences – some are beautiful, some are sad, every single one means something. Please feel free to have a look around.

Phantomas