At 6:00 p.m. on July 4, 1983, performance artists Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh tied themselves together and promised that the eight feet of rope that joined them would stay in place for an entire year. They laid down some clear rules about what would be expected of them for the next 12 months. "We will stay together for one year and never be alone. We will be in the same room at the same time when we are inside. We will be tied together at the waist with an 8-foot rope. We will never touch each other during the year.” The pair slept in separate beds a few feet apart, and when one of them needed to use the bathroom or take a shower, the other would wait outside. During the 12-month period, they managed to stick to their rules, only recording 60 accidental touches. Montano and Hsieh would take a photo of themselves every day and record their conversations. What they discovered is that it’s hard to spend an entire year with another person and not get tired of them. At one point, the pair stopped talking almost completely. Near the end of the year, they began to get along better, and when they completed the experiment, they said it was “almost as if we surfaced from a submarine.” Together, they emerged from that isolated confinement, proud to have braved alternative, deeper levels of connectivity. Montano continues to teach and create art, but Hsieh stopped working in 1999, declaring his creative goals fulfilled.
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| Montano and Hsieh today |
