Endurance art

Endurance art is a kind of performance art involving some form of hardship, such as pain, solitude or exhaustion.^[2] Performances that focus on the passage of long periods of time are also known as durational art or durational performances.^[3]

Human endurance contests were a fad of Depression-era America from the 1920s-1930s.^[4] Writer Michael Fallon traces the genre of endurance art to the work of Chris Burden in California in the 1970s.^[5] Burden spent five days in a locker in Five Day Locker Piece (1971), had himself shot in Shoot (1971), and lived for 22 days in a bed in an art gallery in Bed Piece (1972).^[6]

Other examples of endurance art include Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece), in which for 12 months he punched a time clock every hour, and Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece), in which Hsieh and Linda Montano spent a year tied to each other by an eight-foot rope.^[7]

In The House with the Ocean View (2003), Marina Abramović lived silently for 12 days without food or entertainment on a stage entirely open to the audience.^[8] Such is the physical stamina required for some of her work that in 2012 she set up what she called a "boot camp" in Hudson, New York, for participants in her multiple-person performances.^[9]

The Nine Confinements or The Deprivation of Liberty is a conceptual, endurance art and performative work of critical and biographical content by artist Abel Azcona. The artwork was a sequence of performances carried out between 2013 and 2016. All of the series had a theme of deprivation of liberty. The first in the series was performed by Azcona in 2013 and named Confinement in Search of Identity.^[10] The artist was to remain for sixty days in a space built inside an art gallery of Madrid, with scarce food resources and in total darkness. The performance was stopped after forty-two days for health reasons and the artist hospitalised.^[11] Azcona created these works as a reflection and also a discursive interruption of his own mental illness, mental illness being one of the recurring themes in Azcona's work.^[12]