Pondering the new year: Endurance art, enduring life, yogic sadhana, practice, over-work and letting go

I've always cringed a bit at some of the language Linda Montano uses to frame her endurance projects... (for example). The work itself has been so strong and meaningful for me that I've been able to overlook the bothersome language and construct my own critical apparatus around it.

I'm not so much bothered by the meaning or the ideas themselves, but how they've been articulated through mystical language. As with Ana Mendieta's performances being cast in the understandably discredited discourse of earth mothers and goddesses, there's so much more to the work than those narrow and clichéd explanations. For instance in this interview, which includes Tehching Hsieh, Montano talks more about some of the social aspects of her work – specifically the endurance project with Hsieh and a rope.

For some time now, I've wanted to write a bit about Endurance Art and some artists that I most admire – Linda Montano, Tehching Hsieh and On Kawara in particular. I just haven't been sure how to say all that's jumbling around in my head and relate it back to my own practice in a meaningful way. I considered just putting up some links to their work and then talking more about my own endurance processes. Links and process notes don't seem an adequate documentation of where my head has been recently, let alone my own progression through the ideas of endurance – from being a college student looking for art and meaning in the mundane and functional to a theory driven graduate student situating those same ideas within a critical discourse to a studio artist plowing through to deadlines, resting and repeating. And then... there's that pesky psychologizing and mysticizing language that sometimes attempts to explain acts of enduring art or enduring life.

Enduring life. I put those two words together because I'm intrigued by the ambiguous meaning of the phrase, which could mean a life that endures and is ongoing and self-perpetuating... or could also mean a life that must be suffered through. I see the phrase as a mirror to the acts of endurance art in that the acts are simultaneously poetic (even abstract) and drudgingly mundane as they are carried out over time. They endure only in their presence (as they're ongoing) and then finally only in their documentation. The very nature of endurance art is fleeting... non-enduring.

The endurance project may be a metaphoric, allegorical or abstracted representation of some interaction in the world or a demonstration that exposes (through the doing) the limits and parameters of that same material and social world. The acts also have potential to become a psychological "acting out" as in an hysterical manifestation of a personal or social ill, which before Freud would have been called religious or spiritual (in its more socially accepted forms and in the language of Montano) and called insane or "demon-possessed" in its less adaptable and more reviled forms.

But endurance art ultimately is significant because it is not an "acting out" but instead a conscious, willful and focused act. And here the language of spirituality comes back around because I'm reminded of the yogic practice of sadhana where willful and present intention and attention is key. Acts and practices mean something because they do take effort and because the effort hones a level of skill, strength and accomplishment with regular practice. As well, they're meaningful because they have a frame / focused attention / limits around them.

But acts of will can also be acts of letting go... letting go of a compulsion, habit or even a practice. For instance, for the workaholic, it could be a stop to whatever s/he's doing to make room for something other than the usual. The usual might even be that which has previously constituted a practice or an art (as mentioned above) or a project that has come to the end of its cycle.

Within any art practice are cycles of work, completion and letting go, but with endurance art these cycles (set in time) are as much a part of the content as any other element. They begin with the compulsive or repetitive action, the deliberate intention of setting a length of time and the act of enduring it. In this process... time, the spending of time and the passing of time are what become foregrounded. On Kawara demonstrates this most eloquently with his Date Paintings. And so, with his work, I end the pondering.