This is the first of two reflections Momus published on the occasion of Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, on view at Dia Beacon through 2027. Find the second, by Lisa Hsiao Chen, here.
“I wanted to uncover anger—I didn’t know that at the time. I wanted to watch the ego—I didn’t know that until I began this piece,” Linda Montano said, her voice lilting and droning like an incantation. “I wanted to grow in courage. I didn’t realize that until I was tied to this master. I wanted to applaud his impeccability.” She paused and bowed to Tehching Hsieh, and the packed auditorium at Dia Beacon erupted in shrill, whistling applause. It was the first time in forty-three years that Montano and Hsieh had spoken publicly about Rope Piece (1983–84). A quiet acceptance moved between the two artists as they revisited the difficult year they had spent bound by an eight-foot rope, fastidiously trying not to touch. That acceptance had been shaped over decades, during which their relationship—like the work itself—remained charged, difficult, and marked by long silences.
In 1983, Montano was living in a Zen monastery in Mount Tremper, New York, with her partner, the sound artist Pauline Oliveros. Believing she had retired from public art-making, she was interviewing artists for her book Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties as a final gesture toward her previous life as a performance artist. She asked Martha Wilson to introduce her to Tehching Hsieh. By then, Hsieh was renowned for three yearlong performances: spending a year confined to a cage, a year punching a time clock every hour, and a year living entirely outdoors without ever going inside.
When they met, Hsieh learned from Montano that she had once been handcuffed to Tom Marioni for three days for an art piece, had embraced the strict routines of a Zen monastery, and had lived a regimented life as a novice nun in a Catholic convent. She had also written the Living Art Manifesto in 1975 and later transformed her home into a museum, framing everything that occurred within its walls as art. Hsieh immediately recognized in Montano a kindred ethic—an uncompromising discipline rooted in their shared devotion to life and time as essential artistic mediums. On this basis, he asked her to join him as his counterpart in his next yearlong performance, Rope Piece, which they began just months after meeting.
Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece made in collaboration with Linda Montano), 1983–84. Performance view, day 23, New York. Photo: Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, Life Images; courtesy Dia Art Foundation.
For Rope Piece, Hsieh and Montano were tied together with an eight-foot rope for one full year, from July 4, 1983, to July 4 the following year—an ironic nod to American independence. They agreed to remain connected at all times without ever touching. Any accidental touching had to be written down in a log, and all verbal exchanges were taped, creating a meticulous record of their constraints and transgressions. They practiced Rope Piece for one week, figuring out which ropes were most comfortable to wear and how they might navigate space together. Once Rope Piece began, Montano and Hsieh had to negotiate every aspect of daily life: coordinating time in the bathroom, deciding when to wake up, figuring out meals, and constantly battling for space, pace, and boundaries in their living quarters. Movement in public demanded constant, highly attuned choreography, as everyday actions like riding bicycles or taking elevators became potentially dangerous.
The only interview Hsieh and Montano gave together about Rope Piece appeared in High Performance magazine in 1984, while they were still tied together. In it, Hsieh explains:
I got the idea for this piece because there are problems about communication with people. I feel this is always my struggle. . . . Because everybody is individual we each have our own idea of something we want to do. But we’re together. So we become each other’s cage.
Montano reflected on the emotional endurance of the work, saying:
I feel as if I’ve dredged up ancient rages and frustrations this year and although I’m glad that I went through with them, I now feel that holding any emotional state for too long is actually an obsolete strategy. On the other hand, because I believe that everything we do is art—fighting, eating, sleeping—then even the negativities are raised to the dignity of art.
They told High Performance that mothers of young children, caregivers, S&M practitioners, and trainers preparing astronauts for orbit had inquired about what the artists were learning about negotiation.
Over the year, their communication gradually broke down: First they talked, then they gestured, and eventually they relied on rope-tugging and grunts—a transformation Montano describes in High Performance as having “regressed beautifully.” Reflecting on their dynamic, Hsieh noted, “There are cultural issues, men/women issues, ego issues. Sometimes we imagine that this piece is like Russia with America. How complicated the play of power.”
Tehching Hsieh, Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece made in collaboration with Linda Montano), installation view from Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, Dia Beacon, New York, 2025–27. Photo: Mollie McKinley, courtesy Dia Art Foundation. © Tehching Hsieh.
This complex interplay of power did not end when the performance did. In an interview with The Brooklyn Rail in 2003, Hsieh, asked whether he still spoke with Montano, answered, “Yes, but not so much, because we have had difficulty dividing [Rope Piece] up. . . . Most people think that was her piece. The picture she always uses I don’t like either. She is in the foreground and I am in the background.” In a 2022 interview, Montano said, “During the actual piece I felt honored to be with him, I felt honored to learn from him, I felt honored to collaborate with him. . . . I don’t know if he felt honored to be with me, let’s put it that way.”
In my twenties, drawn to Montano’s synthesis of mysticism, endurance, and art, I sought her out, and she became a formative mentor. Her rigor, generosity, and spiritual imagination fundamentally reoriented how I understand artistic practice. Her Summer Saint Camp—an immersive, weeklong retreat devoted to art, ritual, and self-exploration—inspired me to found Golden Dome in 2014, an art school for mystics. Over the years, I collaborated with hundreds of artists through the school, and inevitably some of these collaborations failed. Each failure was intensely painful.
Tensions surfaced early on when press coverage emphasized my role in founding the school over that of my close college friend—or acknowledged her in ways she felt were insufficient. I explained that I had no control over how journalists represented Golden Dome, yet the same grievances kept resurfacing. Eventually, frustrated by this power dynamic, I stopped answering her calls, and a decade passed without our speaking. A mutual friend advised me never to let her out of my heart, even if we weren’t talking. How could I? I loved her, and besides, in my experience, silence can bind two people together as securely as any eight-foot rope.
Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano, Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece made in collaboration with Linda Montano), 1983–84. Performance view, day 15, New York. Photo: Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, Life Images; courtesy Dia Art Foundation.
Thoughts of this former collaborator—and others I had lost—weighed heavily when I visited Dia Beacon in October to see Hsieh’s retrospective, Lifeworks (1978–1999), and hear him speak. I wandered through the exhibition, lingering in the room devoted to Rope Piece. The installation is magnificent. At the center of the gallery, the rope rests in a long glass vitrine—thick and frayed, its fibers stiffened into a fossil-like arc. It looks like an umbilical cord from some unknowable giant mammal, severed at the point where two circles fastened their bodies together for a year. Around the room, photographs of Montano and Hsieh—at the movies, cutting their friend’s hair, sleeping in twin beds, going to work—are arranged alongside audio tapes of their conversations and handwritten logs recording each accidental touch. These artifacts are laid out in chronological grids that encircle the gallery like a musical score. Early on, the touch logs are full, and the talking tapes are abundant. As the months progress, the logs marking contact and talking grow sparse, until silence accumulates as a tangible substance within the work.
I spotted Montano as she was heading into the talk, and she ran toward me. “Hug me like everything’s going to be okay,” she said, collapsing into my arms for a moment. During the event, Hsieh was interviewed by curators Adrian Heathfield and Humberto Moro about his yearlong projects. When the discussion turned to Rope Piece, Montano joined Hsieh onstage, recounting their first meeting (awe), what he had meant to her (mastery), and what she had endured and discovered during the year they were bound together (dedication). Hsieh quipped that when they went to their respective jobs while tethered—his in construction, hers as a guest lecturer—only one of them ever got paid. Montano began chanting a song dedicated to endurance, each line punctuated by a guttural sound: “You’re a vow embracer, ahhhhhhhhuhhhhh. You’re a fear instigator. Ohhhhhhh ohhhhhh. You’re an anger inducer and curer—ohhhhhhhhhh.” She broke into laughter as she stretched out a final sound that was somewhere between the gagging retch of vomiting and a death rattle.
So much attention is given to feuds and fractures between artists. We are taught to compete, to guard our territories, to diminish one another for the sake of distinction. But onstage, Montano and Hsieh moved differently through their rupture. They carried decades of distance with generosity, softness, and a sense of humor. Their reunification was not a spectacle of tears or grand gestures but a solid demonstration of the courage it takes to keep showing up when navigating fraught relationship dynamics.
For all of us in the room—carrying our own stories of fractures, feuds, and friendships grown silent—they modeled something rare: how to hold estrangement with grace. They showed that ruptures can be spaces for continued inner work, where issues around power can be examined with honesty and tenacity. The talk ended with Montano handing Martha Wilson, who was in the audience, a “Performance Art Saint” certificate for introducing her to Hsieh. After several embraces between the artists, Montano sat quietly as Hsieh continued to speak about how his work evolved after Rope Piece.
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