On October 4, Dia Beacon held a retrospective and panel for performance artist Tehching Hsieh in the Andy Warhol Hall. The packed audience ranged from the few remaining members of the Beat Generation to millennials, spanning nearly half a century. Hsieh’s radical works from 1980s New York remain just as striking today.

A highlight was the appearance of Linda Mary Montano. At eighty-three, she no longer carries the tall figure of her youth, but her chanting was powerful, graceful, and steady. Back in 1984, when she and Hsieh staged their year-long rope piece in New York, I was still a freshman art student on the West Coast. Teachers debated their work with both admiration and doubt. I never imagined I would encounter them again, four decades later.

Hsieh’s work is relatively well known, but Montano is remembered mostly for that one collaboration: the two bound together with an eight-foot rope for an entire year, twenty-four hours a day. To me, both share a monk-like quality, as if their art were also a form of spiritual practice.

In a recent interview, Montano said:

“What is my intention and real work? Learning compassion, because as I age, I want some real kindness to be spread in me and around me and not so much projecting out, producing, penis-ing. I’m tired of hanging out solo in my left brain and want to come home to ecstasy. My art will teach me, I know.”

From her words I understood how such a slight frame could carry such a strong and steady voice. A true salute to this remarkable artist.  Atrium.co 7/10/2025

Performance Art

Performance art transforms visual art into conceptual action—sometimes appearing almost irrational, even mad, to the ordinary eye. It became the ultimate destination of “minimal” art. Unlike traditionalists who use art to tell stories or depict recognizable scenes of reality, or those who see art as a way of presenting humanity’s cultural beauty, performance art may serve as a process of personal healing. Yet when such works still resonate powerfully after half a century, they may also be seen as a shared condition of our contemporary cultural reality.