On September 30, 1978, the performance artist Teh­ching Hsieh locked himself inside a jail cell he’d built in his studio in Lower Manhattan. A friend brought him food and emptied a pail that he used as a toilet. For an entire year, Hsieh did not talk, read, write, listen to music, or watch TV. Each day, he marked the passage of time by having his photograph taken. He carved a single mark into the wall with his nail clippers. On September 29, 1979, he was released—or rather he released himself. Hsieh’s performance art, all of which involves these acts of extreme duration, has made him a cult figure, even though he often shies away from the publicity. A major retrospective of his work is now up at Dia: Beacon, and critic Jillian Steinhauer paid a visit to it for the latest Books & the Arts. Meticulously detailing several of Hsieh’s year-long performances, the exhibition, in its sheer wealth of material, demonstrates how the “process” of “confinement, deprivation,” and “endurance” became a way for Hsieh to highlight the “ridiculousness” of the freedoms we think we have and to make the case for “a different, self-sustained kind of freedom.” Read “Tehching Hsieh—an “Artist Without Art””