Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present, 2010, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Abramović sat silently opposite museum visitors for eight hours a day for three months, a total of 750 hours.^[1]

The artist Abel Azcona during The Death of The Artist at Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid

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]

Examples

Tehching Hsieh spent a year in this cage in his studio in One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece).

• Marina Abramović^[13] – Rhythm 0, 1974; Rhythm 5, 1974; Luminosity, 1997, 2010; Nude with Skeleton, 2002, 2005, 2010;^[9] The House With the Ocean View (2003); Balkan Erotic Epic, 2005.^[14]
• Marina Abramović with Ulay^[15] – Point of Contact, 1980;^[9] Night Sea Crossing, 1981; The Lovers: Walk on the Great Wall, 1988.^[16]
• Vito Acconci – Seedbed, 1972.^[17]
• David Askevold – Fill, 1970.^[18][19]
• Abel Azcona - The Death of The Artist,^[20] 2018. The Fathers, 2016. Amen or The Pederasty, 2015. Buried, 2015. Eating, 2012. The Nine Confinements or The Deprivation of Liberty, 2013-2016.
• Stuart Brisley – And for today ... nothing, 1972.^[21]
• Chris Burden^[15] – Five Day Locker Piece, 1971.
• David Blaine^[22] – Witness (1999),^[23] Buried Alive, Frozen in Time, Vertigo, Above the Below, Drowned Alive, Revolution, Electrified , Ascension .
• Jimmy Donaldson – Counting to 100,000, watching It's Everyday Bro for 10 hours, 50 hours buried alive, fasting for 30 days, 2016 - ongoing.
• Nikhil Chopra, – Give Me Your Blood And I Will Give You Freedom, 2014.^[24]
• Houston Conwill – Juju Rituals, 1975–1983.^[25]
• Elevator Repair Service – Gatz, 2005.^[24][26]
• EJ Hill – A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy, 2016.^{[27][28][29][30]}
• Tehching Hsieh – One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece); One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece).^[31][32]
• Tehching Hsieh with Linda Montano – Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece).
• Ragnar Kjartansson – A Lot of Sorrow, 2014.^[33]
• Stan Lai – A Dream Like A Dream, 2014.^[24]
• Eric Millikin – My Drinking Problem, 2016.^[34][35]
• Bruce Nauman – Stamping in the Studio, 1968; Revolving Upside Down, 1969.^[18][36][37]
• Bryan Lewis Saunders – Under the Influence, 2001;^[38] Deaf Month, 2011;^[39] While Being Tortured, 2014;^[40] 30 Days Totally Blind, 2018.^[41]
• Carolee Schneeman – Up To And Including Her Limits, 1973—1976.^[18]
• Wolfgang Stoerchle – Attempt Public Erection, 1972–1975.^[25]
• Emma Sulkowicz – Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), 2014–2015.^[42][15]
• Zhang Huan – 12 Square Meters, 1994.^[43]
• Benjamin Bennett – Sitting and Smiling, 2014 – ongoing.^[44]
• Guido Segni – A quiet desert failure, 2013 – ongoing.^{[45][46][47][48][49][50]}

See also

• Hunger artist
• Stylite

References

Further reading

• Brown, Sierra. "Discover Endurance Art," California State University, Long Beach, 2008 (report on an exhibition).
• Kafka, Franz. "A Hunger Artist", 1922.
• Montano, Linda M. "Endurance Then and Now," Letters from Linda M. Montano, Routledge, 2012, p. 123ff.
• O’Brien, Martin. "Performing Chronic: Chronic illness and endurance art", Performance Research, 26 September 2014, pp. 54–63.
• Snorteland, Kevin (13 May 2014). "Endurance Art and painting collide at BFA show". The Lantern.
• von Ah, André. "Performance Art: A Bit of History, Examples and a Fast Dictionary", The Huffington Post, 9 November 2013.