Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 9.1 (2015) © Liverpool University PressISSN 1757-6458 (print) 1757-6466 (online) doi:10.3828/jlcds.2015.4

Body ArtsOCD’s Perceptual Challenges and Tehching Hsieh’s “Time Clock Piece”

Sarah OremUniversity of Texas at Austin

Body Arts

Disability scholarship has tended to focus on embodied disability rather than psychiatric impairments. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which some scholars classify as an invisible disability, is one such psychiatric impairment that wants for scholarly attention. The article extends the conversation on OCD by exploring the correspondences between obsessive ritualizing and durational performance art, sometimes called “body art” or “time-based performance art.” Performance art can helpfully serve as a kind of periscope—a device enabling a viewer to see something else held at a remove—to examine OCD without placing the burden of representation onto individuals who self-identify as obsessive-compulsive. Reading disability into a performance piece not explicitly about disability enables us to trouble OCD’s status as strictly invisible. Studies of OCD’s representational challenges can enrich disability theory by offering a way to conceive of disability as embodied but not visible, or, alternately, as invisible but existing in the body.

Introduction

Performance artist Tehching Hsieh’s work One Year Performance 1980–1981 offers a depiction of ritualized movements that might seem familiar to those who self-identify as obsessive-compulsive. In the work, subtitled “Time Clock Piece,” Hsieh abided by strict rules he crafted for himself for an entire year. He planned to punch a timecard into a clock punch machine once an hour, every hour, for 365 days. Though Hsieh has not indicated that he intended the performance as a representation of OCD, his habitual clock punching mirrors the repetitive, compulsive gestures that individuals with OCD use to reduce their anxiety. Hsieh’s work participates in a genre of performance art variously referred to as durational performance art, “body art,” or “timed-based performance art” (Carr xv; Cvetkovich 112), and such perfor-mances can resemble the rituals and compulsions that sometimes accompany Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. As an experimental performance practice, body art flourished in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and 80s, and artists

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who participated in the trend demonstrated that “ordinary activities” could “take on aesthetic significance through repetition and intentional framing” (Cvetkovich 112).

By taking seriously the correspondences between Hsieh’s body art and the compulsive behavior that OCD generates, this article employs his artistic practice as a unique lens through which to examine this particular mental health diagnosis and to illuminate dimensions of OCD not previously remarked on by disability scholars. The difficult, repetitive gestures in Hsieh’s work highlight emotional and physical pain, and many with OCD could claim to understand the relationship between ritual and pain through first-hand experience. The strategy of using “Time Clock Piece” as a kind of periscope, a lens that allows a viewer to better see an object that might otherwise be obscured, brings pain close to audiences, and the performance uniquely lends itself to a discussion of the difficulty of representing pain. Examining OCD through the lens of body art mitigates the burden of representation for those living with a diagnosis. By scrutinizing Hsieh’s compulsive activity instead of an individual who self-identifies as Obsessive-Compulsive, the latter is not forced to speak for an entire category of disability, which can be difficult and exhausting.

In order to discuss Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and those who live with a 300.3 diagnosis, this article uses the terms mental illness, mental difference, and mental health service user. I employ the phrases mental illness and mental difference interchangeably. Many who participate in OCD social networks—whether they be informal support groups, online chat forums, blogs, or medical treatment programs and facilities—frequently refer to OCD as a type of neuro-atypical thinking (a mental difference) that, although not an entirely negative experience, produces suffering (illness) that they hope to treat or cure. The term mental health service user reflects the tendency for people with OCD to seek medical treatment as a means of reducing pain and suffering.

Mental Illness, Perceptual Tangles

Petra Kuppers argues that artistic practices attempting to represent mental illness face unique “perceptual challenges” (122). These challenges stem from the fact that mental difference is often perceived as invisible. Robert McRuer, for example, claims that OCD lacks “visible bodily differences” (103), just as Anna Mollow proposes that mental illnesses confound medical treatment models since they might not “manifest visible signs” (290). Kuppers asserts that negative images of mental illness are in fact pervasive and hyper-visible.

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Widely disseminated images of persons with mental illness include “the homicidal maniac” and “those involving self-neglect and screaming fits” (Kuppers 122). These images “exclude” persons with mental illness from “self-representation” (124). Moreover, a history of “bodily stagings” of hysteria, including the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “madhouses” Elaine Showalter examines in The Female Malady (1987), have put the bodies of mentally ill persons on display for spectators (Kuppers 124–25). Kuppers argues that these performances employ a “diagnostic gaze” that searches for evidence of interior mental difference on the exterior body (130). Her discussion of the perceptual challenges attendant upon representations of mental difference is amplified when considered alongside Mollow’s claim that there is a dearth of disability scholarship on mental illness. Disability theory’s emphasis on embodied disability becomes another “perceptual challenge” facing represen-tations of mental illness. Though “cognitive and psychiatric impairments” are “gaining more attention,” says Mollow, they “nonetheless remain marginalized, both within disability studies and in the broader culture” (287, 284).1 Mollow’s analysis easily applies to OCD’s under-representation in disability studies. Though some scholars, such as Lennard Davis, have examined this condition, it remains understudied.2

The lived experience of OCD presents perceptual challenges in addition to those outlined by Kuppers. Obsessional thoughts can provisionally be classified as invisible since they occur within a person’s mind. Medical models of mental illness recognize obsessive thinking as unwanted images that recurrently intrude upon a person’s thought process, conveying feelings of danger. These intrusive thoughts can cause “marked distress” (El-Sayegh et al. 825). Not simply exaggerated concerns “about real-life problems,” obsessions are “thoughts, impulses, or images that are intrusive” and cause “severe anxiety” (El-Sayegh et al. 825). Obsessional thinking often produces an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance: someone experiencing intrusive thoughts will feel as if they are in very real danger but simultaneously understand that they are not actually in harm’s way. The popular assumption that OCD represents a preoccupation with tidiness is demonstrably false, although obsessive fears can cause a person to crave neatness as a way to mitigate anxiety. Obsessions can revolve around any topic.

1. For a discussion of the emphasis on embodied difference in disability studies, see Mollow (287), and Devlin and Pothier (20). Further complications surrounding OCD’s representation include some scientists’ denial of the existence of mental illness (see Barnes et al. 3) and the ADA’s unwillingness to recognize OCD as a disability (see Neal-Barnett and Mendelson 171–74).2. McRuer and Cefalu also examine OCD from a disability studies perspective.

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OCD can entail embodied and visible aspects as well. People sometimes perform specific, repetitive bodily gestures in order to lessen the anxiety their obsessions cause (Aboujaoude 9). Called rituals and compulsions by medical literature, these performances involve bodily labors such as “checking and rechecking” (Dziegielewski 335). Common compulsions include checking, washing, cleaning, confessing, or seeking reassurance, but any action can be elevated to the status of a compulsion. Dr. Elias Aboujaoude describes compulsive behavior as an everyday action that is performed on an extremely large scale. Some individuals take seconds to ensure “the doors are locked” or “that one did not accidentally hit a passerby while backing out of the driveway,” but a person with OCD might spend “hours a day checking and rechecking, often in complex, uncompromising patterns” (Aboujaoude 11). Although not everyone who has OCD performs embodied or visible compulsions—some take place in a person’s head, such as counting or thinking certain words or phrases—these embodied components to OCD demonstrate that it is not a disability that wholly takes place in the mind. That is, OCD is not an entirely invisible disability.

Frequently, shame prompts individuals to hide their compulsive behavior, adding another layer of complexity to the “perceptual challenges” surrounding OCD (Kuppers 122). Persons with OCD regularly “avoid seeking help” because of the unique way in which shame pervades the Obsessive-Compulsive community (El-Sayegh et al. 824). Those living with OCD “often isolate themselves from social interactions” because they are generally able to recognize the illogic of their fears (El-Sayegh et al. 824–25). Therefore, individuals with OCD are especially prone to worrying that others might perceive them as “crazy” (El-Sayegh et al. 824–25). Many hide their symptoms from friends, family, and medical practitioners. As a result, the average time between symptom onset and clinical diagnosis can range from seven to 17 years.3 Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is uniquely inflected with invisibility in that it compels some to hide their compulsive behavior as best they can. But do bodily movements “count” as invisible simply because there might not be anyone present to observe them? The fluctuating visibility and invisibility of OCD defies the classificatory utility these terms offer.

Of course, the descriptions listed above shore up the diagnostic power that the medical model holds over those living with a mental health diagnosis. Michel Foucault’s work on subjectification reveals the ways in which diagnostic

3. Clinical researchers associate OCD with an especially long period between symptom onset and seeking any sort of treatment, ranging from “over seven years” (Hyman and Pedrick 32), in excess of “ten years” (Kornstein and Clayton 208), to “seventeen years in adults” (Cobert 4).

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terms, such as the term OCD I employ, have “oppressive consequences” that produce the concept of abnormality and monitor those who live with a diagnosed mental illness (Brown and Tucker 230). Foucauldian critique is a valuable tool for those living with mental difference, aiding mentally ill communities in speaking back to dominant culture and defining their psychic life on their own terms.

However, Foucauldian analysis cannot fully account for the experiences of mental health service users. Steven D. Brown and Ian Tucker advise that “meetings between mental health service users and mental health professionals” are “complex social interactions” that might enable and dis-enable those living with a mental illness in a variety of ways (240). Specifically studying Bipolar Disorder, Emily Martin excavates the unpredictable combination of social circumstances that underlie any mental health diagnosis, and asserts that “patients and physicians” often employ the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with “creativity” (99). When I cite the medical term OCD, I do not suggest that persons with mental illness lose agency by partici-pating with the apparatus of the medical profession. Rather, I propose that claiming a mental illness constitutes what José Muñoz calls a disidentificatory performance.4

The reading strategy of this article does not discount the lived experiences of individuals who self-identify as Obsessive-Compulsive. Though critiques of identity politics are many (and crucially needed), the social constructionist model of identity cannot tell the whole story of OCD.5 Lennard Davis critiques the identitarian claim of having OCD in his text Obsession (2008) when he places quotation marks around the word have, interrogating the extent to which anyone can be said to “have” OCD or be a person “with” OCD (243). He contends that marking an official diagnosis of OCD problematically quarantines an individual from the rest of the population (243). However, by appealing to a category of experiences lived by those with OCD, experiences the medical literature describes with varying degrees of success, I argue for the importance of an identitarian model of disability. Carrie Sandahl has defended the continuing relevance of identity politics to disability studies, and she explains that Davis’s generalizing theory of disability risks overlooking the “specificity of experience” and of “oppression” (602, 582). I align myself with

4. Muñoz defines “disidentification” as a “mode of dealing with dominant ideology” that “neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology” (11).5. See Butler for a discussion of the importance of retaining identity categories alongside postmodern critiques of identitarian politics.

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Sandahl’s “commitment to detail,” and I urge scholars to pay attention to the unique experiences of persons living with OCD (596).6

My notion of identity politics does not preclude reading disability into a performance by a nondisabled individual. Scholars have documented the long history of nondisabled artists employing disability as a metaphor for able-bodied and able-minded experience.7 While Hsieh certainly chooses to perform the durational labor of “Time Clock Piece,” I contend that this should not be conflated with the appropriation of disability for metaphoric purposes. Neither audience members nor the artist himself indicate that they see the performance as a representation of OCD, and it is choice that situates Hsieh’s work as art and a lack of choice that casts an individual with OCD as disabled. The analytic of this article reads disability into Hsieh’s performance, appropriating an able-bodied and able-minded performance as a metaphor for a disabled experience. The performance’s focus on pain, repetition, and embodiment provides a suggestive model for thinking through OCD. Though “Time Clock Piece” is not a performance “about” disability, reading disability into and alongside it makes available new insights about OCD’s visibility and invisibility. Alison Kafer argues for the benefits of such a reading strategy, saying that inserting disability studies’ “insights and analyses into conver-sations that are not marked as such” can potentially expand “disability studies genealogies” and help scholars “imagine disability differently” (151, 150).

“What kind of person would put himself through such things?”

The genre of durational performance art has historically emphasized extended repetition, labor, and constraint. For example, in 14 Years of Living Art (1984–98), Linda Montano wore clothing of only one color for a year at a time over the course of fourteen years. Marina Abramović’s Lips of Thomas (1973) showed the artist subjecting her body to self-harm through ritualized actions and the precise use of specific objects, including repeatedly whipping herself, laying naked on blocks of ice, and eating honey apportioned in carefully measured amounts. These performances can be seen to resemble the rituals and compulsions that persons with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder use to relieve anxiety. Performance art by Chinese-American artist Tehching Hsieh proves especially useful to examine alongside medical accounts of OCD since

6. Siebers also advocates for the value of identity politics to disability studies. 7. For example, see Fries (5–6); Norden (260–61); Livneh (282).

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he draws together issues of visibility and pain, and stages the experience of being trapped inside his house. Individuals with OCD often avoid the sources of their chronic anxiety, leading the most “severe forms” of OCD to keep people “housebound for many years” (Wilhelm 119).

I do not want to diagnose Hsieh or speculate about his mental health. Critical and scholarly discussions of durational performance art have regularly raised questions about performers’ mental health. Frazer Ward speculates about Hsieh’s psychological state because of the difficulty of the performances he stages. Ward explains “There is a tendency to ask […] what was Hsieh like? What kind of person would put himself through such things?” (7). Though Ward broaches the question of Hsieh’s psychic life, he assures readers that the artist’s mental faculties are not “psychopathological” (8). Thomas McEvilley assesses body artists in a similar manner when he proposes that their work “introduce[s] into the art realm materials found elsewhere only in the psychiatric records of disturbed children” (75). That scholars and critics employ a “diagnostic gaze” merits further exploration (Kuppers 130), and critical theory would benefit from pursuing these questions while remaining sensitive to the experiences of those living with a mental illness. I do not contend that Hsieh has OCD, nor do I want to collapse the boundaries between durational performance art and the compulsive behavior of OCD. Rather, I use Hsieh’s performance art as a representational lens through which to examine OCD, thereby adding complexity to conceptions of the condition within disability theory.

Between April 11, 1980 and April 11, 1981, Hsieh punched a time clock once an hour, on the hour, every day in his New York studio apartment. Hsieh documented these punches by taking a picture of himself every time he clocked in. He also shaved his head at the beginning of the piece in 1980, and so by viewing Hsieh’s pictures in chronological order audiences can see time pass as his hair grows longer with each subsequent image. The performance dramatically limited Hsieh’s freedom, and he was only able to stray as far from his apartment as he could go and still return within the hour.

According to Hsieh’s records, his commitment to punching in once an hour was nearly absolute, and out of “8,760 required punches, he only missed 134” (Bryan-Wilson 143). He recorded the circumstances surrounding each missed clock punch, and he mostly missed clocking in because he was sleeping. In order to prove that he actually completed the project as stated, Hsieh employed a witness. David Milne, the Director of the Foundation for the Community of Artists, signed each punch-card and issued a statement confirming that Hsieh did not “cheat” during the performance. The project consumed Hsieh’s life, and though the performance primarily took place within the confines of

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his apartment, his accounts of the experience, his photographs, and scholarly examinations of the performance—such as Adrian Heathfield’s Out of Now (2009)—provide a glimpse into the intensely challenging work Hsieh completed.

After finishing his year with “Time Clock Piece,” Hsieh assembled the photographs of each clock-punch in chronological order, and the six-minute video One Year Performance 1980–1981 shuffles through these pictures like a flipbook. The short video shows Hsieh as a “jittery figure with sprouting hair” next to a clock with “wildly” spinning hands (Pittman). In the images, Hsieh stares dispassionately at the camera, always wearing the same drab olive-grey workman’s uniform with his name written in capital letters on his lapel. Because Hsieh felt compelled to offer visual proof of his performance, we can infer that he expected to encounter disbelief from viewers and wanted to confirm that he actually performed as stated. As viewers watch Hsieh’s images elapse, we realize we are only privy to a fraction of the performance. We cannot witness the bulk of the confinement Hsieh experienced during his year-long project.

New York’s Guggenheim Museum exhibited “Time Clock Piece” in 2009, displaying Hsieh’s documentary punch-cards, photos, and the compiled filmstrip. The work was later presented at the gallery of the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in 2010. FACT still hosts a brief segment from the filmstrip online for anyone to view,8 and this web video splices together part of the original film, an interview with Hsieh, and footage of the work’s exhibition at FACT.

Performance scholars have read “Time Clock Piece” as an extended meditation on the problems of documentation and evidence (Bryan-Wilson). Examinations of “Time Clock Piece” as a critique of industrial capitalism are also common (Ward). At the work’s UK premiere, the CEO of the FACT gallery, Mike Stubbs, remarked that the piece frames Hsieh’s seemingly pointless labor as “no more valuable than working in a factory” (FACT). “Time Clock Piece” can be seen as a metaphor for the monotonous factory labor that, in the US, is often performed by undocumented immigrants such as Hsieh. The performance “hyperbolize[s]” factory workers’ subjection to disciplinary observation (Ward 11). Hsieh’s performance art might provide an especially useful site to put disability theory into conversation with performance studies, considering that scholars such as Mike Oliver and Colin Barnes have revealed how the labor demanded by industrial capitalism produces the modern concept of disability (82).

8. This video can be accessed on vimeo (FACT).

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Performing OCD

Appropriating Hsieh’s able-bodied and able-minded representation of ritual for the purposes of thinking through OCD enables a nuanced discussion of the way visibility and invisibility circulate around the condition. In “Time Clock Piece,” Hsieh performs ritualized behaviors, but his work demonstrates that any attempt to represent or document these rituals is fraught. The original performance of “Time Clock Piece” is visible through its continued represen-tation through film, photography, and audience description, and it was also visible in the past, since it drew spectators and generated a documentary book and DVD. However, it would be difficult to “see” the entirety of Hsieh’s performance, and we must instead settle for catching glimpses of his year-long experiments with ritual labor. The complicated web of “perceptual challenges” that structure OCD emerge in a fashion similar to the representational challenges of Hsieh’s performance. “Time Clock Piece” provides scholars with a site to think through the complications of representation with which those who self-identify as OCD must grapple.

Using Hsieh’s body art as an analytical lens to study OCD challenges popular and scholarly conceptions of this mental illness, his performance reveals the visibility of ritualized behavior and challenges the equation between mental illness and invisibility made by some scholars (Mollow 296; McRuer 103). Even though Hsieh’s performance took place in his apartment and did not always have an immediate audience—much like the ritualizing that accompanies OCD—the performance becomes visible through his meticulous documentation and, later, through the work’s inclusion in traditional museum spaces like the FACT gallery, proving that obsessive ritualizing can be read visually. During the original performance of “Time Clock Piece,” Hsieh allowed audience members into his apartment to witness him punching in on fourteen separate occasions (Heathfield 30). Hsieh’s work renders visible, and embodied, the type of extended ritualized behavior that can characterize OCD, making it accessible to spectators. The performance problematizes McRuer’s suggestion that Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder does not produce “visible bodily differences,” a claim he makes in analyzing the film As Good as It Gets (1997) (103), and proves that ritualistic labors can be visible to those who are invited to look, or who know what to look for. Given scholars’ and critics’ attempts at diagnosing Hsieh, it becomes apparent that such labors have been the target of social stigma.

McRuer asserts that those living with psychological disabilities are less capable of speaking back to the dominant culture than persons living with

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“visible” disabilities (103). Alleging that individuals with OCD have not adequately participated in disability activism, he asserts:

Those marked as obsessive-compulsive are not among the leaders of a movement driven [to develop a minority consciousness …] because it is easier for blind people, Deaf people, people who use wheelchairs, and people with visible bodily differences to embrace the minoritized identity I discuss in my conclusion and to resist the ideologies of treatment and “cure” that are arguably still central, even in some instances exclusive, organizing principles for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder or some other mental or behavioral disabilities. This is not to say that a reverse discourse or minority consciousness is impossible […] but there has been fairly little space for, or collective discussion of, such a consciousness, and thus it is at this point difficult to imagine. (103)

Though Hsieh’s work was not intended as a performance of OCD, by identifying its similarities the performance directly responds to McRuer’s assessment. “Time Clock Piece” proves that ritual behavior can be highly visible, thereby troubling McRuer’s conclusion that individuals with OCD do not evince “visible bodily differences” (103). Seeing OCD as a disability with visible contours subverts McRuer’s claim that invisibility bars those with OCD from speaking back to the dominant culture.

That Hsieh’s year-long performance was at least partially invisible to spectators—it would have been nearly impossible to view every second of the original “Time Clock Piece” performance—did not undermine the work’s power to spur viewers’ critical consciousness. Of course, the artistic value in Hsieh’s work is seen to come from his choice to perform difficult labors over a long period of time, while a person living with mental illness performing the same sort of behavior would risk forced treatment or involuntary commitment.9 But thinking about disability alongside Hsieh’s performance shows that the ability to generate critique is not dependent on visibility, enabling a re-conception of OCD within disability theory that recognizes that the invisible components of OCD do not hamper the development of critical consciousness.

Fans and fellow artists, when corresponding with Hsieh, often remarked that their inability to witness every moment of his performance heightened the impression it left with them. For example, in a letter dated December 1980, the poet Jackson Mac Low writes to Hsieh:

9. Most US states allow for involuntary commitment if an individual has “a mental illness” and presents “an imminent or substantial danger to himself or herself or others” (Lamparello 876–77).

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Dear Mr. Hsieh,

Thank you for sending me notices of your performances, but may I ask you a completely serious (not meant negatively) question: why do you do such perfor-mances? They do not seem self-fulfilling or such as to give much pleasure or insight to audiences, but there must be much more to them than is apparent. Please try to let me know. This is a sympathetic question & not meant to offend.

Yours, J. Mac Low. (qtd. in Heathfield 349)

Low’s sense that there is “much more” to Hsieh’s performances than meets the eye troubles McRuer’s equation between visible bodily difference and the ability to enable social or political critique. Low’s reaction reveals that the invisible elements of Hsieh’s performance heightened the effect it left with him. Low remains uncertain of Hsieh’s exact message, but his letter indicates that its partial inaccessibility compels him to search for deeper meaning. Similarly, real estate developer Gilbert B. Silverman wrote to Hsieh after “seeing” the piece: “I don’t totally understand exactly what you are doing but I do think its [sic] very important” (qtd. in Heathfield 350). These letters challenge the connection McRuer makes between “visible bodily difference” and activism or critical consciousness (103): Hsieh’s performance unhooks visibility from critique.

Marina Abramović, a performance artist perhaps more widely known than Hsieh but who nevertheless credits him with building the foundations of the genre (Heathfield 352), notes that Hsieh did not need immediate viewers in order to create his work. She explains that in Hsieh’s performance, “he doesn’t interact with the audience. He even avoids looking at them straight in the eyes. He doesn’t need them to be there while he’s doing the work” (qtd. in Heathfield 352). The lack of immediate observers did not make it more difficult for Hsieh to develop his own critical perspective, which in “Time Clock Piece,” was aimed at highlighting the precarious living conditions facing undocumented immigrants in the United States. “Time Clock Piece” illustrates that invisible, private experiences of pain are perfectly capable of enabling social critique. In an analogous fashion, that individuals with OCD do not experience bodily difference in the same way as “blind people, Deaf people,” or individuals who “use wheelchairs” (McRuer 103) does not preclude them from developing minority consciousness. Though “Time Clock Piece” does not directly depict immigration, it can be used to comment on it, just as it can also be used to provide commentary upon the conditions of living with OCD.

Furthermore, to McRuer’s claim that people who self-identify as obsessive-compulsive have not sufficiently engaged in disability activism or generated a

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minority consciousness, I think it important to remember that just because a minority group’s critical consciousness does not fit within received narratives of what activism ought to look like does not mean that a reverse discourse is absent. There is much more to say on this topic, and scholarly discussions of OCD activism and cultural production are crucially needed.10

Read alongside medical literature on OCD, “Time Clock Piece” also renders more visible the complex way in which suffering circulates around the condition. The issue of palliative care—medical or alternative treatments meant to reduce pain and suffering—has been widely debated within disability studies. Interro-gating the common linkages between illness and disability, Eli Clare advocates that persons who identify as disabled should not be seen as “sick, diseased, and ill” (105). Conversely, Susan Wendell avers that pain and disability can be connected: “some people with disabilities are sick, diseased and ill,” and some disabled individuals “very much want to have their bodies cured” (18). Both reading strategies offer benefits. Clare’s text Exile and Pride (1999) counteracts the oppressive stereotype of disabled individuals as long-suffering heroes and highlights the lived experiences of those who identify as differently-abled but do not suffer. Wendell’s analysis, however, foregrounds the type of pain experienced by many people living with OCD. For example, even a cursory glance at the blog forum of the website OCDTribe reveals a common experience of pain. An April, 2013 search of this website shows bloggers using phrases such as “draining,” “scared to death,” “difficulty and struggle,” and “so much pain” to describe life with OCD (“OCD Support Blogs”).

Using durational performance art as a lens through which to examine OCD highlights the experience of mental and physical pain that typically accompanies this condition. In an interview with Hsieh, Adrian Heathfield asks the artist about his choice to bluntly represent “pain and risk” with his performance (324). Hsieh responds that, during the five One Year Performance pieces, he wanted to show audiences that “I was in a position of profound disadvantage” (324). The disadvantages he alludes to include the challenge of surviving as an undocumented immigrant in the United States. In order to scrape out a living wage, Hsieh worked grueling jobs in cleaning and construction in lower Manhattan, and his life was defined by uncertainty. His artistic work “concentrated on pain and risk” in order to emphasize his “inner struggle” (324).

10. Traci Foust’s Nowhere Near Normal (2011), Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (2009), and Fletcher Wortmann’s Triggered (2012) are just a few of many works by individuals with OCD that artfully represent the experience of living with the disorder. The organization OCD Texas is an excellent example of OCD activism and advocacy that merits further scholarly attention.

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Hsieh’s efforts to communicate his emotional turmoil were quite successful since “Time Clock Piece” generated in viewers concern for his safety. Heathfield’s Lifeworks collects letters written to Hsieh by viewers, scholars, and art critics, and many worry about the demands of his “One Year Performance” pieces. Theater artist Tim Etchells plaintively wrote to Hsieh during the original staging of “Time Clock Piece”: “Tehching. I had no way to tell if you were or could be or could ever be ok” (358). In an earlier letter, Etchells expresses concern for the artist’s well-being when he says that the project forces Hsieh to live “inside the simplest, and harshest of self-made rules” and renders the “violence” of ritual in startling detail (357). Hsieh’s work is as much a performance of ritual as it is an interesting case study in the task of responding to the suffering of another person. Etchells’s remarks model a way for those not living with mental illness to respond sensitively to the suffering of OCD: he recognizes the impossibility of experiencing Hsieh’s pain himself, “I had no way to tell if you were […] ok,” but acknowledges the difficulty of surviving under “harsh” conditions (357). Used as a lens through which to examine OCD, Hsieh’s performance emphasizes pain in a way that troubles McRuer’s claim that individuals living with a disability would be better served by resisting “ideologies of treatment and cure” (103). “Time Clock Piece” draws attention to the difficulty of living within “inflexible structures and self-imposed rules” (Carr 356) and provides a way for undiagnosed individuals to conceptualize and respond to the emotional and physical pain highlighted by scholars like Wendell.

The tactic of indirectly examining OCD offers a kind of periscopic perspective on mental illness, bringing performance art close instead of the narratives of those living with OCD. Members of minority groups are regularly asked to educate dominant groups about the nuances of their lives, and this burden can be incredibly taxing. The burden of representation has been productively discussed by disability theorists,11 and N. Ann Davis’s analysis of the specific burdens attached to invisible disabilities lends itself well to this discussion of OCD. Given that OCD has invisible components, and that shame often leads to hiding what might be the visible aspects of OCD, those who live with a diagnosis sometimes “appear to meet able-bodied standards” and can sometimes be seen as “normal” (“Invisible Disability,” 159). Therefore, “members of the general public may suspect that they are ‘cheating’” by asking for accommodations or are “seeking to be granted special privileges” instead of “exercising a right” (“Invisible Disability,” 211).

11. See Brueggemann; Kleege.

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The burden of proof (proving that one has a disability) and the burden of representation (speaking for the entire group) are two closely related tasks that someone with OCD would shoulder owing to the condition’s status as at least partially invisible. Davis asserts that the burden of proof and the burden of representation are linked and, in a passage that is worth quoting at length here to capture the full scope of her argument, she reveals the impact of these dual stressors:

it is damaging for persons with invisible disabilities to have to shoulder the extra burden of trying to teach others about their condition and having to rebut the able-bodied paradigm’s presumption that “what you see is what you get.” Even when people succeed in making their case, thus proving to others’ satisfaction that they are disabled, what they may have is—at best—a Pyrrhic victory. They may be able to lay claim to the “special” services that they need to function in our society. But in being perceived as people who need these services or accommodations, they are likely to be more prominently marked by the stigma that attaches to being designated as disabled. This, of course, provides considerable disincentive. Those whose disabilities are invisible will often have more motivation to “pass” than to “come out,” which may imperil their well-being, exacerbate their disability, and deepen their invisibility. (“Invisible Disability,” 212)

A periscopic reading strategy—using one text to examine another that is kept at arm’s length—does not put representative pressure squarely on the shoulders of diagnosed individuals. Instead, using representative analogues enables a discussion of OCD while allowing the burdens of representation to be re-distributed.

Finally, considering performance art alongside medical literature on OCD adds complexity to conceptions of “embodied” disability. The degree to which a disability can be considered embodied or psychological, invisible or nonvisible, or, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson specifies, “functional” or “formal” has been a useful conceptual rubric for scholars (14). Garland-Thomson distin-guishes between disabilities that are “Functional but not visible” and “formal” disabilities that are readily apparent on the body but might not “entail physical dysfunction” (14). Though she stresses that the experience of disability is always fluid, she does remark that “a disability’s degree of visibility […] affects social relations” (14). But I suspect that a disability’s relationship to social structures becomes difficult to determine when it is accompanied by a tangle of perceptual challenges. Garland-Thomson’s analysis merits further exploration, especially considering OCD’s shifting relationship to visibility. Considering that OCD is neither solidly visible or invisible, embodied or not, how can we think about its impact on the category of the social if scholarship has used a rubric of

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embodiment and (in)visibility to think about a disability’s relationship to social structures? Are the categories of visibility and invisibility still tenable? I believe these questions would be fruitful sites for further research.

Hsieh’s performance and the lived experience of OCD rewrite conceptions of what constitutes embodied disability. Considering “Time Clock Piece” as an analogue to OCD suggests that embodied difference can be experienced as a different way of being embodied in the world rather than a visible difference that is always apparent on the body. Hsieh’s performance would have been invisible at times, since it sometimes lacked a physically present audience, but like the ritualizing of OCD it was always literally visible. In order to adequately theorize OCD, we must be able to conceive of disability as simultaneously embodied and invisible, or, alternatively, visible but not marked on the body.

Conclusion

When read alongside Kuppers’s analysis of the “perceptual challenges” that underlie the performance of mental illness, the lived experience of OCD reaffirms that scholars need to stay attuned to nuances of representation and perception when studying mental illness (122). OCD produces perceptual tangles in addition to those outlined by Kuppers, and this particular condition is uniquely poised to aid a reconception of pain, visibility and invisibility, and the effectiveness of DSM diagnoses.

Rather than directly examine individual accounts of OCD, such as those presented in memoir and autobiography, I construct a periscopic perspective on disability. Tehching Hsieh’s landmark performance “Time Clock Piece” enables scholars indirectly to think about OCD’s representational challenges without placing any burden on people with OCD. Such a reading strategy remains sensitive to the experiences of individuals who have difficulty revealing their OCD to others. I propose that performance theory might offer useful inroads into the study of mental illness, and of OCD more specifically. Thinking disability through the lens of performance refigures the types of inquiries that are important to the study of debility and capacity. Instead of asking, “To what degree is an individual’s disability visible or invisible?” an analytic grounded in the study of performance might ask a different though related question: “Are there any spectators present?”

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