Song A Day As Performance Art

Song A Day As Performance Art
As I sing my way into my 17th year, I’ve been thinking about time-based art. Although I did not first conceive of Song A Day as “ART”, I've become obsessed with some artists whose work grapples with the same ideas that Song A Day evokes.
Roman Opalka
Starting in 1965 and over the course of 46 years, Roman Opalka painted one number at a time from 1 to 5607329. He never used a comma. He had hoped to get to 7777777, but he died before reaching that goal. In 1968 he added a daily self-portrait, as well as a tape recorder, into which he would speak the numbers he was painting that day.
“All my work is a single thing,” he said, “the description from number one to infinity. A single thing, a single life.”

Tehching Hsieh
From 1978 to 1986, Tehching Hsieh did a series of one year long performance pieces. My favorite one involved punching a time clock in his studio every hour, on the hour.
Each time card was signed by a witness and captured with a single frame of film from a 16mm movie camera. In a brilliant bit of foresight, he shaved his head at the beginning of the project, so that by the end, you could see time passing in the resulting film/images. My favorite part of this performance is the document that shows the times he was sleeping, late or early to punching time. The combined total of all of these was 133, meaning that out of 8,760 hours, he slept through, was late or early to just 1.5% of his clock punches.

“Life is a life sentence; life is passing time; life is freethinking.”

• Tehching Hsieh

Song A Day
Unlike static mediums like paintings, punch cards or photographs, it’s not possible to experience the entirety of Song A Day at once. All of Tehching's time cards can be displayed on a single wall, as can Roman's 233 canvases of numbers. You can't do that with Song A Day.
But if you could view the project as a whole, you'd see that Song A Day is a single contiguous performance I’ve been doing for nearly 17 years.
Like Roman, I will sing until I die. Like Tehching, I am accountable to witnesses: all of you.
And 50 years from now, when I’m 92, you’ll need a wall that could fit 23,840 screens to be able to perceive the full contours of Song A Day, and 800 hours to hear them.

A single thing. A single life. A life sentence. Passing time.