An endurance performance can only be fully understood by one person: the artist themselves. Even if a fanatic were to watch every publicly viewable second, the necessary preparation and recovery that occurs in private would stay hidden. What also remains out of sight is the toll such performances take on the artist, especially when they involve engaging in the same action for multiple hours, almost every day, over several months.
EJ Hill is living out this challenge in Yearning for an Absolute (2025), the centrepiece of his solo show at 52 Walker (until 13 September). Every day that David Zwirner’s kunsthalle-inspired Tribeca dealership has been open to the public since 25 June, Hill has donned a white long-sleeved t-shirt, off-white trousers and monochrome socks, entered a part of the space partitioned by tall velvet curtains and knelt on the crimson pad of a church kneeler for eight continuous hours. There is no food or water, no speaking or distractions, no breaks. By the end, the performance will have taken place for a total of 56 days across 12 weeks.
“This is far more gruelling than anything I’ve done before,” Hill tells me from a yoga pose in his makeshift green room, which has been established in 52 Walker’s office area. We were talking shortly before his performance on 30 July, near the midpoint of the show’s run. The aches and pains were already widespread.
“I feel so much more of it in my lower back, because my knees, quads and thighs are trying to support everything above it,” he says. His shoulders and wrists had become increasingly sore, too, from intermittently dropping to all fours for minor relief while kneeling.
States of physical and psychological extremity are these days extremely familiar for the Los Angeles-based Hill. For his 2016 performance A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy, Hill capped his residency at the Studio Museum by lying on his back at the base of a purple-lit rollercoaster sculpture day in, day out; as part of Excellentia, Mollitia, Victoria (2018), his multi-pronged contribution to the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennial that year, he stood atop a sculpture resembling an Olympic podium for all the hours the show was open. Both exhibitions ran for at least three months.
Mental challenges
Although Yearning for an Absolute completes a “performance triptych” with these pieces, Hill says it also exists in “an entirely different ballpark”. The human body is built to lay prone or stand upright for hours on end—not to kneel.
We resumed our conversation at the end of the same day—an endurance artist’s equivalent of a post-game interview. Hill shuffled out of the exhibition space like a nonagenarian, then kneaded dab after dab of balm into his legs as we talked. He explained the mental challenges the performance posed. “In order to complete a day of this, I have to put my mind somewhere else and not think about time as much as possible,” he says. “I understand the rhythm of the day in a way that’s hard to describe.”
Ebony L. Haynes, a senior director at David Zwirner who oversees and programmes 52 Walker, places Hill’s performance in the tradition of canonical greats such as Tehching Hsieh, Chris Burden and Marina Abramović. She calls it “a consideration of the mind over the body” that “places itself within the context of socio-cultural commentary, reflecting or mining something greater than itself”.
Although Hill’s performance most overtly references Catholicism—he attended church services and Catholic schools until his early teens—he intends it as a nondenominational embodiment of the extreme difficulties people bear, quietly and privately, across cultures and contexts every day. He hopes the work’s strenuousness can jolt viewers into offering “a little bit of grace, understanding and compassion” to others after they leave the gallery.
But Hill, too, will leave a changed man. “I turned 40 on the third day of this performance, which is crazy. It feels transitional in a way,” he says of attempting this work at this point in his career.
Yet endurance artist is an unrelenting profession in more ways than one. The day after completing his Hammer performance, Hill flew across the country to embark on a year-long fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Similarly, as much as he would like to take a true holiday after his latest performance ends, it may not be possible: “The irony is if I’m not working, I can’t really support myself,” he says. “So I may have to go right into the next thing.”
• EJ Hill: Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout, 52 Walker, New York, until 13 September
