Man and woman tied themselves together for entire year with no escape to see what would happen

At 6.00pm on 4 July 1983, a man and woman tied themselves together and promised that the eight foot of rope that tethered them would stay in place for an entire year.

The two people bound together for a year were performance artists Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh, who laid down some clear rules about what was going to be expected of them for the next 12 months.

"We, Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh, plan to do a one-year performance," they wrote to explain what they were doing.

"We will stay together for one year and never be alone. We will be in the same room at the same time when we are inside. We will be tied together at waist with an eight-foot rope.

"We will never touch each other during the year."

They spent a whole year tied together but not allowed to touch (Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano)

According to ArtForum, the pair slept in separate beds a few feet apart. When one of them needed to take a shower the other would wait outside and the pair stayed celibate for the year.

They named their collaboration Art/Life One Year Performance, and to a large extent, they managed to stick to their list of rules, clocking in about 60 accidental touches over the year and one deliberate hug from Montano.

It wasn't even Hsieh's first time dedicating a whole year of his life to his art, having previously spent a year in a wooden cage without speaking, another year punching a time clock every single hour and spending an entire year outside.

Montano, meanwhile, had previously done a performance where she'd been handcuffed to someone else for three days.

Hsieh and Montano would take a photo of themselves every day and record their conversations, though, as they found out, it's difficult to spend an entire year with another person and not get tired of them.

Where one of them went the other had to go, and for a while they were barely speaking to each other (Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano)

The pair 'stopped talking almost completely', with Montano saying as time went on they were 'becoming more animal-like' and would fight without touching each other by pulling hard on the rope they were both attached to.

Instead of speaking, Montano explained they 'began pointing with sounds and groans and moans', and the breakdown in communication caused more problems as they couldn't really do anything without the other's permission.

If one of them wanted to do something, the other had to go with them, and at one point, they spent hours not doing anything as they knew it would cancel out anything the other wanted to try.

However, nearer the end of the year, they started getting along better as Hsieh said: "80 days before the end, we started to act like we were people. It was almost as if we surfaced from a submarine."