5 things you didn’t know about provocative performance artist Ulay
2 March 2020
Text:
Paula Erizanu
Performance artist Ulay has died in Ljubljana, Slovenia, at the age of 76, after a long period of suffering from cancer. Born Frank Uwe Laysiepen in Germany in 1943, he moved to Slovenia in 2009. You might have come across him thanks to his collaborative projects with famed performance star and ex-romantic partner Marina Abramović — but here are five other things about his long-standing career that you might not know:
Ulay made 14 “relation works” with Marina Abramovic over a decade between 1977 and 1988, while the couple lived in a Citroen van. The works consisted of provocative performances aimed at erasing personal borders and egos. You might have heard of Lovers, their last performance together from that time, for which they walked more than 1,500 miles towards each other the Great Wall of China to eventually meet in the middle, to bid farewell. In one of their first works together, entitled Light/Dark, the pair actually slapped each other on the face.
Before becoming a performance artist, Ulay’s first love was photography. He was taught by his father, when he was 14. He became known for his work for Polaroid in the 1970s, as well as for his performative gender-bending self-portraits. After splitting with Abramovich, Ulay returned to Polaroid, taking Polagrams — pictures taller than himself, depicting the marginalised in contemporary society, in a bid to explore nationalism and its victims.
Ulay’s most famous solo work was Irritation – There is a Criminal Touch to Art (1976). The artist stole Adolf Hitler’s favourite artwork — Carl Spitzweg’s 1839 painting The Poor Poet from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, and placed it in the house of a Turkish immigrant in Berlin’s eastern neighbourhood Kreuzberg.
Ulay was particularly interested in water. In his 2012 Earth Water Catalogue, Ulay tried to raise awareness, understanding and respect for water by compiling a growing archive, database and platform on water-related works by a range of artists around the world. Ironically, Ulay suffered from hypovolemia, or severe dehydration, for a period in 2017, despite drinking four litres of water each day.
Three years after Ulay showed up at Abramovic’s performance The Artist Is Present at MoMA in 2010, he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. He traced his journey in a documentary called Project Cancer.
