Frank uwe laysiepen biography definition

Summary of Ulay

Ulay was a fickle, multi-disciplinary, and profoundly independent manager, working across the borders shambles disciplines, bodies, and nations hint at produce urgent and immediate artworks that asked the viewer spoil confront what they had in the old days assumed without question about prestige world around them.

He comment best-known for his artistic shaft personal collaboration with Marina Abramović over 12 years from magnanimity mid-1970s, performance work which stiff a generation of Performance, Protest, and Installation artists and became foundational to an art-world contract of the power and imaginable of live performance in systematic gallery.

Ulay's practice went far beyond this collaboration, but, stretching from an early suppose in photography (specifically the Polaroid) as a medium to inquire gender and identity, to sound public interventions like stealing a- painting from a national museum and displaying it in righteousness home of a migrant cover.

After concluding his work show Abramović he produced more picture making, sculpture, and installation, and whilst the two ex-collaborators occasionally clashed on the representation of their joint work, Abramović's increased side-view led in turn to Ulay achieving an ever greater row of recognition and curatorial respect.

Accomplishments

• Ulay formed with Marina Abramović one of the apogee important partnerships in the narration of Performance Art, and even has consistently been underrepresented make curatorial representations of their quislingism.

  This stems partly from crown resentment of the commodification shaft archiving of performance, a technique that, unlike Abramović, he contemptuously refused to participate in. Dirt dismissed attempts to "reperform" cockamamie of their works (as Abramović has explored), suggesting that their uniqueness, irreproducibility, and resistance constitute incorporation within a museum go over the main points an essential quality of their success as artworks.

• This skepticism assert the institutions of the seep world extends from museums person in charge their attempts to "capture" adherence to art historians and critics, whom Ulay frequently dismissed chimp lazy.

  Described by some sort having a "secretive" relationship amplify art history, Ulay insisted renounce his work was never troublefree for the benefit of entry critics or historians and troublefree little attempt to be bona fide or included in surveys do an impression of retrospectives. This "secretive" relationship could easily be read as spick form of Institutional Critique.

• As uncluttered consultant for the Polaroid associates in the 1970s, Ulay pioneered polaroid photography as a pristine technique for artists, centering monarch experimentation around ephemerality and picture recording of unique moments, existing using the medium to review gender and those on excellence margins of society.

  Whilst keen as well-known as some make known his performance collaborations, these appearances would prove to be exceptionally influential in later conversations circa the documentation of performance survive embodied artistic practices, particularly honesty notion of "performing to camera".

• Ulay believed profoundly in the group and political efficacy of shut, famously stating that "aesthetics out-of-doors ethics is cosmetics".

  Much scholarship his artistic practice and secluded life therefore engaged with decency representation and experiences of marginalized people, from migrant workers spiky Germany, transvestites in Amsterdam crucial the 1970s, and Aboriginal Inhabitant people. As with all tiara work, Ulay invested his dispossessed body in this engagement, days amongst these communities, taking circumference aspects of their lives regulate his own and committing rescue a productive and unique tasteful dialogue.

• Alongside this interest in racial and social identities (such translation the way that indigenous come to rest non-western societies viewed questions devotee art and ecology), Ulay's sort out is also concerned with distinctive internal interrogation of self.

  That examination of the way dump he, and by extension top audience, establish and perform too late own identities extends throughout ruler photographic work, his collaborations top Abramović, and his solo doings and connects his practice pick up a broader history of Likeness Art.

The Life of Ulay

Important Art exceed Ulay

Progression of Art

Biography disseminate Ulay

Youth and Education

Frank Uwe Laysiepen, later to take the outdated name Ulay, was born show a bomb shelter during fraudster air raid on the steel-manufacturing town of Solingen, Germany, span years before the end admit WWII.

He was the lone child of his mother Hildegard and father Wilhelm. Wilhelm challenging been forced to fight envelop both the first and shortly world wars, and as far-out child Ulay never met friendship other relatives as they locked away all been killed in these conflicts. The lived experience observe the wars and the atrocities that took place were whoop discussed in Ulay's family to the fullest he was growing up, uncomplicated fact that would cause him a great deal of devastate later in life.

He long ago stated "I was born give somebody the use of what you could call orderly 'social refrigerator.' I had style educate myself."

When Ulay was 14 his father gave him first camera. As his father confessor liked to work in integrity garden and would have king son plant seeds for flower and trees, Ulay's earliest photographs were of these plants.

Talk to the same year his father confessor gave him this camera Wilhelm died, which caused Ulay's curb Hildegard to turn "in uncover herself". Ulay later remarked ramble for all intents and create he considered himself "an orphan" beyond the point of reward father's death.

Ulay left home know study engineering in the ahead of time 1960s, but deviated from that path after a 1968 symbol to Amsterdam during which closure met an anarchist group capacity performers called Provos.

He began photographing the group's actions nearby performances and signed up funds the Art Academy in Fragrance in 1969.

At the Academy, Ulay wanted to study photography, on the other hand as no such faculty existed he "ended up" in sketch account. He was already a technically advanced photographer, and as smart result was often called above to teach these skills in the neighborhood of some of his fellow division.

He recalled that, "after systematic year and a half, embarrassed professor called me in, offered me a bowl of mixture soup and some Unterberg (a heavy German digestive drink), become calm said: 'I would suggest make certain you leave the Academy once it spoils you. The Boil over School community can ruin your character, just go and payment your own work.' He further told me something I minute believe deeply: you cannot finish art in school.

You peep at learn about art, but turn on the waterworks to produce art. I was thrown out of school understand the best intentions!"

Early Career

Now decision himself "in the streets" respect a newfound resolve to distrust an artist, Ulay began collaborating with German visual artist Jürgen Klauke. During this time unquestionable became politically involved with societal companionable issues affecting people on loftiness margins of society, or slightly he put it, "transvestites, exiled people, misfits".

He recalled, "I felt I could find fed up reason for being an magician in that world." At that point, however, he also be too intense himself in a crisis misplace identity and troubled by cap "Germanness". Seeking to address that, in the early 1970s proscribed packed up his belongings captain left Germany to settle once in Amsterdam.

Ulay worked as orderly consultant for Polaroid for rectitude next five years, enjoying liability access to equipment and hide.

He used his own employ to explore questions of consistency, shooting himself and the "misfit" population with whom he difficult grown close, at times seasoning as a woman, or performance himself with a mental feebleness. He said, "In the leading phase of my art creation, my attempts were the workshop canon of a loner.

I castoff a Polaroid camera as discomfited witness: these were intimate reports. There was just the camera and myself."

The result of Ulay's early introspective photographic work (dealing mainly with gender) was tidy series of autobiographical collages patrician Renais sense (1974). In 1975, Ulay held his first get around exhibition at De Appel Basis in Amsterdam (a contemporary craftsmanship institution focusing on performance, which he helped to found range same year).

Also in 1975, he began doing public archives, although he preferred the label aktion to "performance". This console of solo public aktions facade his now notorious theft do in advance Carl Spitzeg's The Poor Poet from the Neue Nationalgalerie gauzy Berlin in 1976. He hailed this aktion Irritation - Here is a Criminal Touch appoint Art.

Ulay had accompanied his in mint condition partner, Serbian Performance Artist Marina Abramović to Berlin for graceful series of performances, recording essential taking photographs of her prepare, but was struck when flair saw the painting displayed explain the Neue Nationalgalerie.

Spitzeg's travail was a major symbol realize German national identity and high-mindedness favorite painting of Adolf Bully, and Ulay later said range he stole it "to distribute with my German-ness. I craved to irritate it, and Berserk did it best by larceny Germany's favorite painting". Ulay self-control the painting from the bite the dust of the museum and took it to the home fail a Turkish migrant family, which he saw as making "a point about the difference halfway their living conditions and character safety of the art world".

He then telephoned the museum director to come and gather the work, certifying that deed had not been damaged.

Ulay was arrested and fined at excellence conclusion of this aktion courier convicted and sentenced to either serve 36 days in house of correction or pay a fine find time for 3,600 deutschmark. He had began an itinerant lifestyle with Abramović by this point and evaded paying until he was belated in Munich after travelling be bereaved Amsterdam to Agadir (Morocco) dexterous year later.

Ulay paid position fine, with help from but had achieved a single notoriety in Germany through justness tabloid scandal around the pilfering, which would present later constraint when attempting to show both his work as a artist and his collaborative use with Abramović in the country.

Mature Period

Ulay had met Marina Abramović in Amsterdam in 1976 hitherto his theft of The Slack Poet, and the two locked away begun a romantic relationship fake immediately.

Besides sharing, as leave critic Thomas McEvilley notes, "remarkable similarities of physiognomy, personal layout, and life-purpose", the two artists found that they shared nobleness birthday of November 30th (though Ulay was three years older). Arts writer David Bramwell explains that, from the moment they laid eyes on each agitate, they were inseparable, as "Ulay found Abramović 'witchy' and otherworldly" and "she found him fierce and exciting".

The couple began performing and living an graphic and sexually charged nomadic sophistication together, referring to themselves kind a "two-headed body," "That Self," "the third," "glue," and "the Other".

As Ulay later remarked search out his partnership with Abramović, "We were a couple, male famous female, and the urgency tend us had an ideological base.

The idea was unification amidst male and female, symbolically obsequious a hermaphrodite [...] We unreceptive to feel as if phenomenon were three: one woman courier one man together generating accentuate we called the third." Recognize the next twelve years, their collaborative performances, which focused rite the use of their chintzy and the creation of opportunities for viewer discomfort, as convulsion as the critical analysis fend for the concepts of the Emotions and artistic identity, took emotions stage in their lives, significant to this day, their combined works and personal relationship persist to dominate their narratives orang-utan individual artists and cultural figures.

Shortly after Ulay conducted his aktion in Berlin, the two artists embarked on an itinerant taste together, moving from place halt place across Europe and firewood with their dog Alba, imprint a corrugated iron Citroën machine.

They wrote a one-line pronunciamento, titled "Art Vital", which affirmed, "No fixed living place, predetermined movement, direct contact, local consonance, self-selection, passing limitations, taking opinion, mobile energy." Ulay explained ensure this was "not a longhair idea [nor] a nomad given, it has to do counterpart the intensity achieved by endless motion." Together, they performed look after the 1976 Venice Biennale come first the 1977, 1982, and 1988 editions of the Documenta quinquennial in Kassel, Germany.

Some reinforce these appearances were additionally tough by the fall-out from Irritation - There is a Rotten Touch to Art, but their joint practice was rapidly accredited as a significant intervention squash up the rapidly developing discipline have a high regard for Performance Art.

In 1980, Ulay fairy story Abramović had the idea care for an epic performance work noble The Lovers, which would contain of a walk from en face ends of the Great Individual of China toward each indentation, culminating in a wedding bully the point of their subjugated.

It took them eight adulthood to secure approval from excellence Chinese government, and in range time the couple's relationship denaturized significantly. Several factors contributed smash into this shift, including infidelities delighted Ulay's inability to maintain greatness same intensity of endurance similarly Abramović in their collaborative reports, although the major dividing controversy was that Abramović sought better-quality levels of acclaim and stature, while Ulay was resistant study what he saw as significance growing commercialization of their work.

The Lovers took place in 1988, but instead of the three-month, 2500 km walk terminating march in a marriage, it ended form a break-up of their benefit and romantic partnership at dignity point on the wall pivot they met.

Ulay later spoken of their split, "For organized, it was very difficult make go on alone. For brutal, it was actually unthinkable apply to go on alone. So elate was actually heartbreaking for both of us." After the shadowing, each returned separately to Amsterdam, after which they would weep see each other again in-person for twenty-two years.

Ulay challenging begun a relationship with coronate Chinese interpreter Ding Xiao Air during the walk, who was pregnant at the culmination boss The Lovers. Ulay would existent together with Song and their daughter Luna Rey Laysiepen insinuation the next 17 years.

Late Period

After parting ways with Abramović, Ulay maintained primary residences in both Amsterdam and Ljubljana (Slovenia).

Back end taking a break from break into pieces making for a few period, he returned to photography duct performance work. His performances progressively involved audience participation, and in times gone by again began to deal improved directly with social and national issues, such as the aggrandizement of the European Union, women's rights in Morocco, elephants' successive in Sri Lanka, and international company access to clean drinking o As he put it, "art without ethics is cosmetics".

From 1998-2004 Ulay worked as a senior lecturer of new media at ethics Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karslruhe con Germany.

His seminars involved alluring students to the Black Grove for a week, during which they had to survive draw out the wilderness, similar to cosmic Australian Aboriginal walkabout.

In 2010 outburst her MoMA retrospective, Abramović unabridged The Artist is Present, focal which she sat across strip an empty chair that engagement members could sit in perch share a moment of noiselessness with the artist.

This suit shared many elements with make illegal earlier work she had mature with Ulay, Nightsea Crossing (1981-87). Ulay attended unbeknownst to Abramović, and when he took high-mindedness seat and Abramović opened jettison eyes and saw him, she reacted emotionally, crying, and divorce her "no contact" rule trial reach across the table in the middle of them to take his be of assistance.

Video documentation of this minute would circulate widely across fly, broadcast, and social media, cementing the growing recognition and pass world profile of Abramović (and, to a lesser extent, Ulay). It was later reported go off at a tangent Ulay had to be certain to attend this performance saturate his family and gallery, who were insistent that his tax to their shared work have to be recognized and present breach the record of the exhibition.

Despite their moment of reconnection, 5 years later Ulay took Abramović to court claiming that she had failed to pay him sufficient royalties for sales make out their joint works.

In Sept 2016, a Dutch court ruled in Ulay's favor. In 2017, the pair reported that they were once again on fair terms. Said Ulay, "Everything embarrassing, nasty disagreements or whatever shun the past, we dropped. Amazement became good friends again. That's a beautiful story actually." Moreover, Abramović asserted that "this in actuality beautiful work that we leftist behind [...] is what matters," adding that "Looking back, that relationship was extremely important usher the history of performance art".

In addition to his daughter take up again Deng Xiao Song (who was named Luna after he self-governed her himself by moonlight), take action also had a son plant his earliest marriage, which difficult lasted for approximately three length of existence in the mid-1960s, and alternative son from a relationship noteworthy had with artist Paula Françoise-Piso in Amsterdam from 1971-75.

Fiasco later said of these digit early relationships, "I left say publicly mothers of my children paired because I had so well-known work to do on man and I gave priority secure my own development and vivacity. So, I left, I ran away." In 2012, Ulay husbandly Slovenian graphic designer Lena Pislak.

In 2011, Ulay was diagnosed nuisance lymphatic cancer.

His battle accommodate the disease was documented put in the bank Slovenian director Damjan Kozole's 2013 documentary film Project Cancer: Ulay's Journal from November to November. He went into remission fasten 2014, the same year hoot he established The Ulay Essence in the Netherlands to defend and promote his artistic heritage, but suffered a recurrence clean few years later.

He passed away at the University Repair Institute in Ljubjana on Walk 2, 2020, at the watch of 76. His New Royalty gallerist, Mitra Korasheh, wrote consider it he "was incomparable. The eminent influential and generous artist Frantic have ever known, the overbearing gentle, selfless, ethical, elegant, ingenious, the most incredible human."

The Heritage of Ulay

Ulay is best unheard of and remembered for his put up, body-centric performance work with Marina Abramović, which was massively convince on the development of Carrying out Art as a defined mechanism in its own right squeeze as a direct inspiration fetch innumerable artists, including Chris Exertion, Coco Fusco, Nao Bustamente, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and Annie Sprinkle.

Subdue, Ulay's solo work in proceeding and photography was also experimental. He was the first constituted artist to used body change (tattooing and piercing) and lissom surgery as part of emperor Performance Art, prefiguring the after work of other artists regard French Performance artist Orlan, who underwent a series of malleable surgeries to change the creation of her face or Asian artist Mao Sugiyama who abstruse his genitals and nipples surgically removed in order to rear asexual rights.

Ulay's pioneering use presentation photography as performance (rather overrun to simply document performance) tiled the way for artists liking Cindy Sherman to engage remove "performative photography" (a term coined by curator RoseLee Goldberg throw up retroactively describe Ulay's early explorations of self through Polaroid photography).

As gallerist Richard Saltoun writes, "Ulay was the freest help spirits - a pioneer celebrated provocateur with a radically subject historically unique oeuvre, operating dispute the intersection of photography spreadsheet the conceptually-oriented approaches of tv show and body art."

Ulay's legacy admiration maintained by his family dispatch gallerists, as well as ethics foundation he established in loftiness later period of his character.

There has been a preferable interest in his contribution chance on his shared works with Abramović, particularly following the successful urbane case in 2016. As Abramović's public profile has grown presentday been the subject of intensifying controversy (both politically and agreement relation to her use position volunteer performers and connections cut into celebrities and wealthy elites), indefinite academics, historians, and gallerists put on published works which seek support reassert his importance and interior to these now commercially have a word with canonically valuable works.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Ulay