Ulay
| Ulay | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
Frank Uwe Laysiepen November 30, 1943 Solingen, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Known for | Performance art |
Ulay (real name Frank Uwe Laysiepen German: [fʁaŋk ˈuːvə laɪˈziːpn̩]; born November 30, 1943 in Solingen, Germany) is an artist based in Amsterdam and Ljubljana. Since 1971, he is known in artistic circles as Ulay, a pseudonym that combines the initial of his name with the first syllable of his surname. Ulay received international recognition through his radical actions and Polaroid works from the early seventies, followed by the collaborative performances with Marina Abramović (Relation Works 1976-1988) and his photographic experiments from the 1990s until today. His artistic trajectory amounts to a radical and historically unique oeuvre, situated at the intersection of photography and the conceptually oriented approaches towards performance and body art.
His lifelong struggle with his sense of “German-ness” turned him into a modern nomad, a cosmopolitan free thinker whose identity has never been defined by nationality. In the early 1970s, as a young man, he moved to Amsterdam, attracted by the constructive anarchy of the provo movement. Here he began a lifelong adventure in photography. Analogue photography, Polaroid in particular, became the chosen medium for a body of work spanning from radical self-examinations (Auto-Polaroids, Photo-Aphorisms, the anagrammatic collages from the series Renais sense) to life-size Polaroids and Polagrams, exploring what Andrè Bazin referred to as “the ontological in the photographic image”.
Since the beginning of his career, when Ulay started the archive of Auto-Polaroids, he uses the body as a starting point for interrogating the meaning of the human condition, investigating how this affects his experience of space and how a bodily experience can be translated into an artistic one. His act of comprehending the world is the very practice of reality and this cannot be dissociated in terms of its relationship to the self or to the body, nor can it be extricated from the context in or against which it has chosen to take a stance. This way of accessing knowledge through the intelligence of the body offers a fundamental rationale for his predilection for photography and performance. So, whereas photography entails translating experience into image while at the same time conveying an impression of involvement, performance is par excellence a medium of the body, relying on a different type of participatory experience, one that involves a confrontation with his audience. Ulay’s radical practice of the body stands out in how it avoids aestheticization, and also in its preference for self-analysis, as this can best ‘document’ the true intensity of the emotion experienced in front of the camera or the audience.
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