Frank uwe laysiepen biography
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He stated, "As I began using the Polaroid camera, mainly pointing it at myself - a practice I called auto-Polaroid - I immediately discovered its performative element. It looked disastrous." The surgeon then took a thin layer of skin from the underside of Ulay's forearm, and grafted it where the tattoo had been. On this day, it is comforting to know that his art and legacy will live on forever.”
Among their most famous works is Rest Energy (1980), in which the couple held a bow and arrow—with the sharp object pointed directly at Abramović’s heart.
For much of his career, he was based in Amsterdam and Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Ulay’s performances with Abramović landed the two artists placements in the world’s biggest exhibitions early in their careers, including the 1976 Venice Biennale and three editions of the Documenta quinquennial in Kassel, Germany, in 1977, 1982, and 1988.
He had also produced several long-term projects in Australia, India, China, and Europe while also working as a professor of Performance and New Media Art at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe in Germany. E. T. RATION ULTIMA RATIO, "the gesture most clearly portended an ambivalent relationship with pain. He passed away at the University Rehabilitation Institute in Ljubjana on March 2, 2020, at the age of 76.
They embraced as they said a heartfelt farewell to one another, with Ulay telling Abramović that he wished he could continue to walk with her "forever". He called this aktion Irritation - There is a Criminal Touch to Art.
Ulay had accompanied his new partner, Serbian Performance Artist Marina Abramović to Berlin for a series of performances, recording and taking photographs of her work, but was struck when he saw the painting displayed in the Neue Nationalgalerie.
For me, it was actually unthinkable to go on alone. The work would involve herself and Ulay walking toward each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China over the course of months and holding a wedding when they met at a central point.
An Event about Art and Psychiatry, held in the Netherlands there is evidence again of the artist’s approach to audience participation. He was the only child of his mother Hildegard and father Wilhelm. Their urgency is conveyed in their volume and their immediacy enhanced by the use of Polaroid." Performance curator RoseLee Goldberg retroactively coined the term "performative photography" to describe Ulay's photos from this early period, recognizing his creation of a new category distinct from the use of photography as mere documentation of a performance.
Skin
1976
Irritation - There Is a Criminal Touch to Art
For Irritation - There Is a Criminal Touch to Art Ulay stole Hitler's favorite painting, Carl Spitzeg's The Poor Poet (1839) from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and took it to the home of a migrant Turkish family, where he hung it on the wall.
Both Ulay and Abramović also came across a number of families living in caves carved into the wall itself. Ulay spent much of his journey in the desert, coming across locals with working donkeys and camels. Although Abramović and Laysiepen had met the morning of the exhibition, Ulay and Marina shared a deeply emotional moment when Ulay surprised Marina by deciding to sit opposite her in silence and participate in her performance piece.
Life After Marina: Ulay’s Solo Work
After his break with Marina, Ulay returned his focus to photography, producing a very consistent body of work.
[...] These were very intimate and private works, my business, nobody else's. It took them eight years to secure approval from the Chinese government, and in that time the couple's relationship changed significantly. He had spoken with the family beforehand, but only told them that he wanted to enter their home for "documentary film reasons". Ulay’s artistic career is summarized by a radical and profound photographic and performative exploration of the human experience, the human body, and the human psyche.
He was already a technically advanced photographer, and as a result was often called upon to teach these skills to some of his fellow students. The idea was unification between male and female, symbolically becoming a hermaphrodite [...] We used to feel as if we were three: one woman and one man together generating something we called the third." For the next twelve years, their collaborative performances, which focused on the use of their bodies and the creation of opportunities for viewer discomfort, as well as the critical analysis of the concepts of the Ego and artistic identity, took center stage in their lives, and to this day, their collaborative works and personal relationship continue to dominate their narratives as individual artists and cultural figures.
Shortly after Ulay conducted his aktion in Berlin, the two artists embarked on an itinerant lifestyle together, moving from place to place across Europe and living with their dog Alba, in a corrugated iron Citroën van.