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| Ulay: Art without Cosmetics Jekaterina Vikuļina, Art Critic | |
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The Dutch artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen, 1943) is a classic performance artist and photographer. Many will be aware of his collaboration with the artist Marina Abramovich, who was his partner for several years both in art and in private life. But Ulay's ascent to the Olympian heights of art is not only due to his joint performances (for example Expanding in Space (1977); The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (1988), etc.). He is also well-known for the celebrated theft of Hitler's favourite painting, Karl Spitzweg's The Poor Poet, from the National Gallery in Berlin. The artist then hung the painting in the apartment of some Turkish immigrants, and invited the gallery's director to enjoy the Biedermeier painting in a new setting. But these sorts of pranks have been abadoned, left to the 1970s. Now Ulay's Nordic features are complimented by greying sideburns and a well modulated voice, well-suited to an artistic giant who can look back at his artistic achievements with pride. He has no plans to rest on his laurels, however. For the last few years Ulay has been actively working on a project devoted to the problem of the decline in stocks of drinking water. Fittingly, our conversation took place on the shores of a picturesque lake in Lithuania. | |
 Ulay | |
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Jekaterina Vikulina: How has the situation in art changed in comparison to the 1970s, when you began your career as an artist? Ulay: Changes take place constantly. No one can stop this process. Although art does try to do this, if we are talking about museums and their collections which display mementos from bygone years. Major changes in contemporary art began with the emergence of Dadaism, and later with Constructivism in Russia and Europe. Of principal importance and significance in these processes was the work of Marcel Duchamp, later Black Mountain College in the USA and artists such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg. They were quite revolutionary in their work. Happenings and performances, Fluxus, and the conceptualists followed. Today this is all interpreted as anti-art, which has inspired the development of art. My performances, being conceptual by nature, form part of this movement. When I started working as an artist I. was constantly asking myself: What do you want to do? How do you want to do it? With what resources? What kind of media will you use? I chose media which at the time hadn't gained legitimacy in art: Polaroid photography, film (often 16 mm) and performance. Now these media are described as postmodern. So it turned out that in the 1970s I started out as a postmodernist, although nobody used the term back then. My chosen media prevented my works from being exhibited in galleries and museums. So why did I, along with many other American and European artists, continue to use them? I think we started off out of a feeling of protest and discontent. It was a form of sabotage. Usually an artist does not base his or her creative work on dissatisfaction, but rather in uncovering the truth, or his or her version of the truth. But the 1970s generation... flower power... to a large extent it was similar to the 1960s generation. Politicised youth brought forth causes for revolution. Unfortunately the revolution failed. But it was a surprising movement, and there was a spirit of mutual understanding between these people and the artists. Performances by women were the most important achievements of the 1970s, because they were both art and politics at the same time. Women were very active in expressing their ideas, they defended their interests in the realm of art and we can see the results: today: women hold the majority of leading intellectual positions. I chose to work together with a female artist for 12 years, although I would consider myself neither a feminist nor a male chauvinist. Working together with a woman was the wisest thing I could have done. J. V.: What artists have inspired you the most? U.: For me, Dadaism was very important, Marcel Duchamp - reflecting on his works became a good artistic exercise. Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, and the youthful works of Bruce Naumann and Chris Burden. Gina Pain, Valie Export, Ulrike Rosenbach, Marina Abramovich, Vito Aconchi as well as the early works of Terry Fox have also been important. Even Trisha Brown and Simone Forti with early postmodernist dance. These artists also have meant something to me because they are from my generation. J.V.: How do you explain the remarkable popularity of photo-graphy today? U.: It is ironic that photography has been around for about 180 years, but for 160 of those years it was not considered to be a suitable medium for artistic expression. But now it has become the centerpiece of contemporary art. One reason for this is that during late modernism critics and art historians declared art to be a universal phenomenon. Clement Greenberg once said that Jackson Pollock's paintings would save the world. I assume that the attraction of photography is related to the politicisation of particular aspects in a specific generation, the Vietnam War for example. This media was selected because it offers the closest representation of reality. Photography is associated with reality. Painting can also be very realistic, but it has other connotations, it is regarded completely differently. Photography depicts reality. That is why artists used it, in parallel with video and performance, which are also close to reality. There's a lot of talk these days about media, but I believe that the most important thing is the person, the human body. All other media have been invented as bodily extensions, as technological prostheses. A pair of glasses or a camera are extensions of the eyes. J.V.: Of all the photographic means available, why do you choose to take Polaroids? U.: Polaroids are the most immediately connected with the subject they are picturing. Traditional photography is a black box in which you observe things. You can't give the person their image straight away, you can't involve the person in the photographic process directly and without mediators. With Polaroids, you can instantly share the results. It's like an exchange of gifts. The possibility to do this completely changes the relationship between the photograher and the subject. I often take a Polaroid camera with me on journeys, regardless of whet-her I'm visiting eskimos or aborigines. I always give the first picture to the people I am photographing. Sometimes they laugh, at other times they look critically at themselves, but most are happy to have their photo, and this is the start of a relationship. This is not the case with traditional photography, and that's why I choose Polaroids. J.V.: Please tell us more about your work Fototot. U.: I have been working with Polaroids since 1969. Before that I used to write aphorisms and poetry, and when I discovered Polaroids these spheres of activity for a while ovelapped. I once put a photo in a typewriter and printed one of my verses on it. Gradually the words became fewer and fewer, because words demand greater intellectual effort than images. But images have more emotion. With my discovery of the Polaroid I also discovered emotions which required a more precise form of expression than words could provide, and words lost in the end. At the time I was interested in genetics issues, I was thinking a lot about identity, my karma or fate, about my origins. I have been an orphan since I was 15 and haven't had a family, I have been responsible for myself - I'm a self-made person. I stood before the Polaroid as a transvestite, as flesh being circumcised, tattooed, pierced, transplanted, subject to all sorts of torments. I studied myself not only as a photographic identity, but also as a body which I used as my sculptural material. After thousands of Polaroid images, I concluded that the identity of the photographic image is a paradox. Another paradox is the fact that a passport photo is considered to be an automatic sign of identification, yet for photographic purposes it is possible to manipulate your identity in countless different ways. I understood that I could go on like this for 100 years and take millions of photos, but what would be the point? So I arrived at the work Fototot (‘Photo Death'), which is a step away from photography in the direction of performance. Fototot was shown in the De Appel Gallery in Amsterdam in 1975 - 1976. I prepared nine self-portraits with a landscape background. The first shot was a close-up, then I put the camera on a tripod and took ten steps back, then 20 steps for the next shot, and so on. With each shot the person becomes smaller, until they completely disappear in the landscape. I made black and white, one metre by one metre photocopies (omitting to treat the photo paper with fixing agent) and put them on three walls. The space was dark, and I lit it with two yellowish-green lamps from a photographic laboratory. I set myself up on the fourth floor of the building with a camera and a switch which regulated powerful halogen lights in the gallery, and when these lit up, in the space of a few seconds the photographs became overexposed and turned into pitch black squares. The viewers were in shock (and I documented this). They had come to look at the art on the gallery walls, but it vanished before their eyes. A month later I held Fototot 2. The nine black squares remained on the walls, and I placed a table with a lamp and a black album in the room. The room had the same yellowish-green laboratory lighting. The viewers opened the album, switched on the table lamp and looked at the Fototot documentation. While they were looking at the photos, the images disappeared. Fototot was one of my best works. J.V.: How do you differentiate between art photography and documentary photography used for recording a performance, for example? U.: I don't see any difference. In both cases the image can be interesting and of high quality. I don't categorise photography as an autonomous artistic sphere, although Marina Abramovich does. Unfortunately, artistic photography is a formalistic, aesthetic game. But its absence does not have to be an obligatory precondition for documentary photography. There are excellent documentary photographers whose work reaches a certain level of "completeness" with formal aesthetic values, and I have no objections to that. J.V.: You presented a lecture in Russia titled Aesthetics without ethics is nothing but cosmetic. (This statement is attributed to the Swiss artist Remy Zaugg - J.V.) Do you think there's too much of the cosmetic in contemporary art? U.: Many young artists today are working with photography, video, performance - media which have gone from being revolutionary to being routine and boring. The attitude and significance have changed. I did what I truly wanted to do. My artworks were critical of society, art and myself. I think that now young artists simply produce performances, basically repeating what was done 30 or more years ago, without being particularly interested in the motivations of the artists back then. Because they are working today, and today performance is a legitimate art form, a recognised part of culture just like dance, music and theatre. Performance has entered galleries and museums, and artists are paid for their works. I don't believe in these performance "revivals". They don't have the ring of truth about them. They have become a part of the culture industry: an aesthetic without substance. As regards photography, it's become too beautiful. This is mainly due to digital technology. The images exceed the boundaries of perception. This doesn't interest me. If the image has become sharper and the colours brighter than my eyes can perceive, what's the point? Many young photographers, especially women, act as social critics, highlighting injustice by photographing the impoverished, or physically or mentally ill people, then reproducing the photos using hi-tech materials, on a gigantic scale as if they were advertising billboards. I consider this to be a total misconception about what their mission should be. A mistake has crept into the relationship between reality and the concept - this is what has changed. There are also lots of artists claiming that their art will change the world, make it better. I think that art is far too insignificant, it can't change anything. Art can only change the meaning and perception of art itself. But that's not the objective. Art today is an international, multi-million dollar business. In the 1970s the market couldn't put a price on what I and other artists of my generation were doing. Now the market determines value, and sets the criteria for good and bad art. Art has become a consumer item, it's commercial. That doesn't apply to me. I've never earned money with my art. I'm not a businessman in this respect, not because I lack the intellect to do it or because I have some ethical dilemma - I simply don't want to pollute my mind by capitalizing on my art. Someone else may do it, but I don't want to. J.V.: You said that art cannot change anything. But in the 1970s you believed that revolution was possible. Are you disappointed that the revolution didn't happen? U.: No. We believed that art could change attitudes towards art. At the same time, we wanted to use art to change society, so we distanced ourselves from the art world, we moved out of the ivory tower of galleries and museums and took to the streets to create art there. The media reporting about us was sensationalist, about artists operating in an environment not intended for them. In the end we changed art, but not the world. I'm not disappointed, because what is happening today is the result of our earlier actions. We also changed the point of view of art historians. Previously they were very lethargic people, but today art historians and curators are highly mobile. Changes took place in the academic sphere, in museums and in galleries. Life - the street - came into them. I want to bring what I consider to be important into the art world. I've initiated change once before, and I'd like to do it again. Now I'm working on a project about the shortage of drinking water in the world. I've visited Palestine, Israel and Patagonia, and now all my attention and time is focused on problems connected to drinking water. I don't care if the subject doesn't fit into the parameters of art. In this case art isn't the main thing. J.V.: Artists are always looking for new media. You have said that you are tired of forms of expression such as performance and photography. Has water become an artistic medium for you? U.: Perhaps water is the most ancient medium of all. The Earth came into being thanks to water. I want to make water famous and to present it to people. Water is very scarce. I want to involve children aged six to 16, because their generation will face problems with water shortages that will in turn lead to much conflict and destruction. Compared with water, oil is a mere trifle. Water is humanity's main problem. There can be nothing without water. J.V.: Would you agree that this project has more of a social character, whereas your performances were ontologically based, concentrating on aspects of life and death, gender, sexuality and trans-sexuality issues, using psychological and even psycho-pathological methods to describe the human existence? U.: I think that they were more emotional works, and had more in common with psychology than psychopathology. For example, Orlan's surgical operations have reached a pathological level. I met her recently in New York. She's very nice, even if she doesn't look normal (and she doesn't have any wish to look normal anyway). If you use plastic surgery to become abnormal, that's pathological. But my performances weren't pathological - they were partly emotional, partly intellectual, partly psychological. J.V.: Has art turned away from representing the person as a unified whole, with all of his or her fantasies and phobias, focusing instead on the person as a cell? What do you think of bioart? U.: I don't call my art genetic. It could be called an anagrammatic body, there was a great exhibition with that name (the personal ex-hibition Anagrammatic Body by American multimedia artist Douglas Davis (1933) at the Neue Galerie in 1999 - Translator's note). But genetics was the beginning of my art, which also drew attention to the body, to its manipulation, to the monstrous representation of the human body. The first publications about genetics disturbed and repelled me. They were reminiscent of Hitler's ideas, and raised ethical issues. In my opinion this is still the most serious problem in genetics: the laws of ethics are ignored throughout the world. The problem of genetics showed me the way and made me an artist. In parallel with political ideas, I wanted to show how easily the body is injured, how easily it can be manipulated, transformed, destroyed. That was my idea, but at the time it was not as clearly formulated as bioart is today. J.V.: Are you continuing to work in the performance genre? U.: Not regularly. For me it's in the past. The audience has changed. Today you can't do what you could do in the 1970s. For example, long performances. People no longer have the patience to observe, to seek and to find enjoyment in action, in activity and passivity. Digital technologies have spoiled people's reactions, changed the meaning of things. So it seems logical to me that I have also changed. J.V.: Which new performance artists do you find interesting? U.: New names turn up every day, and I can't remember them all. Exotic names...It seems that there never have been so many artists before, especially from the far-flung former colonies. And there's also never been so many communications technologies, so many opportunities to make your art known. At the moment art is like the universe after the Big Bang. I can't possibly keep up with everything, I leave that to the young curators. There are interesting artists, but I don't care. To find something good amongst all that is going on would be a full-time job, and I have other work to do. I'm old, and accordingly have become selective about how I spend my time. J.V.: Are you still taking photographs? U.: I will be using photos and videos in my new project, but it won't be traditional photography. I'm not saying what exactly it will be, except that it will be like a stream of water. J.V.: Which of your works do you consider to be the most important? U.: I think there are only four. They are: Fototot, the theft of the painting from the National Gallery, my collaborative work with Marina Abramovich, especially the performances between 1976 and 1980, and the new water project. In a single breath I can name the most important things in my life. /Translator into English: Filips Birzulis/ | |
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