Marina Abramović and Ulay, key performances, life, works

Marina Abramović (Belgrade, 1946) and Ulay, a pseudonym for Frank Uwe Laysiepen (Solingen, 1943 - Ljubljana, 2020) were a pair of artists who focused on performance art, both in sodality in the 1970s and 1980s and separately. The pair were also linked by an emotional bond that lasted many years, and in their collaborations together they explored certain aspects of relationships between people, sometimes taking them to extremes. They met many years after the end of their bond during a solo performance by Abramović, resulting in a moment that gained much acclaim in the era of early social networks such as Facebook.

Marina Abramović and Ulay have gained international notoriety, as well as public and critical acclaim, since the 1970s thanks to their often disconcerting performances, all of which centered on the body, used as a material, as an artistic medium to conduct an in-depth investigation of social and relational dynamics.“Together,” wrote art critic Martina Corgnati, “the two stage many boundary positions and systematically explore several key relationships: man-woman, male-female, body-body, person-person, in many variations, including possible symbiosis, osmosis, complicity, antagonism, distance, intrusion, violence, tenderness, passion and complementarity. They often implicitly ’challenge’ each other, using each other as a ground for confrontation and open confrontation, a testing ground.”

Biography of Marina Abramović and Ulay

Marina Abramović was born in Belgrade, Serbia, on November 30, 1946, and is the granddaughter of a patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, who was later proclaimed a saint. Her parents, Vojin Abramović and Danica Rosić were both partisans in World War II. He studied at theBelgrade Academy of Fine Arts from 1965 to 1973. Later, he in turn taught for a few years at the Academy in Novi Sad, and in 1976 he moved to Amsterdam. There he would meet the German artist Ulay.

Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen) was born in Solingen at the height of World War II, on November 30, 1943. He moved to Amsterdam in the late 1960s, leaving behind his wife and child, attracted by the anarchist-inspired “Provo” art movement. He became interested in photography by experimenting with early instant cameras, eventually bringing this art into live performance as well. The two met in the course of 1976 at the Appel Art Gallery in Amsterdam, where Abramović had been invited for a television program devoted to performance art, a field in which she had already been noted for some very strong happenings. They immediately began a very intense personal and artistic relationship, sharing the same interest in experiments concerning man and his relationships. The investigation of these aspects is taken to extremes in an attempt to provoke deep reflections in the audience. Noteworthy is the detail whereby the couple chose for three years to take their performances around Europe living nomadically and essentially in an old police van, repurposed for use and repainted black. Numerous photographs document the experience.

They would remain together in both life and art for 12 years, until 1988, when they announced their separation to the world through a celebrated performance that took place on the Great Wall of China. When the two resumed working solo, Ulay returned to photography exclusively while Abramović continued in performance art, achieving great popularity. In the 1990s, a number of legal disputes arose between the two regarding the copyrights of work done together. The disputes ended with Abramović being obliged to pay her former partner a sum of money as compensation for having sold works by both of them independently. Abramović meanwhile had taken to traveling extensively around the world, eventually settling permanently in New York, where she created a meeting place dedicated to performance artists.

While the two artists’ careers continued in parallel, Ulay was diagnosed with cancer in 2009, shortly after moving to Ljubljana. He uses the diagnosis of the disease as if it were another art project, through which he questions the big issues of life and art, visiting the most important places in his life and going to say goodbye to all his friends. A documentary will later be made from this project in 2013.

Abramović and Ulay meet again in 2010, and the meeting happens in plain sight. Ulay, in fact, decided to travel to New York and participate in Abramović’s performance The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art, which consisted of the audience being given the opportunity to sit in front of the artist and look at her. The artist was supposed to respond to the participant’s gaze by staring at him or her, without interacting with him or her, to watch his or her reaction, but when Abramović realizes that in front of her is Ulay himself, she cannot hold back her emotion and takes the hands of her former partner, who is also emotional. The scene was captured on video and quickly spread on major social networks such as Facebook and Youtube, shared by thousands of people even several years later.

Ulay’s battle with cancer lasted for about ten years, between treatments, remissions and finally a lymphoma that would prove fatal to him on March 2, 2020. Marina Abramović continues her artistic research to this day.

The paired performances of Marina Abramović and Ulay

Since her earliest performances in the late 1970s, Marina Abramović has focused on taking the limits regarding the body’s physical endurance and emotionality to extremes, investigating the audience’s reaction in the face of potentially very dangerous situations. In fact, it is often the audience that is the real protagonist of the performance, an aspect that at first analysis seems to emerge less than the focus on the strong actions performed by the artist. Abramović in those years therefore gives birth to numerous happenings in which she comes to deliberately lose consciousness after starting a fire, injures her body by creating specific images (such as a five-pointed star carved on her belly with a razor) and performs other self-injurious acts that force the viewer to intervene to save the artist, creating a direct relationship with her.

Even during her artistic and human partnership with Ulay, Abramović continued on this track, expanding her experiments with her partner. Ulay, after all, had previously done some groundbreaking work on the theme of the union of the masculine and the feminine (in a series of instant photographs titled Auto Polaroid from 1974, he portrays himself while wearing half a woman’s makeup) promulgating the importance of recognizing the feminine part of men and inviting them to value it in order to find themselves and create a deep connection with their loved one. In addition, Ulay had also used photography to launch a provocation, whereby the people portrayed in the photos are actually a mechanical duplicate of themselves with no identity. In his performance Fototot (1976), Ulay photographed with a Polaroid camera the silhouette of a named participant in the audience, placing it in front of a linen sheet made photosensitive. Later, he would project the Polaroid by superimposing himself on the image, thus demonstrating that in front of a photograph it is no longer possible to establish the specific identity of a person.

Between 1976 and 1988, the two artists gave numerous performances together, grouped under the title Relation works. In their first performance together, in the context of the Venice Biennale, Abramović and Ulay are locked in a room for an hour(Relation space). Completely naked, they wander around the room brushing against each other and colliding, increasing in speed and violence as the minutes pass. In this case, the goal for the pair was to lead the audience to wonder who the protagonists were and what relationship they had with each other, whether of love or hate. Abramović said later that it was quite easy for the audience to understand how intense their love relationship was. Also from 1976 is Relation in time: inside the Galleria - studio G7 in Bologna, the two artists sit back to back for sixteen hours, with their hair pulled tightly together in a single hairstyle. Only in the last hour is the audience let in, finding before them a being created by the combination of male and female as if it were a third entity made of both. The subtext of the performance was about the bond between two lovers, who although intimately connected (hair braided together) may not necessarily be able to communicate (they never look at each other’s faces).

It dates back to 1977 Breathing in/Breathing out (1977): made in Belgrade, the two artists are filmed exchanging breaths through their mouths for twenty minutes. At the end of the performance, the two artists pass out due to lack of oxygen. Here, the pair of artists intended to suggest how death often hovers with its presence in collaborative games. In the same year, the two perform Imponderabilia : in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, Abramović and Ulay are naked and stand facing each other on either side of the Gallery’s entrance. At that point, the audience must necessarily pass through the two naked bodies, deciding whether to turn toward the female nude or the male nude. The inherent significance of the performance is about having to make decisions quickly, often without knowing why. The performance was interrupted after an hour because of the arrival of the carabinieri, who were called for indecent exposure.

In 1978 it was the turn of AAA-AAA (1978). It took place in a recording studio with no audience in Liege. The two artists yell at each other, at first making monotonous sounds, then beginning to compete over who would yell the loudest and longest. Ulay is the first to give up. The significance of this performance is the intention to portray two lovers who at first are on the same level, but as time goes on they try to overpower each other. It is a continuation of an earlier performance by Abramović, Freeing the voice, in which the artist screams for a long time until she loses her voice. Rest energy , on the other hand, is from 1980 : it is a performance recorded on video. Marina Abramović and Ulay assume a position such that the balance of the weight of their bodies keeps a bow with an arrow in tension. He keeps the string pulled, with the arrow pointing to the heart of Abramović who with her arm clings to the bow. A wrong movement could prove fatal to her, so she must rely completely on the other person, thus investigating the theme of trust in the other. The couple remains in this position for four minutes while a microphone amplifies their heartbeats and breathing, accelerated and irregular at first and then increasingly relaxed as the minutes pass. The video cuts out just as the tension is fading. Abramović will say that this was the most difficult performance to tackle.

The performance Nightsea crossing conjunction (1981 - 1987) has been made numerous times in different settings, both outdoors and in museums or other indoor settings. The two artists fast and remain silent both before and during the performance. They sit at a table for seven hours and watch each other, completely still and silent. The underlying message is about becoming aware of the fact that the mind continues to work even while the body is motionless, and the very effort of not moving for all that time is, for all intents and purposes, work that the brain performs incessantly. In 1985 comes Modus vivendi : the pair takes the three positions in which human beings usually find themselves, namely standing, lying down or sitting, and then includes a fourth one, namely moving or walking. It is meant to be, this, a metaphor for the stages of life that each of us goes through. Finally, the couple’s last performance is Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (1988). The end of the love story between Abramović and Ulay also becomes a performance. The two artists walk the Great Wall of China, each starting from two different ends of the path. After ninety days they meet halfway, and say goodbye to each other. At that point they walk away again, each going their own way.

Where to see the works of Abramović and Ulay

Since these are, clearly, performance art, it is possible to view videos or photographs from them. Some are preserved in the video libraries of some museums, such as a video from Relation in Time (1976) that appears in the video archive of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin.

Works by Ulay are held in the Netherlands, where he lived for many years: in Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum), Eindhoven (Van Abbemuseum), Groningen (Groninger Museum). Other works can be found in Paris (Centre Pompidou), Bern (Kunstmuseum Bern), Stockholm (Moderna Museet).

In the United States, you can see some works in New York (MoMA - Museum of Modern Art) and San Francisco (Museum of Modern Art).

In Italy, where the two created some famous performances in the 1970s, a number of exhibitions have been organized, including one dedicated to Abramović (in which performances with Ulay were also featured) in 2018 at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. The exhibition in question had been anticipated by the display of the van in which the couple had lived for three years, parked in the courtyard of the palace. An appearance by Abramović in Italy was organized very recently, in July 2021 at MAXXI in Rome, as part of the exhibition Più grande di me. Heroic Voices from the Former Yugoslavia. Here the artist was present through images of the performance Rhythm 0, plus she participated in some of the focus through a streaming interview.

Marina Abramović and Ulay, key performances, life, works

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