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Ulay (real name Frank Uwe Laysiepen ; 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. == Early career== His lifelong struggle with his sense of “German-ness”〔Cassin, A. in conversation with Ulay. Finding Identity: Unlearning. In Whispers: Ulay on Ulay, authors: Maria Rus Bojan, Alessandro Cassin; Valiz, Amsterdam, 2014 (pp. 189-192); ISBN 978-90-78088-72-1〕 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.〔Bojan, M. R. Body: Threshold of Knowledge, Signifying Surface and Generator of Artistic Expression. In Whispers: Ulay on Ulay, authors: Maria Rus Bojan, Alessandro Cassin; Valiz, Amsterdam, 2014 (p. 24); ISBN 978-90-78088-72-1〕 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. Ulay’s 1974 autobiographical collages from the ''Renais sense'' series take the concept of the split self to a different level, prefiguring a postmodern expression, years before the paradigm shift from modernity to post-modernity had largely been acknowledged. The modes of display as filmic successions and series of actions were not very common at the time, as well as the artist’s strategy of dealing with his identity vacuum through gender issues. Although the Dutch social and artistic climate at the time was quite permissive in terms of gender, the overt visual representation of a constructed gender was perceived as scandalous and controversial.〔Bojan, M. R. Body: Threshold of Knowledge, Signifying Surface and Generator of Artistic Expression. In Whispers: Ulay on Ulay, authors: Maria Rus Bojan, Alessandro Cassin; Valiz, Amsterdam, 2014 (p. 25); ISBN 978-90-78088-72-1〕 In other works from the same ''Renais sense'' series, the hybrid identity and transgender visual rhetoric is replaced by the representation of the androgynous.〔Bojan, M. R. Body: Threshold of Knowledge, Signifying Surface and Generator of Artistic Expression. In Whispers: Ulay on Ulay, authors: Maria Rus Bojan, Alessandro Cassin; Valiz, Amsterdam, 2014 (p. 26); ISBN 978-90-78088-72-1〕 These works translate different feelings and needs: the desire to obtain an androgynous unity and to retrieve the lost Self through the fusion with his beloved. Extreme erotic experiences led Ulay to a sort of illumination, coming to understand that in the moment of erotic fusion, the subject is completely liberated of his bond with the self, making room for a sense of plenitude and equilibrium. Among these experiences, his relationship with Paula Françoise-Piso is of special importance, because she played more than the role of a muse.〔Bojan, M. R. Body: Threshold of Knowledge, Signifying Surface and Generator of Artistic Expression. In Whispers: Ulay on Ulay, authors: Maria Rus Bojan, Alessandro Cassin; Valiz, Amsterdam, 2014 (p. 26); ISBN 978-90-78088-72-1〕 The series of works, suggestively entitled ''S’He'' and signed with the composite name ''PA-ULA-Y'', anticipates the communion of the pair that becomes a unity, a unity to be later perfected and materialized in the relationship with Abramović. Even though not many artists can boast a knowledge of photography as broad as his, Ulay never presents himself as a photographer; instead he considers himself a conceptual artist fascinated by the phenomenology of the photographic medium. Precisely this knowledge of the technical potential of photography opened up new perspectives for him on how to use the medium, how to escape it, stretch it or subvert it. The two consecutive actions entitled ''FOTOTOT'' (Photo Death), realized in 1976 at De Appel in Amsterdam, are the first in a line of experiments that aim to dismantle this myth of photographic objectivity. In these happenings, he shows that photography consists of a set of practices that are meant to technically stage the apparition of an image, but that the image only seems to correspond to reality, and is ultimately nothing but an illusion.〔Bojan, M. R. Body: Threshold of Knowledge, Signifying Surface and Generator of Artistic Expression. In Whispers: Ulay on Ulay, authors: Maria Rus Bojan, Alessandro Cassin; Valiz, Amsterdam, 2014 (p. 28); ISBN 978-90-78088-72-1〕 Intervening in this ritual of ‘staging’ the image by eliminating the fixing phase of the photographic emulsion from the process, the artist abruptly interrupts the chain of signification through image. The act of contemplating the vanishing images until they became nothing more than black rectangles could be perceived as a sort of a warning, and a meditation on what happens inside the Black Box of photography. But it is also a critique of a new type of ‘idolatry’ and of a form of mastering the medium: if the artist cannot defeat the camera’s built-in program, he can at least overpower the process of producing and distributing the illusion. This approach once again explains his lifetime predilection for photographic experiments and primitive forms of photography such as Polaroids or Photograms. In many ways, these ''FOTOTOT'' actions are emblematic: they assert Ulay’s strong commitment to objectivity, a commitment to which he would remain loyal throughout his life. And it also prefigures the articulation of a radical critique that questions the validity of the photographic approach in the absence of the artist’s own artistic program. In 1976, after meeting Marina Abramović, his identity quest moved from the gender issues and anagrammatic visual expressions to even more radical approaches, and the last work that he signed as an individual artist was the transgressive action in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin: ''There is a Criminal Touch to Art – Corresponding to a Situation''. This action represents a key work within Ulay’s oeuvre, as it emphasizes not only his fight with his own German origin and the historical legacy of Nazism, but also points out the problematic situation of minorities within post-war German society. As a reaction to these failed post-war ‘denazification’ processes, Ulay symbolically dislocated the ‘identity icon’ of Germanness (the painting Der arme Poet by the Romantic painter Carl Spitzweg—who was Adolf Hitler’s favorite painter) from the Neue Nationalgalerie and relocated it in the home of a Turkish immigrant family in one of the poor neighborhoods of Berlin. He photographed the work in its new context, and shortly thereafter called the museum director to come and see the new display of the artwork. By performing such a radical act, he wanted to shed light on the immigrants’ condition, stressing that Berlin’s old glory as a symbol of Prussian power had been replaced by the Cold War rhetoric and the humiliating division of the German nation into two entities within the same city. Ulay had arranged to have this action recorded: Jörg Schmitt-Reitwein (the former cameraman of Werner Herzog) filmed the action from a vehicle that was following the van the artist was driving and eventually followed him during the last part of the act into the Turkish family’s home. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ulay」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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