A large group of small polaroids dating from the first half of the 70s takes first place in this exhibition of Ulay's work. The group consists of an estimated 290 photos dating, to quote the curriculum of the artist, from the years "1970 - 1976: Writing aphorisms, Auto-Polaroids ('Soliloquy')". Evidently, the aphorisms and what he calls auto-polaroids are connected and share connotations, even falling under one working title: Soliloquy.
In retrospect we can identify these photographic works as important, as much for their place within Ulay's oeuvre as for their art-historical significance. The polaroids, of an intimate format, appeal in a highly personal way to the viewer, who will feel like a voyeur contemplating the subject matter of the images. The polaroids represent a pivotal phase in Ulay's oeuvre; in the years before 1970 he gradually progressed from being a photographer, owning and running a photographic lab, to taking on commissioned work and working as a consultant for the Polaroid firm. After 1975 he worked as an artist, doing installations and performances in which the photographic image played a major conceptual and inspirational role. The autopolaroids, presenting the artist's body as their main subject, later gave rise to performances such as FOTOTOT (PhotoDeath). The polaroid project and the performances, taken together, define Ulay's artistic oeuvre that precedes the famous "Relation Works" collaboration with Marina Abramovic, starting in 1976. The creative tension between photography and performance, which also permeates their "Relation Works", is to be attributed to Ulay.
Tension between performance and photographic image, between real-time and arrested-time images, and the exploration of their differences, can be said to define all of Ulay's works. The autopolaroids state this concept with great impact. These are not merely documents from a private existence, from intimate performances without a public, in which an autistic author of the event/image becomes his own public with the help of a camera.
In the polaroid images indications of actual place and time are kept abstract. As main subjects they present transvestism, doubles of body and person, manipulation of bodies and faces, violent attacks on bodies or their suggestion. Overall, the constant transformation into male, androgynous and female identities catches the eye. Some autopolaroids constitute a single work as they are, others form sequences or groups of up to 20 or more images. In every sequence, the narrative is dominated not by a storyline, but by the transformations or variations on a theme, not unlike how a posed still from a film differs from an actual arrested moment from the stream of images.
However, we should never forget the personal roots of Ulay's experiment with role and sex change. In these years he was involved in a highly symbiotic relationship with a woman, who later left him. This is reflected in the autopolaroids: even when the beloved is absent, he desires to live through the relationship and the trauma it caused, and he puts himself on by putting on her clothes. Pain and violence are existential aspects of his desire, he even turns against his own body by trying to adjust his feet with a knife, to fit into her shoe. Again and again questions arise: what, where, how is the boundary between 'her' and 'me'? The merging with the beloved, made possible in the pictures, is deeply moving and painful to watch. Some sequences show Ulay's naked body striking feminine poses in her lingerie. How deeply can the image of masculinity (and the body we see is undeniably one of a strong male) be adjusted by changing clothes?
The body, exposed in different appearances and identities, belongs to the author of these images. Common speech provides us with words like: artist, photographer, model, photo – except that they are not quite applicable in this case. By way of elucidation, here is important biographical context. At the time the polaroids were produced, Ulay lived in a house on the Amsterdam Herengracht, where he himself occupied only a confined space. His way of living was that people could come and go, he invited notable characters from the Amsterdam (night)life, thus developing around his camera an ongoing process of staging and dressing up, sometimes in extreme situations which Ulay and his guests created for each other. In this way the artist assumed the role of participating observer, but nobody was really interested in making artworks or photographs of a particular esthetic quality; the accent was on the experiment with imaginative and often anti-social behaviour. Although produced within a private space, the events and actions aimed, one could say, at a profound revaluation of values (Nietzsche's "Umwertung aller Werte"). And the values most neglected by these people, who acted out alternative lives, were those cultural and emotional values which on a subconscious level define what in western society is usually called personal identity.
A given from the start is Ulay's fascination with individuals who have been marginalised by society or who have placed themselves outside the mainstream order of society. Life in the Amsterdam fringe, with its prostitutes, drugs, transvestites, 'good' criminals and self-confessed homo- or bisexual lifestyles (in those years not romanticised in any way, unlike today) filled Ulay's house and left its traces in the polaroid images. The atmosphere of social and psychological experiment, so dominant in those years, is given an especially striking face in the variations on the theme of the portrait: two or more faces that overlap, merge through multiple exposures or projection techniques, casting masks, the exchange or combination of male and female traits.
This change of identity is made possible by the photographic image: through their directness, the polaroids are the performance they seem to document. They are as many attacks on the limiting aspects of the mainstream concept of identity. It is fetishism, but on a higher level, because pornography is countered with the conceptual and esthetic qualitites of posing, acting and staging. The experiment here was to find a definition of the social construction of identity, sexual or otherwise; in other words, of what has since been named as the opposite of instant identity, namely gender. This is why these images are still so important.
Questioning and experimenting with identity, projected on your own body, written in your own flesh and even transplanted? Between the events of procreation and interpretation, what is the "ultima ratio" of life? This is exactly the same question we can ask of the photographic image: how deep does it go? The question is tattooed into Ulay's skin, next to be removed and then presented as a work, literally separated from the author, like a photographic image in a light-sensitive layer without any further material support. In a poetic way, the answer suddenly seems clear: skin-deep, the surface of the human body, its capacity to receive and to retain scars, imprints, identity, language places the human skin parallel to the photo. Visible traces of a garter, of fingertips on skin, of fingerprints on photos, our eyes feel them. A mask is a mask is a mask, but what about the depth of a projection of one face on another, one body on another? Our eyes feel that depth.
Here we touch on Ulay's fascination with the medium of polaroid photography. Because of its direct and once-only character, because it performs the imprinted image, the polaroid is inextricably part of the performance; it is not merely a document, but because of what its 'skin' does, the polaroid presents the visible side of the performance. Transferring an image to a layer of light-sensitive emulsion that processes itself is the photographic equivalent of the tattoo, of the facial cast, of the pressure mark in the skin.
The association of Ulay's autopolaroids and aphorisms provides us with additional insight. Coming from the Greek verb aphorizein, to confine or to limit, an aphorism is a literary form stating some insight in a pointed, succinct and challenging way. Since the 18th century a sophisticated form of aphoristic writing developed, leading to longer texts in which the logical order of discourse and argumentative clarity is loosened. In Nietzsche's writing the aphoristic style culminates as an iconic presentation of his distrust of all system-building. Since, in art and literature, the of the aphorism has further evolved in meaning and function and even become a form of philosophical licence, appreciated for its suggestive possibilities. Philosophically the aphorism gives an advance on the truth, it suggests truth by force of its way of expression. The aphorism certainly does not forgo discourse or argumentation (Nietzsche builds grandiose discourses out of aphorisms), only its logic needs not be so strict. Seen from this perspective, the aphorism directs attention to the way it shows or presents something.
Thinking along the lines of the aphorism shows a more social, lively, process-related character, because it does not hide perspectives within logic. Here is room for both the serious and the humorous aspects of the language game, for the flux of the moment, for the human condition, even for the illusions of the philosophical game. Opposition and paradox need not be solved or explained away, but may as such represent the process of our thinking.
As Robert Schumann in his Davidsb_ndlert„nze was threading musical aphorisms, visual equivalents developed too. I mention Claude Monet's studies of Rouen cathedral, Wassily Kandinsky's Improvisiations, the integration of text and image in Cy Twombly's paintings. Aphorism and autopolaroid cross where the public and the private run into each other, sometimes crash, within a personal identity (or what is experienced as such). Identity experiments - as in Ulay's autopolaroids - are painful, because identity is interpreted almost as a human right, which for many implicate the impossibility of discussing or visualising it openly. It is something that remains hidden, and is usually only experienced as a response to some external incentive. Yet, with diligent narcissism we protect our identity, denying its entanglements with the social construction of reality, with the repetition that promotes something random or occasional to the engram of some truth.
The group of autopolaroids as a whole is significant because they undermine the Great Narrative of the Ego. 30 years later, this is a part of Ulay's oeuvre that reverberates with actual interests in art and philosophy. Paradigms on which we model our thinking become less important and there is a broad interest in ways of thinking that respond to and honour possibilities, coexistence and differences of perspective. Reality can be experienced as a collage, and personal identity may be interpreted in a positive way as a construction. Truth is a driving force within reality, not the other way round. The aphoristic image is a bubble in a stream, a temporary emulsion enclosing a temporary space. When in 2000, for the first time since 1974, Ulay's autopolaroids were shown in the retrospective exhibition "Performing Light" in the Amsterdam Center for Contemporary Art De Appel, the motto was "Identity Through Change".
Cees de Boer