Ulay's vast artistic oeuvre, developed over nearly forty years, has featured photography and performance. in either mode it has tented to emphasize marginal areas of society. Sometimes the two elements have operated together in an intimate collaboration, as in the twelve years of performance work he did with Marina Abramovic, meticulously and sometimes oddly documented on film. Performance and photography are perhaps most intimately related in the category of self- photography. An early series involves a transvestite social group at whose get-togethers a Polaroid camera was passed randomly from hand to hand. The group photographed itself. Sometimes the performance aspect is non human, as in a series of early morning portraits of stray dogs encountered on a beach. A series of large-scale Polaroids of homeless people in New York evokes something like the complex multicultural aspect of a series taken in a large-scale Polaroid booth on a street market in Amsterdam where, it is said, eighty languages were spoken. Perhaps the ultimate in self-photography is the impression left by the body on a roll of film that is imprinted like a blueprint. In Ulay's work, usually these series are discrete, not intermingling with one another, each extending itself to a kind of limit of cessation. At times the camera itself is a performer, at times an observer. In both roles it has travelled around the world performing its tasks in his hands from China to Thailand to the United States to Syria to Kenya - and on and on. One special emphasis in Ulay's work has been cultural difference. Originally German (now Dutch) he has long questioned the traditional values of western Europe, especially in light of its history of devastating internal wars. A series of large photographs taken in Berlin, combining black and white and color as if different spiritualities, shows nea-classical German buildings scarred by the bombing and artillery of World War II. Various works have dealt wioth the flags of the members of the EU as essentially sinister symbols of a society gone awry. More recently his camera has turned outside the EU to the emerging previously marginalized nations of Central and Eastern Europe. A parallel interest with other elements, has dealt with the implications of gender differences in various ways. The economic uses of women in the emrging states that were once parts of the Soviet Union is a basic structural element of the present series of portraits of young Moldavian women. How does beauty relate to reality? What are the social uses (or abuses) of the beautiful especially the beauty of the human female? In self-photographs one sees not only the object but the subject. They appear both prettily and desperately interlinked as in a global trap. Who prepares the trap and springs it? The shutter clicks, somewhat like the trap but observing it, uneasily suggesting the complex and ambiguous web that secretly controls human life in society.
Thomas McEvilley