Marina Abramović is one of the world’s most radical and controversial pioneers of performance art. Since beginning her career in Belgrade in the 1970s, she has consistently explored her own physical and mental limits, using her body as both subject and medium. In durational performances, Abramović has inflicted pain upon herself, drawn blood with whips, carried a skeleton and confronted a dangerous snake. She also demands involvement from her audience, who frequently become an integral part of her performances. In Rhythm 0 (1974), the artist laid out seventy-two objects on a long table including pens, a feather, scissors, chains and an axe, inviting participants to use them on her as they wished; the performance famously resulted in a loaded gun being held to her head.
In a more recent work, ‘The Artist is Present’ (2010), Abramović sat in silence for eight hours a day, over the course of three months, at a table in New York’s MoMA. This time, she engaged with over a thousand audience members who were invited to sit opposite her, one by one, and look into her eyes. While physical touch was banned, the participants held the artist’s gaze, from minutes to hours.
On the show’s opening night, a grey-haired man, wearing a black suit and Converse trainers, stepped from the audience to face Abramović, who was clothed in a floor-length regal red dress. A video of this encounter – which went viral – shows the man sit down, straighten his jacket, stretch each leg and, as Abramović opens her eyes to see her next companion, smile. The artist smiles back and, with tears filling her eyes, she breaks her non-contact rule to lean towards the man and hold his hands.
Inside the museum, captivated onlookers from the art world applauded. Who was this individual, who had moved Abramović to tears? What was their relationship? How had he shattered the stoicism of a woman who notoriously withstands intense and punishing performances, for hours at a time, with complete composure?
The man who had stepped up to the table was the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, better known by the single name Ulay. Having moved from Germany to Amsterdam in the 1970s, he rose to prominence for his Polaroid photographs of the city’s community of transvestites, transsexuals and drag queens. Taking the marginalised members of society as his subject matter, Ulay celebrated countercultural expressions of identity beyond socially accepted stereotypes.
At this time, Ulay also turned the camera on himself, using his own face as a canvas in androgynous self-portraits. In one of his most iconic series, ‘S’he’ (1972), he appears split in two: half of his face is masculine and covered in stubble, the other half is feminine, clean-shaven, painted with make-up and framed by large curls of soft brown hair. Questioning the nature of identity through interrogative photography, Ulay was pointing out that gender is constructed, mutable and performative.
However, Ulay was also coming to the conclusion that photography could only remain to use his words, ‘on the periphery of things’. The artist had realised that his real self lay underneath the skin, and so he started cutting, piercing and tattooing his body, all the while documenting these physical self-examinations through a unique style of performative photography. As Ulay’s tendencies to perform grew stronger, his experiments became more audacious and ever more exposing. In a disturbing work titled Tattoo/Transplant (1974), the artist had a tattoo incised on his forearm before then photographing it being cut out, under local anaesthetic, by a doctor. ‘I had to go under my own skin,’ Ulay reasoned, as he bridged art with cosmetic surgery in boundary-breaking transformations. The next natural step for him was to perform, not only for the camera, but for live audiences, and in spaces that belonged to the art world: ‘I wanted to inject life-like art into the white cube galleries and into the museums.’ In 1975, Ulay helped to establish the De Appel Foundation, providing him with the stage for some of his earliest performances, including Fototot (Photo Death) (1975–76). Using photosensitive paper, Ulay created a series of self-portraits that disappeared after the gallery’s lights were switched on. As he later recalled, ‘The moment the audience had gathered, we turned on the exhibition light, the halogen light. The images had not been fixed and were put up on the wall wet; because of the power of the light they would lose the images and turn deeper into black in no time. While that was happening, the audience became very nervous and very surprised. I recorded the process and their reaction in additional photographs.’
Ulay recognised that audiences not only brought a new energy to his practice, but could also become an integral part of it. By developing a direct relationship with viewers, he found that he could provoke them into discussion, discomfort and even action. However, he wasn’t the only artist disrupting traditional hierarchies between artwork and audience at this time; Ulay was about to meet his female counterpart, Marina Abramović, who was also invoking the powerful phenomenon of the audience through daring body art in her native Serbia.
In 1975, Abramović was invited to perform at De Appel, where she presented Thomas Lips. Stark naked, she started by eating a kilo of honey and drinking a litre of red wine, before breaking the wine glass with her hand. Abramović’s actions became increasingly violent, culminating in the artist cutting a five-pointed star into her stomach with a razor blade. She then lay down on a block of ice, in the shape of a cross, until onlookers intervened, unable to watch a moment longer. Following this precarious performance, Ulay, who had been in the audience, carefully and tenderly nursed Abramović’s bloody cuts. The wounded performer was immediately fascinated by Ulay’s looks: he was dressed, as in his ‘S’he’ photographs, as half-man, half-woman. Abramović also recalls that beyond physical attraction, she felt an ‘immediate and strong reaction’ and ‘trust right away’ for the man who was looking after her.
As Ulay cared for Abramović, she revealed to him that it was her birthday.
‘It’s my birthday, too,’ he replied.
‘Can you prove that?’ she asked.
Ulay pulled out his notebook to reveal that he had torn out the page for 30 November, because he hated the day. Abramović couldn’t believe it; she did exactly the same thing. As they continued to chat, the artists began to discover a number of uncanny coincidences, some of which were humorous – they both wore their same-length hair up with chopsticks – and some more profound, including considerable similarities in their confrontational, identity-focused performance art.
The two artists spent the next ten days in bed together and it was not long before they decided to live together in Amsterdam, with Abramović leaving her Serbian husband for Ulay. As the couple’s romantic attachment developed, they agreed that they wanted to work together too. As Abramović remembers, ‘Some couples buy pots and pans when they move in together. Ulay and I began planning how to make art together.’
But how could these autonomous artists become one united force? It wasn’t going to be simple, as Ulay later reflected: ‘For two ego-centric driven artists, it’s not easy to join forces, to create one and the same work together and authorise the work as one, and that was a difficulty actually.’ However, the answer was also obvious; drawing on their previous performative practice, in which both artists used their bodies as sites for art, they would draw on their personal relationship, turning it into a living artwork. The first performance which Abramović and Ulay devised was Relation in Space, which they staged at the Venice Biennale of 1976. Standing naked, twenty metres apart, the couple ran at each other repeatedly for one hour, colliding and bouncing apart and then, as they increased their speed, crashing into one another. As Abramović has explained, ‘We really wanted to have this male and female energy put together and create something we called That Self. It was very important to collaborate and to mix our ideas together and not ever say to anybody from who idea comes from. It was the mixture that really make sense to us, and create that kind of third energy field.’
This was the first of a series of risky, passionate performances through which the couple played out their romantic relationship. Not long afterwards they conceived Breathing In/Breathing Out (1977), which saw Ulay and Abramović sit intertwined, lips locked in a kiss, as they breathed into each other, both eventually fainting. Visualising their status as mutual muses and united lovers, they performed the physical and metaphorical manifestation of their emotional closeness. The artists’ performances also portrayed, and proved, their interdependence and total trust in one another. Nowhere was this clearer than in Rest Energy (1980), which saw Abramović hold a bow opposite Ulay while he strung, drew and aimed a sharply pointed arrow at her heart. For four minutes and ten seconds, the two artists remained motionless while small microphones, attached to their chests, picked up the sounds of their quickening heartbeats.
Oscar Wilde once wrote that ‘life imitates art far more than art imitates life’. What he meant by this is that art affects the way we look at life; our perception of the world around us is changed by it, which makes us appreciate, for example, beautiful landscapes or sensational sunsets. We may notice a view more because it’s been framed by artworks telling us this is something sublime, which we should appreciate. In the case of Ulay and Abramović, the couple’s staged symbiosis not only reflected their intimate romantic connection but, in turn, strengthened it and demanded that they recognise and honour it. From their very first encounter, art had brought Ulay and Abramović together; and now the art and lives of these conjoint muses had become indistinguishable; life had begun to imitate art, as much as art imitating life.
The couple revelled in their unorthodox and reciprocally inspiring relationship. Writing a shared manifesto, ‘Art Vital’, they set out their tenets: ‘No fixed living place, permanent movement, direct contact, local relation, self-selection, passing limitations, taking risks, mobile energy.’ They lived in a van together for three years, involving the vehicle in their performances too. At this point, Ulay and Abramović strove for, and achieved, ‘oneness’ in their art. Although their work was theatrical, it was, at its very core, defined by integrity on both an artistic and a personal level; they were being truly themselves in everything that they did. United by a joint vision and working in the same purposeful direction, they pushed the boundaries of performance art, making history by staging their intensive collaborative life in galleries and spaces across the world. But dependence can also be destructive and, as they enjoyed success, Ulay and Abramović’s shared single identity became problematic. As the performing pair gained notoriety, Abramović began to be seen as the primary star of the show. ‘We were a team,’ she recalled, ‘we were like one person: UlayandMarina. Glue. But at the same time, people – gallerists, audiences – were more and more seeing me as our public face.’
The story of Ulay and Abramović is an unusual one within art history: the female artist had begun to overshadow her male counterpart. Perhaps it played out like this because critics and audiences found it more shocking to see a woman undertaking dangerous stunts than a man, or perhaps it was because Abramović was the more vocal partner in media interviews. Whatever the reason, Ulay began to resent the growing inequality in their work’s reception. Once willing to share in a partnership, he now found himself consumed by it. He later described himself, in self-deprecating terms, as ‘the most famous unknown artist’ in the world; the power balance had shifted. Once again, life was imitating art for the couple. As tension increased in their professional partnership, in their personal life there were conflicts too: both partners indulged in sexual affairs, Abramović refused Ulay’s request to start a family and communication broke down. This, in turn, impacted on and became evident in their art.
In 1981, the couple began ‘Nightsea Crossing’, a series of twenty-two performances during which they sat silent and motionless at either end of a table facing each other. In the middle of one performance, Ulay, who was suffering immense pain, stood up; he could not continue the piece. He told Abramović that she should not carry on without him, but she saw no reason not to and carried on, facing an empty chair. ‘Nightsea Crossing was the beginning of the end for us,’ Abramović admitted. The last three years of their all-consuming relationship were increasingly difficult for the couple, whose time together was catapulting to a close. However, they had one final performance to stage.
Many years earlier, the couple had wanted, and planned, to get married; in true Ulay–Abramović style, they had devised a public performance of the union, planning to walk the Great Wall of China from opposite ends and meet in the middle where they would wed. The artists had struggled to gain permission from the Chinese government, and spent years negotiating with them. Finally, in 1988 the authorities gave them the go-ahead. Over the course of three months, Abramović and Ulay walked more than fifteen hundred miles each, from either end of the wall, towards one another in The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (1988). Eventually meeting in Shen Mu, Shaanxi province, where they had originally planned to get married, they embraced silently; a photograph shows the pair saying goodbye in a solemn handshake, marking the end to their partnership – professional and personal – in epic fashion.
Following their break-up, Abramović and Ulay were unable to collaborate as artistic creators. Their work had never been a game; while it was performative, it staged their personal, romantic relationship, with high-stake stunts relying on absolute trust, communication, openness and intimacy – not things you can manufacture. Would Abramović have confidently allowed Ulay to hold the arrow to her heart now? Not a chance. For the next twenty years they barely spoke, beyond negotiating the rights of shared artworks in a bitter court case. In 2015, Ulay brought a lawsuit against Abramović, claiming she had violated a contract regarding their shared work and the court ordered her to pay him US $280,500 in royalties. The case was resolved but the relationship between them didn’t improve. As Ulay slowly returned to photography, Abramović reverted to performing alone. Since then, she has only gained celebrity, both in and outside of the art world, further overshadowing her former partner through her hugely successful solo career. This came to a pinnacle in 2010, when New York’s MoMA invited Abramović to hold a major retrospective in the museum. She agreed on one condition; naturally, the artist insisted that her exhibition include an original live performance.
And so, on the opening night of her major exhibition, Abramović premiered ‘The Artist is Present’, inviting audience members to sit opposite her across a table. After two decades apart, this was the public stage upon which Ulay chose to be reunited with his former partner, facing his estranged muse head on, in front of onlookers. Why now and in this dramatic fashion? Was it fair of him to sabotage Abramović in this way?
The first time Ulay had met Abramović was at one of her performances, when he had been watching from the audience and subsequently stepped in to care for her wounded body. On this memorable night, he once again moved from passive bystander to active partner, in an encounter layered with symbolism and significance. Ulay had always turned to art as a primary means of communication: ‘It’s through art that people exchange interpretation and meaning and love. You can be without solid food for forty days, you can be without water for four days, you can be without air for four minutes, but you can be only four seconds without impressions… that’s why art is so important.’
Throughout their shared history, Ulay and Abramović had always performed their relationship with absolute truthfulness and integrity, turning to art to express their deep bond. This unscripted act was no different: a video, capturing the event, shows them both moved to tears in this tender moment of reconciliation – a connection between them clearly remained. Moreover, this performance in particular held meaning for them. ‘The Artist is Present’ echoed the couple’s joint work, ‘Nightsea Crossing’, from which Ulay had retired early. As he pointed out, ‘At MoMA, she just cut the table in half and invited visitors to sit opposite her instead of me.’
Ulay was also asking the art world for recognition. For twelve years, he had collaborated with Abramović, taking performance to new, unexplored realms. Extreme emotional and physical discomfort were themes that he had already started to develop even before meeting his partner. Nevertheless, Abramović has often been presented as the dominant star of the pair’s shared works. That opening night of ‘The Artist is Present’, with a confrontational power, Ulay demanded visibility, acknowledgement and appreciation for his integral part in Abramović’s career, from both the artist and audience. To use Ulay’s own words, ‘You cannot separate my life from art.’ You also cannot separate Abramović from Ulay. Holding out her hands to him, Abramović showed acceptance and understanding: Ulay took, and deserved, a seat at that table.