AJDA ANA KOCUTAR

What the Artist Kept Hidden: A Brief Overview of Ulay’s Early Work

“I’ve had the experience a couple of times when staying at his house in Amsterdam that he appears from his semi-private storage area in the evening and shows me a portion of his work that I hadn’t even been aware of. I imagine there are parts of it still that I don’t know.”¹

When Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen) exhibited in 1974 the Polaroids that he had been making since 1970, the occasion became one that he would always look back on—one that would mark the beginning of his path as an artist. Invited, or rather persuaded, by Wies Smals and Mia Visser, who wanted his works to be the last ones shown at Galerie Seriaal in Amsterdam before Smals moved on to establish De Appel in 1975, Ulay covered the gallery walls with steel plates on which he placed an estimated 220 photographs individually in black metal Polaroid cartridges. The images he displayed were very intimate. They included self-portraits and portraits of people on the margins of society, cross-dressers, transgender people, and homeless individuals; communities he would always be drawn to and people he was able to connect with thanks to his Polaroid camera. He created this body of work without the intention of showing it and presenting it as art. In his recollection, it took the gallerists asking him four times to exhibit the photographs to finally convince him. The work was subversive, however, and the reaction of the audience was a very negative one, he remembered. It affected him deeply and convinced him that he would never again show his work in public.²

While this vow was one that he could not keep, it did hold true for a while, at least for this selection of Polaroids, which he did not show again until 2005. The experience solidified his desire to do things differently, to collaborate, to find new formats and ways to experience, explore, and enact the questions and ideas he had of the self, the body, and relations between people—topics that would remain at the core of his artistic practice for years to come. He called his body of work bizarre, not easy to grasp, nonlinear.³

1 Thomas McEvilley, “Ulay and Photography,” in Whispers: Ulay on Ulay, ed.
Maria Rus Bojan and Alessandro Cassin (Amsterdam: Valiz Foundation, 2014), pp. 349–56, esp. pp. 350–52.
2 “The Body Is the Medium Par Excellence: Matthias Ulrich in Conversation with Ulay,” in Ulay: Life-Sized, ed. Matthias Ulrich, exh. cat. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2016), pp. 37–48, esp. p. 37.
3 Alessandro Cassin, “Ulay on Ulay,” in Whispers: Ulay on Ulay, pp. 83–96, esp.
p. 88.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 163/2023, pp. 31–42.

SUSANNE HOLSCHBACH

“We have opened the gate to the stars”*

She Takes a Hand Herself in History—Luise Schröder chose this title for a project that she initiated in 2015 during a German-Israeli artist exchange in Israel; it is a title that could also stand for her position as an artist on the whole. Taking history into her own hands—a powerful translation of this metaphor—stands for a claim to agency, that is, for the ability to act and the opportunity to shape the course of history. Yet it also represents, for Luise Schröder, taking something into one’s hands quite literally, in order to grasp it. Thus, the motif of the hand appears in her works repeatedly: in the video Arbeit am Mythos (Shaping the Myth, 2011) we see the artist’s hand, how she arranges books and photographs on a table, and then keeps rearranging them;¹ in La Barricade – Existing as a Promise (2022) books are passed along hand to hand in a human chain; in Der gerissene Horizont (The Torn Horizon, 2020) hands are seen moving in a wind tunnel; and a photo in the tableau Strömungen in Bewegung (Currents in Motion, 2021–22) shows a web of yarn stretched between two hands, waiting to be taken up by another pair of hands.²

She Takes a Hand Herself in History can also stand paradigmatically for the artist’s key themes, working methods, and media-based practices. The installation, which is comprised of photographs mounted onto wallpaper, several video screens placed throughout the room, and a film showing an interview, deals with the socialist utopia of kibbutz, which ultimately failed after striving to be a model for collective living and working without owning property, with one of its cornerstones having been the full equality of men and women in all areas of life. . . . “The past offers no solutions for dealing with present reality”—though Luise Schröder would surely not agree in full with this assertion by one of her discussion partners. The unrealized potential of revolutionary movements and alternative histories, along with the deconstruction of mythic narratives, creates the threads that Schröder reweaves again and again through her methods of research, dialogue, montage, performance, and installation, with the aim of opening up space for imagination. A special focus of the artist here is placed on integrating a feminist perspective.

* This quotation originates from the voice-over of Luise Schröder’s essay film Der gerissene Horizont (The Torn Horizon, 2020).
1 In the video, other actions follow that allude to traumatic events from the city’s history: water is poured out, fire is started, sand is spread, and the buried is uncovered again. See also the publication: Luise Schröder and Hannah Petersohn, Arbeit am Mythos, exh. cat. C/O Berlin Foundation (Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2013).
2 In Donna J. Haraway’s eyes, the string figures practiced in many cultures represent something “tied together by the threads of hand and brain, making and thinking”; see Donna J. Haraway, “Playing String Figures with Companion Species,” in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 9–29, esp. p. 13.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 163/2023, pp. 43–54.