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Ulay | Plastic Bag and Glass of Water (From the series Long Playing Record), 1991

Unique Giant Polaroid (Polacolor) Original Polaroid

Description

This monumental work belongs to Ulay’s seminal series Can’t Beat the Feeling Long Playing Record, created between 1991 and 1992. Utilizing a custom-built, room-sized Polaroid camera in Boston a machine so large the artist had to physically step inside it to operate it this piece represents the pinnacle of "performative photography." Unlike digital prints, this is a unique original object. The chemistry of the Polacolor process and the sheer scale (240 x 111 cm) make it a physical record of a specific moment in time. Because the camera and the specialized large-format film no longer exist, this work is an irreplaceable artifact of 20th-century photographic history. The series itself is a biting, poetic critique of European identity and consumerism, using "staged" objects like the broken vase and ink jar to evoke a sense of fragmented history and the "echo" of human presence.

240 × 110 cm

Unique

Price

NaN €

Year

1991

Type

Photography

Price

NaN €

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

BORN IN SOLINGEN, GERMANY, 1943.

LIVED AND WORKED: ACROSS EUROPE AND INTERNATIONALLY, SPENDING TIME IN LJUBLJANA (SLOVENIA), WHERE THE ULAY FOUNDATION WAS ESTABLISHED AND WHERE HE SPENT HIS FINAL YEARS.

Frank Uwe Laysiepen, better known under his moniker Ulay, is known for his boundary-pushing performance art practice, most notably the conceptual pieces he performed with his longtime artistic and romantic partner Marina Abramović. Ulay and Abramović worked together for 12 years, and their performances often centered on testing the physical and mental stamina of both partners. Pieces such as Light / Dark (1977), in which they slapped each other repeatedly, or The Lovers (1988), in which the couple walked more than 1,000 miles each from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle, exemplified their extreme approach to their practice and led to the pair becoming icons of performance art. Ulay’s commitment to testing the limits of the body extends to his work as a photographer, with images that largely focus on explorations of identity and the self. He has exhibited in cities across the world, and his works are in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Kunstmuseum Bern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.

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