Episode #118: Modern Love--Marina Abramović and Ulay (Season 13, Episode 11)
Listeners, I heard you—a bunch of self-admitting hopeless romantics who wanted to hear more about people bound by attraction, fascination. By love. Though there are examples of romantic and sexual relationships between creators that are sprinkled throughout art history as we know it, it’s true that we have the most information about relationships from folks who lived in the last century—because we have greater access to documentation recording the lives of these people, and because, as the 20th century progressed, people—artists, perhaps especially—became more vocal about their relationships, less inhibited. Modern artists, artists especially from the first half of the 20th century, lived their art, and their relationships, out loud-- writing about them, talking about them, and sometimes even creating works of art about them.
This season, I’m rounding up stories about modern artists in love, in lust, in relationships— digging into these individuals, see how their liaisons, marriages, affairs, and connections played in or on their respective works of art, and how, if anything, they affected art history as we know it. I, for one, believe that it’s time for Modern Love.
Today: it’s our season finale, and my absolute favorite (tear-jerking!) story of the season: the epic love-and-lost story of Marina Abramović and Ulay.
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Episode Credits:
Research by Anna Kienberger. Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis. Additional music by Storyblocks. Logo by Vaulted.co.
ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.
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Episode Transcript
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Let’s take a little trip back in time. The day is March 14, 2010. A dark-haired woman, dressed in a bright red gown, sits quietly and patiently at a wooden table across from an empty chair in the center of the Museum of Modern Art’s interior courtyard. This woman is Marina Abramović, and she’s beginning her retrospective exhibition and her latest extended performance piece, titled The Artist is Present. Abramović is prepared to sit for eight hours, six days a week, for the next two and a half months, during which she will gaze into the eyes of museum visitors who patiently wait in line to have their turn to silently engage with this world-renowned artist. They won’t speak to her, and they won’t touch her. Abramović, her head bent down to rest between visitors, then slowly looks up at the new stranger in front of her, engaging with them in a singular, completely silent relationship. But on this day, something amazing happens. Abramović lifts her head to acknowledge the newest visitor, only to find that it isn’t a stranger at all. Sitting across from her is her past romantic and creative partner, Ulay, whom she has not seen since their relationship ended 22 years prior. Imagine this: it’s like time stops in this moment, as the artists come to terms with the enormity of this moment, remembering so vividly the love they once shared, and the career-defining work they did together. Abramović, who had maintained a neutral face while staring at the visage of her typical visitor, then breaks and she gives him a timid smile. Ulay smiles back nervously, breathing out to ease the tension of seeing an old lover. Abramović’s eyes fill with tears as she takes in the moment and the sight of the person in front of her. And then does what no one is expecting. Marina Abramović breaks the rules of her own performance and reaches her hands across the table to take Ulay’s, holding him and their memories. The audience bursts in applause, recognizing the weight of witnessing a true love story— one of the greatest in modern art history.
Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. ArtCurious Season 13 is all about Modern Love, and today for our season finale, we are talking about the epic 12-year relationship and art of Marina Abramović and Ulay. This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.
From the very beginning of my preparations for this season of ArtCurious, I knew I wanted to talk about Abramović and Ulay, because I have always found their story so intriguing, so sad, so beautiful—and with that almost cinematic happy ending with their reconnection at MoMA in 2010, it’s nearly unbeatable. But to truly appreciate that singular moment, we’ve got to go back to the beginning.
Marina Abramović and Ulay’s love story started in Amsterdam in 1975. Before Abramović was known as the godmother of performance art, she was an up-and-coming artist in the early 70s visiting Amsterdam for a television performance of her work Lips of Thomas. Let’s back up just a tiny bit more, though, just in case the phrase “performance art” trips you up a bit, because I get it—it’s not a painting, it’s not a sculpture, and though a performance might routinely be photographed or video-recorded, it’s not what would have been called “art” a century prior. In brief, performance art is a piece in which art—like a play, like drama, like theater—typically involves the artist’s body as its focal point, so that the actions they, or other participants, make creates the work of art. It’s not a great explanation, but just go with it here. The sixties and seventies were huge in terms of the popularity and critical acceptance of performance art, but its beginnings reached back into the performances of Dada and early Surrealist artists from the Ninteen-teens and early 1920s. So while it had a long history, we can still firmly say that Marina Abramović truly took it to the next level. Now, back to 1975 Amsterdam, and Lips of Thomas.
Lips of Thomas, like much of Abramović’s work, involved her body as her subject and medium to explore her physical and mental limits. In this particular case, Abramović cut a five-pointed Communist star onto her stomach with a razor blade, and over the course of her performance, her blood flowed, smeared, and covered her naked body. As curator and art historian Nancy Spector has written about these works, there’s a personal element referenced here. Abramović was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1946, and works like Lips of Thomas were, quote, “borne out of the contradictions of her childhood: both parents were high-ranking officials in the socialist government, while her grandmother, which whom she had lived, was devoutly Serbian Orthodox.” Unquote. Religion and socialist politics were at odds, and as Communist rule exploded throughout the world in the wake of World War II, it affected not only the emotional and mental lives of millions, but it left marks upon the body, too, in Abramović’s estimation. Lips of Thomas was her way of acknowledging this.
While Abramović was in Amsterdam for this soon-to-be iconic performance, she met another young and aspiring artist. German-born Frank Uwe Laysiepen, better known as Ulay. Ulay was born in 1943, so he was three older than Abramović, and both artists were immediately drawn to one another, often saying that theirs was “love at first sight.” Ulay would later note that he found Abramović alluring and—in his words—she was “witchy and fatal.” For her part, Abramović was instantly fascinated by Ulay’s appearance, who was exploring his constructed identity at the time by presenting as half man and half woman through hair and makeup and the lack thereof—a performance of his very own that he captured in his famed photo series from this period, titled S’he—that’s s-apostrophe-h-e. Throughout this series, Ulay investigated the role of gender identities in society during the 70s, as well as the variety of gender performances. Both artists were expressive, transgressive, avant-garde, and driven to do something new, something meaningful. It was an excellent connection, and one that grew into a passionate love affair with one simple act: Ulay gently tended to Abramović’s wounds after her Lips of Thomas performance. That act was the beginning of a romance that would last 12 years.
There was just one little hitch. Abramović was already hitched. At the time of their fated meeting, Abramović was married to a fellow student with whom she had studied at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts. But for the artists, their meeting did indeed feel like a fated one—like too many things aligned in the stars for their union to be mere coincidence. The day they met was their birthday—yep, their birthday, as they shared November 30 as their joint day, though Ulay was born three years prior to Abramović --and when Ulay mentioned his birthday, Abramović declared that she needed proof that this wasn’t just a line to keep her interested. So Ulay showed her his pocket agenda in which he purposefully tore out the page of his birthday, a personal tradition—and one that Abramović herself would soon adopt in her own planners and diaries. Abramović loved this synchronicity and took it as a karmic sign of their destiny. According to her later reminiscences, she decided then and there to form a partnership with him, returning to his house and staying there—in bed, she says—for ten days straight. After that, her Amsterdam stint complete, Abramović returned home to Belgrade, but she was irrevocably changed. She was so lovesick that she said she felt she could no longer talk, could no longer move. When she finally picked herself back up, she ran away from home, leaving Serbia and divorcing her husband a few months later so that she could fully reunite with Ulay, whom she called her “twin flame,” according to journalist Judith Thurman.
The reunion is coming up next--right after this quick ad break—remember that you can join us over on Patreon for a few bucks a month and get this show ad-free: patreon.com/artcurious.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
Marina Abramović and Ulay immediately entwined their lives, not only romantically, but professionally as well. The artists began collaborating, combining her chosen medium—performance-- with his interest in gender and relationships. The two embarked on a series of challenging performances called Relations Works, using physical extremes to explore the boundaries between the self and other. Their first performance, a landmark work titled Relationship in Space, was a highlight of the 1976 Venice Biennale, one of the most famous international contemporary art expositions in the world. For Relationship in Space, Ulay and Abramović stood naked—of course they were naked—and apart from each other, and then explored these boundaries by running at each other and then smacking their bodies frontally together. They performed this action for one hour, increasing in speed and intensity with each sprint toward each other. The whole idea, according to Abramović, was the combination of male and female energy, showcasing their unity—their romantic unity, their professional unity, a collaboration on all fronts. And this was their M.O. for the next five years, a period in which they lived minimally and rather nomadically. To save money as they drove between museums in Europe to perform, they lived in a small, black Citroën French police car. This car actually inspired their 1977 Paris Biennale performance, Relation in Movement. For this piece, Ulay drove their car in circles while Abramović used a megaphone to count the number of laps completed. The sentiment was that either the car would collapse, or that they would, as an experiment to test the limits of both machines and the human body. After 16 hours of nonstop spinning— a nightmare if you ask me, as someone who gets carsick after only minutes on a windy road— the car’s motor burned out. So, chalk that one up to the durability of the human body, I suppose. People 1, machine 0.
As time progressed, Abramović and Ulay became more daring in their performances. Take, for example, their piece, Breathing In/Breathing Out, which the couple performed twice: once in Belgrade in 1977, and once the following year in Amsterdam. In Breathing In/Breathing Out, Abramović and Ulay knelt across from each other and pressed their mouths firmly together while blocking their nostrils with filters. This forced the pair to rely on each other for air—and thus, for survival. Their performance, as always, relied on their cooperation, but it also highlighted their individual physical boundaries, because in reality, this couldn’t last forever. They couldn’t rely on each other indefinitely, and after 19 minutes, they released themselves from the other’s mouth, and Ulay and Abramović fell back, both gasping for breath.
The pair continued to up the ante when it came to the demands they put on themselves for their performances, especially as they strove closer and closer to dangerous situations. If Breathing In/Breathing Out was a struggle for trust and cooperation, then Rest Energy, from 1978, was that times one hundred. Together, the couple held a bow loaded with a sharp arrow positioned directly at Abramović’s heart. Leaning back and with each holding one side—Abramović the bow, Ulay the end of the arrow--the weight of their bodies put tension on the weapon. With one wrong move, Abramović could die. To amplify this already high-stress situation, small microphones were attached to their bodies, recording and magnifying their heartbeats for all to hear. In contrast to Breathing In/Breathing Out, Rest Energy was a far shorter performance, lasting only four minutes and ten seconds, but with an arrow pointed at Abramović’s chest, it felt like forever—for the audience as much as for the performers.
And it didn’t always go well. In the 1980s, the artists began a work titled NightSea Crossing, which they performed 22 times over 19 different locations all over the world, and it was yet another endurance feat. NightSea Crossing acted almost like a precursor in some ways to Abramović’s 2010 performance at MoMA, The Artist is Present, in that it involved two people sitting and facing one another. But this time, there were no pauses, there were no breaks, and the audience wouldn’t participate in the way that they would in Abramović’s later work. Here, as always, it was just Marina and Ulay. For NightSea Crossing, the couple sat silent and motionless, facing each other across a table, in whichever art museum or institution happened to host this iteration. They’d be seated just before the museum’s opening, and stay seated—no eating, abstaining from movement and consuming anything except water—until after the museum closed, so that visitors never saw the beginning or ending of the performance. Sometimes the performance would last a day, but in some cases, they would continue for over two weeks, with 16 days being the artists’ maximum. Their goal was to perform the work a total of 90 separate times. For Ulay, NightSea Crossing was a turning point, and not a great one. By their 22nd performance, he had lost 24 pounds from fasting, and had become so thin that he found even the act of sitting to be excruciating, as his bones pressed uncomfortably against his little-padded skin. Toward the end of this marathon performance, Ulay was in so much pain that he could no longer bear it, and he broke the performance—so he told Abramović so. Okay, it’s done, we did it, I can’t do it anymore, he said to her. But to his shock, Abramović did not stand up, insisting that there was no need for her to finish their work if she hadn’t reached her stopping point. So she carried on. Ulay, for his part, ended up hospitalized for a brief period of time. It was a stunning break between the two artists—and one that, some say, may have pushed them to break finally and officially.
We’ll finish our story—right after another quick break. Come right back.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
A year after their series of NightSea Crossing performances, Marina Abramović and Ulay broke up. It was 1888, and they had been a romantic couple and professional partners for twelve years. But this wasn’t your everyday, heart-wrenching uncoupling. This is, after all, Abramović and Ulay we’re talking about, so naturally they marked the end of their relationship through a performance, titled The Lovers. What’s fascinating, sad, and ironic is that the pair had originally proposed the performance of The Lovers nearly a decade prior as a grand testament to their love—and an incredible showcase of their commitment to their art, too. The Lovers involved the pair trekking the length of the Great Wall of China—thousands of miles in length—beginning at opposite ends and walking toward each other to meet in the middle. The original iteration would have had a glorious romantic ending: Abramović and Ulay, once they met each other at the center point of their journey, would then be married. But the hoops that the artist needed to go through to enact this performance, as you might imagine, were many—we are talking about China, typically not known as the easiest country to obtain permissions and authorizations for… much of anything. On top of that, UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—had just bestowed World Heritage Site status upon the Wall only a year prior, which meant even more red tape. So the artists tried for years to get the artwork off the ground, only to be denied permission time and again. By the late 1980s, they finally received the green light, but by that point, the relationship between Abramović and Ulay had deteriorated. The couple had grown apart, with their aims for their careers diverging, and even their beliefs about art—what it should be, what an artist’s duties should be—no longer matched. They no longer matched. So for The Lovers, a wedding was no longer on the table. Instead, it became a performative divorce.
This grandest and most epic of breakups began on March 30, 1988, with Abramović at the eastern end of the Wall at the so-called “dragon’s head” at the Bohai Sea, walking westward. Ulay began in the west, not far from the Gobi Desert walking eastwardly slowly and methodically toward his soon-to-be-former lover. To be fair, neither artist walked alone. They each had a translator with them, as well as soldiers accompanying them on their journey for both safety and political reasons. Every day, Abramović and Ulay trekked, on average twelve and a half miles a day. And it wasn’t easy—several sections of the Wall are little more than rubble, which some have taken as symbolism of the disrepair that the couple’s relationship had undergone. Once strong, they had decayed, and had fallen apart. After ninety days of walking—no rest days in between, by the way—they met in the middle, in the center of a stone bridge in the province of Shaanxi.
As you might imagine, this portion of the performance was incredibly emotional. Ulay and Abramović embraced and Abramović in particular shared her mixed feelings about their breakup, later recalling, quote, “We didn’t want to give up. We wanted to walk the wall, but we knew we had to separate, and that was how our life would be.” Unquote. They spent some time chatting together, which ultimately probably didn’t turn out exactly as Abramović had expected, because Ulay dropped a teeny, little bombshell on her. His translator, the one who had accompanied him for the past three months on his journey across the Great Wall, was pregnant with his child. He would marry the translator later that year in Beijing. Woof.
Finally, Abramović and Ulay embraced one last time. As Marina recalled in her memoir, Walking Through Walls, quote, I wept as he embraced me. It was the embrace of a comrade, not a lover: the warmth had drained out of him. My heart was broken. But my tears weren’t just about the end of our relationship. We had accomplished a monumental work – separately. My own part in it felt epic, a long ordeal that was over at last.” Unquote. The ordeal of the walk, of the performance, and also the performance of being Ulay and Marina, the iconic art couple. It was over. Both of them turned away from each other there on the Wall. And they wouldn’t see each other again until twenty-two years later, when Ulay made a surprise appearance at The Artist is Present retrospective, reassuming his seat across from Abramović, wherein this time, she stopped the performance to hold onto him.
I’m not crying, you guys. You’re crying, okay? And possibly I’m crying even more because of what happened next. Because, yep, there’s more. I wish I could say that their beautiful reconnection at MoMA was the end of the story, but unfortunately, it’s not. Their relationship continued to be rocky—five years after The Artist is Present, Ulay took Abramović to court, suing her for violating a 1999 contract that had been created around their joint performances. Ulay claimed that he had not been properly attributed or compensated for their collaborative works, arguing, quote, “The whole oeuvre [meaning their performances] has made history. It’s now in schoolbooks. But she [Marina] has deliberately misinterpreted things or left my name out.” Unquote. For his part, Ulay had spent the previous twenty-five years out of the spotlight, leaving the public side of the art world almost entirely, a decision made concurrently with Abramović’s continual rise, independent from him, as an artistic powerhouse. Still, Ulay had a point—at the beginning of their collaboration, the artists agreed to always note that theirs were joint endeavors, not solo performances. Ulay eventually won the suit, and a Dutch court ordered Abramović to pay him 250,000 euros in royalties.
The good news, though, is that there was yet another reconciliation, an even more prominent one, in 2017, two years after the lawsuit. Together, they chose to create a documentary detailing their world-famous performances and, just as importantly, their love story. The documentary, called Marina Abramović & Ulay: No Predicted End, is a wonderful watch—you can catch it for free on YouTube, which I heartily recommend.
On March 2nd, 2020, Ulay passed away at the age of 76 from lymphatic cancer. In her statement responding to his death, Abramović said, quote, “It is with great sadness I learned about my friend and former partner Ulay’s death today. He was an exceptional artist and human being, who will be deeply missed. On this day, it is comforting to know that his art and legacy will live on forever.” A huge part of his legacy is that love Ulay shared with Abramović, a love that changed contemporary art, and continues to move us today. It’s a beautiful reminder that it is not always what we do in life that matters, but who we love.
Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal, with excellent writing and research by Anna Kienberger.
The ArtCurious theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our podcast is co-produced by Kaboonki - podcasts, creative video, and more. Subscribe to their show, Subgenre, a podcast about the movies, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at subgenrepodcast.com. Kaboonki: Leave your mark. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space, Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.
The ArtCurious Podcast is also fiscally sponsored by VAE Raleigh, a 501c3 nonprofit creativity incubator, which means you can donate tax-free to ArtCurious to show your support, and you can join us at Patreon for the price of a cup of coffee. I hope you enjoyed this season of ArtCurious. Until next time, stay curious.
