Exhibition: Ulay at Duncan of Jordanstone
It's a rare opportunity for me to head up to Dundee to see an exhibition, not because it's so far away - although that is part of it - but because the art scene in this city is very very small. However, after seeing that the Cooper Gallery at Duncan of Jordanstone was going to be hosting an exhibition by renowned performance artist Ulay (previously creative partner to Marina Abramovic) I knew I had to make the trip to see it.
I'll be honest, with a reputation as big as Ulay's is, perhaps I got a bit too excited at the promise of this show. I'd never actually seen the Cooper Gallery in use for a public exhibition so I really didn't know what to expect. The space itself is not fantastic, it's made up of a dark corridor and a stairwell that leads into a large bright room. That being said, the curators have attempted to use the space to maximise on the number of works on display.
You enter off the street into a kind of reception space on the ground floor. The wall facing you is pasted with black and white newspaper articles all in german with 2 TV monitors mounted on top. What plays on these is the documentation of his legendary live action There is a Criminal Touch to Art performed in Berlin in 1976, wherein Ulay steals a painting from a museum (Carl Spitzweg's The Poor Poet) and hangs it in a Turkish family's living room as a way of raising awareness of the difficult situation immigrants in Germany were facing at the time.
The work itself is genius. You actually get to witness Ulay running through the museum with the painting under his arm and hang it on the wall of the family home on the opposing screen. My only issue with the way this piece has been displayed is the fact that the audio over the videos is in German, the newspaper articles are in German, and there is no signifier to tell you what this artwork is, or is about unless you read the booklet that accompanies the exhibition. Yes, that might sound a bit silly - why not just read the booklet? The problem with this is that the booklet is 17 pages long... Then there also comes into play the whole idea about being able to walk into a gallery and be able to decipher and decide for yourself what the work is about - which is something you just can't do with this work.
Moving through to the right and up the stairs to the main space, you are greeted with a pair of wireless headphones and an accompanying projection over the stairs of a series of black and white photographs. These are documentation photographs of Kill Your Pillow - part of Tim Brennan's ongoing Fortress Europe project. This work was a 'live-in' group social experiment in Amsterdam in 1992 that again, comments on the politics of the discrimination and isolation immigrants were experiencing with the eastern expansion of the European Union, which is explained in the narration of the headphone set. This was really interesting to listen to - my only issue is that because I am one of those people that doesn't read the booklet I actually thought the audio in the headphones and the photograph projection were completely unrelated for a good ten minutes - my bad.
Next were 2 analogue televisions with headphones displaying videos from the work Bread and Butter (1993) - more of Ulay's social experiment works. I'll be honest here, I kind of brushed past these and headed straight into the main gallery space because I'd caught sight of arguably the main work in the exhibition, Aphorisms (1970-73/2017).
Aphorisms is a sound installation with twelve A4 prints selected by the artist that have corresponding texts on them. A timber frame shaped almost like the skeleton of a storyboard hosts the typewritten prints on clear wire with their partnering english translations on pink paper next to them. As you walk around the piece reading them, they can be heard being read out by Ulay on surrounding speakers. The prints read contemplative phrases such as 'My room contains everything but me so empty' and all have quite melancholic undertones to them which I personally loved - but then who doesn't love a bit of sad poetry? My only negative comment on this piece is perhaps me just being picky - but the original prints that Ulay had selected were white almost greased paper with typewritten text on them with a couple of handwritten additions on some of them - to then translate these to english and put them on a smaller size of coloured paper and use a different font, to me, just seemed a bit messy and disjointed. I really wish they had used the same size of paper and also been typewritten to match their originals just for the sake of continuity and flow.
The rest of the room contained framed prints and polaroids from a series of actions he had performed in the 1970s as well as two vitrine tables filled with ephemera selected and compiled by Ulay over the the last 30 years. The polaroids, despite being beautiful and amusing to look at, lacked context. The same goes for the larger framed prints that make up the publicity image for the show. However, the vitrines I found fascinating - to see the interests of an artist that don't necessarily obviously translate into their work was a really eye-opening experience. Queue the photographs of three-legged men and diagrams of conjoined twins.
Heading out into the other end of the corridor and to the last work in the exhibition, Women with Flags (1992-97) with accompanying voice over. Again, a political piece regarding the European Union, this time executed through a series of projected images of women holding makeshift flags utilising the colours of existing flags reassembled into new ones.
Overall this show provides a very small insight into the practice of artist, Ulay. Displaying samples of his work from the 1970s onwards and the various forms it has taken, you can be sure that this exhibition is a taster if nothing more of his almost 50 year career. The show is a little underwhelming if I'm being completely transparent, perhaps because of the limitations of the space or because of the confusing layout and lack of context to the works. That being said, Aphorisms is definitely the highlight of the show and I would definitely suggest you see the show for this work alone, however if you're not in the area I'm not sure I would tell you to make the trek to Dundee for this one.
The show runs until the 16th December 2017, if you go be sure to let me know your thoughts.
- Melissa x