The story of how Ulay made an art heist into an artwork
If your performance art is freaky enough to attract the attention of Marina Abramovic, then you know you’re doing something right.
Not only did the work of Ulay catch the attention of the master performance artist, but it ended up leading to a decade-long romantic relationship too, in which they collaborated on several works that showed just how much they matched each other’s freak. There’s the Relation in… Series, which saw them first run into each other repeatedly for over an hour, then do laps inside a museum in their car, then spend 16 hours with their hair tied together while the public watched on. This was all happening one year after another, but it doesn’t make it any less weird and wonderful.
Even their breakup was turned into a pretty inspiring piece of art. One where they started on opposite sides of the Great Wall of China, then walked towards each other. After each walking 2,500 kilometres, they hugged and said goodbye. Pretty phenomenal stuff, but the truth is that Ulay, born Frank Uwe Laysiepen in Solingen, Germany, deserves to have his legacy viewed separately from his more famous ex-partner.
The truth is that Ulay was responsible for some truly amazing works of his own. Most notably, a stunt he pulled in 1976, a year after meeting Abramovic, that briefly made him a household name in Germany. A piece of performance art that he gave the name There is a Criminal Touch to Art. A very fitting name considering the piece began with him waltzing into the Neue Nationalgalerie in West Berlin, and waltzing out with Carl Spitzweg’s painting The Poor Poet before anyone could stop him.
This made national news because The Poor Poet was one of the most famous paintings in the history of German art, but not entirely for the right reasons.
Why did this stunt make Ulay so famous?
The Poor Poet is a striking work of art to this day. A starving artist huddles in a corner of his garret as snow piles on the frame of the hovel’s lone window outside. A ratty old umbrella is pinned directly above him to keep the melting snow from landing on him. Bundled up in blankets and an old-fashioned sleeping hat, the artist frowns at his right hand, its fingers held up for reasons that fellow artists, critics and historians have been debating about for centuries.
It’s a wonderful painting. The problem is that an amateur artist, very connected with the German history of the mid-20th century, felt the same. That’s right, The Poor Poet was a particular favourite of Adolf Hitler. That fact wasn’t lost on Ulay, born in literal Nazi Germany. Thus, that was the reason he decided to steal the painting, yet it wasn’t the end of his piece. No, the actual theft was only step one. Step two was calling it in and leaving it somewhere for the cops to find.
This was where the true beauty of the piece unfurls. Ulay had asked some friends of his, an impoverished Turkish immigrant family, if he could hang the work on their wall for the police to find. Thus, the very people seeking to find the painting, one depicting someone who had slipped through the cracks of society, had to engage with those same people in order to return it to a high-class art museum. One where bored rich folks will give it a cursory glance before moving on to the next distraction.
Truly, an act that blurs the line between art and crime, one that shows that Ulay is more than deserving of his own reputation as a firebrand artistic maverick, separate from anyone else.