Ulay Interview: Advice to the Young

If you want and need inspiration go behind the central station. The iconic performance artist and selfproclaimed anarchist Ulay here advises young artists to avoid art institutions and to make works that meet their own needs rather than that of the audience. The German artist, who has created works for almost half a century, has a very simple recipe for performance art: you need a location, a date, a time and an audience: You are terribly prepared and then you enter your own mental physical space, and you do what you have to do. Collaborating with Marina Abramović (from 1976 to 1988), the two even promised each other that they would perform even if there were no audience, and Ulay goes on to comment that if you have the pretension and the ambition to do something for an audience, then dont kiss their asses. When you perform, you must hold back at least 30 per cent in order to make the audience long for more.