‘Individual Mythologist’: Vulnerability, Generosity, and Relationality in Ulay’s Self-Imaging

Abstract

The career project of Ulay, as I understand his work, has been to explore and expand in the most generous way upon his sense of vulnerability as, in his words, “a loner by nature… an orphan since I was fifteen years old,” born in 1943 into the complexities of a Germany in the midst of World War II.[1] “I am,” he has written to me, an “individual mythologist (all included) the more so [in that] I’m self taught, an autodidact.”[2] His extensive performance and photographic project as an “individual mythologist” has been aimed at enacting himself for us as a fluid and mutable subject, while creating community by activating relational bonds and opening us to our own fluidity. We are all mythologists of the self.