Dressed in baggy red clothes, she was given the nickname Pa Ma Ta Je – big fat sister mother. Abramović, set off westwards from the dragon’s head at the Bohai Sea, an extension of the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean peninsula. Already it is worn, it is polished.”įinally, having also agreed to participate in a film of their “study” of The Great Wall for Chinese Central Television, they were granted permission.Ībramović and Ulay began their walks on 30 March 1988, from either end of the Great Wall, known to the Chinese as The Sleeping Dragon. Already I feel I have walked it 10 times. A frustrated Ulay confessed: “I have been living with the wall in my thoughts for five years.
Then, inexplicably, the authorities postponed it again. Permission was finally granted for the walk to take place the following year. In 1986, they went to China to visit parts of the Great Wall, to familiarise themselves with it and meet some of the villagers they would be staying with. As phone calls, letters and documents were fired back and forth between China and the artists, years rolled by. The pair were told that it would be too dangerous to do the walk alone and they would be required to have an accompanying crew. Permissions and visas were granted then denied. And who in their right minds would want to get married on it? Paper trails were endless. No one camped or walked the Great Wall as an “art project”. The Beijing authorities struggled to comprehend the pair’s motives for the journey. What the pair were less prepared for, however, was Chinese bureaucracy. They saw The Lovers as an odyssey and a performance in which they alone would be both players and audience.Įager to prepare, and ever-practical, Ulay laid in a year’s supply of dried tofu and seaweed, together with tents and camping stoves. Exhilarated by the emotional and physical scale of The Lovers, the pair imagined themselves walking alone across great expanses of the Chinese landscape, camping under the stars and concluding the journey with the ultimate commitment. Setting off alone from opposite ends, they planned to meet in the middle, where they would marry. They proposed to be the first people to walk the Great Wall of China. In 1983, Abramović and Ulay announced their ultimate collaboration: The Lovers. Marina and Ulay perform Rest Energy in 1980. Uncomfortable viewing, this was relationship therapy played out as art – and, perhaps, vice versa. One of their pieces, Rest Energy, performed in Dublin in 1980, saw them balance each other on opposite sides of a drawn bow and arrow, with the arrow pointed at Abramović’s heart one slip from Ulay and he could have killed her.
#The great wall movie story full#
They explored conflict, taking their ideas to extremes: running full pelt into each other, naked, and slapping each other’s faces until they could take no more. In one, called Relation in Time, they remained tied together by their hair for 17 hours. Their artistic collaborations matched their personalities: they focused on performances that put them in precarious and physically demanding situations, to see how they and their audience would respond. For years they lived a nomadic lifestyle, travelling across Europe in a corrugated iron van and performing in villages and towns. The pair began to perform together, describing themselves as a “two-headed body”. Even their initial encounter was propitious: they met in Amsterdam on their shared birthday of 30 November. Ulay found Abramović witchy and otherworldly she found him wild and exciting. From the moment in 1976 that Serbian and German performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen, who died last month aged 76) clapped eyes on each other they were inseparable.
0 kommentar(er)
