Timm Ulrichs
Sunday, 25 March 2012
Work from his oeuvre.
“In 1959, he established the ‘Werbezentrale für Totalkunst, Banalismus und Extemporismus’ [Central Advertising Agency for Total Art, Banalism, and Extemporality] and thus began to extend a hitherto limited notion of art. Based on the idea of the readymade, and above all on Kurt Schwitters’ Merzkunst, he takes up the artistic project of the historic avant-garde: to link art and life. He interprets the notion of an art of ideas (Duchamp) and of conceptual art since the 1960s in such a way that he makes his life, his everyday routines, his body the subject and object of his art. Since that time, Ulrichs calls himself a total artist, and since then he has been working on an interdisciplinary, heterogeneous oeuvre in which the genres of sculpture, performance, video, photography, concrete poetry and installation are all mixed. As the first ‘living work of art’ (Ulrichs about Ulrichs), he exhibits himself, measures his body, and exposes himself, as a living lightning rod, to the reality of life and death. That this artistic game links reality and fiction is demonstrated by his tattoo on his eye-lid: ‘The End’. Ulrich creates a subtly ironic body art that intentionally distances itself from the shock effects of what is usually known as body art.
His language games, tautologies, and actions confront the question what art is and still can be historically. ” – Wentrup Gallery