- documenta
“Always remember to forget me”
(Timm Ulrichs, gravestone sculpture with inscription, 1969)
Timm Ulrichs — sculptor, performance artist, word-artist, intermedial “total artist”, “universal dilettante” and perhaps the most central marginal figure in German art — has died a few weeks after his 86th birthday. News that, upon becoming known, will surely have provoked scepticism in many. Given the consistency and programmatic totality with which he declared every aspect of his life — his thinking and actions, his performances, his own body, the surface of his skin, and, decades ago already, his own death — the subject and medium of his art, the obvious questions practically forced themselves: Did it really happen? Or is it merely a ruse, another art action by this humorous artistic contrarian? A distinction Ulrichs himself would never have accepted.
As early as 1961 he presented himself as the “First Living Work of Art”, seated in a black suit inside a glass vitrine. The concept was later expanded by an ironic yet matter-of-fact compilation of official and medical documents: from his birth certificate, through school reports, confirmation certificate, vaccination records and X-rays, to his own death certificate, whose printed form he had designated at the age of 26 as his final “total art demonstration”: “The missing data [place and time of death] are to be added in due course.”
Such actions were then still far removed from the art establishment, and it is hardly surprising that the Kassel documenta initially gave the total artist from Hanover a wide berth — though this did nothing to deter him: at the opening of documenta 3 (1964) he distributed 2,000 manifestos of his artistic vision and, by means of adhesive plaques, declared traffic signs and other objects in the city’s public space to be art. The young artist’s equally self-assured and critical attitude towards the exhibition is on record before a running camera in Gottfried Sello’s worthwhile television film (Das Museum der 100 Tage – Erster Bericht von der documenta 3 in Kassel, Hessischer Rundfunk, 1964).
An official appearance eventually came with documenta 6 (1977) — with several conceptual book objects shown as part of the book art section assembled by Rolf Dittmar and Peter Frank in the Kassel Orangerie.
In 1981, Timm Ulrichs had the words “The End” tattooed on his right eyelid at a Frankfurt tattoo studio: “I inscribe my eyelid curtains […] with the word ‘End’: when my eyes close, my eye-cinema is over. […] When the moment finally comes for someone to close my eyes in eternal sleep, the punchline appears on the right lid: the final performance of a life conceived and conducted as if for the stage.”
The curtain has now fallen for the last time. Yet the final act may still be pending in Kassel. In 1992, Ulrichs’ own grave monument was among the first two to be inaugurated at the Kassel Artists’ Necropolis: buried upside down beneath the forest floor, his bronze body cast lies on the underside of the earth’s surface. All that is visible are the footprints of his hollow figure, which will also receive the artist’s ashes. We shall see.
