“
Ulay’s Polaroids of that period often showed him piercing his own flesh in various bloody ways. In one work, he tattooed one of his aphorisms on his arm: ULTIMA RATIO (meaning final argument or last resort, referring to force). Then he cut a square hunk of flesh containing the tattoo out of his arm, slicing so deeply that the muscle and tendon were visible. He framed and preserved the tattooed flesh in formaldehyde. For another image, he held a bloodstained paper towel over a self-inflicted razor wound in his belly. A series of shots showed him slicing his fingertips with a box cutter and painting the white tiles of a bathroom with his own blood.
(...)somebody gave Ulay a Newton’s cradle. He was fascinated by the back-and-forth swinging of the shiny metal balls, the little clack they made when they collided, the perfect transfer of energy.
“What if we did that?” he said.
I immediately understood what he was talking about: a performance where the two of us would collide and bounce off each other.
We were naked, standing twenty meters apart. We were in a warehouse on the island of Giudecca, just across the lagoon from Venice. A couple hundred people were watching. Slowly at first, Ulay and I began to run toward each other. The first time, we just brushed past each other as we met; on each successive run, though, we moved faster and faster and made harder contact—until finally Ulay was crashing into me. Once or twice he knocked me over. We had placed microphones near the collision point, to pick up the sounds of flesh slapping flesh.
(...)
then [Ulay] took out a heavy needle, the kind used to sew leather, attached to some thick white thread, and he sewed his lips shut.
This didn’t happen quickly. First he had to penetrate the skin below his lower lip—not easy—and then the skin above his upper lip. Also not easy. Then he pulled the thread tight and tied a knot. And then he and I changed places: Ulay sat down among the audience, and I sat in the chair he had just occupied.
“Now,” I told our friends, “you will ask me questions and I will answer as Ulay.
”
”