Effective period / Period of releases: 1968

Timm Ulrichs (born in 1940) is considered one of the most influential German conceptual and action artists. He writes concrete poetry, makes performance art, and works as a sculptor.

For his work, Timm Ulrichs has received numerous international prizes, but in a conscious gesture of rejection, he withdrew from the art market. Even though his early performances and happenings have art historical significance in terms of determining an avant-garde art after 1960, his entire oeuvre is often only known to insiders. As an artist’s artist, Timm Ulrichs is widely respected.

Ulrichs has been active as a self-proclaimed “total artist” since 1959 when he displayed himself in a glass box and determined himself "the first living artwork". In that year, he established the Werbezentrale für Totalkunst, Banalismus und Extemporismus in Hanover, which was to serve the propagation, development and production of total art. Under the motto “art is life, life is art”, he called himself “the perfect gesamtkunstwerk”.

His demonstration of total art contained about a dozen personal documents: birth certificate, inoculation certificate, school reports, military service record, dental records, x-rays, and a death certificate with the note “the missing data are to be added at the appropriate time”.

Instead of found objects, Ulrichs uses his own body. A simple and simultaneously great idea: whereas with Duchamp the producer and the work were still separated, in the case of Timm Ulrichs, the artist and the work are one and the same.

Within the European art context, actions like the exhibition of himself were more than rare in the 1960s. In the US, similar art concepts of the body were developed, though more within the contexts of theatre, dance, and choreography, i.e., the performing arts. Timm Ulrichs, on the other hand, came more from the Dada movement and Duchamp.
Timm Ulrichs derives a large part of his oeuvre from postulating his body as an art object. He treats his own body as raw material – in a material as well as an intellectual sense.
Under these conditions, its individual parts, its limbs, hair, skin, nails, blood, semen can take on the characteristics of art; its internal processes and indeed its life-maintaining needs such as eating and sleeping can then be viewed differently.

The mapping and exploration of his own body: the body becomes the object of experimentation and research, and the entire environment is related to this centre.

Timm Ulrichs’s first self-exhibition had a decisive influence on body art in German-speaking countries: in the 1960s and 70s, several of his colleagues appeared with similar actions. In retrospective, it was almost a chain reaction of self-exhibitions: from Jochen Gerz, Valie Export, Joseph Beuys to Arnulf Rainer and Günther Brus all the way to Marina Abramovich.