Ulises Carriόn
An aficionado of B-movies, Mexican conceptualist Ulises Carrión initially conceived of The Death of the Art Dealer as a performance, though it was ultimately realized as the artist’s only video work. Mostly interested in the structure of these films than their narrative content, Carrión moves himself and the monitor in accordance with the movements of the camera as they are seen in Max Ophüls’s 1949 film The Reckless Moment. Shifting his body up and down and from left to right, Carrión turns the television on and off each time there is a cut in the scene, using his bodily interventions to punctuate the film, ending his performance as the camera pans down to a newspaper headline reading “EX-ART DEALER FOUND SLAIN.”
Ulises Carrión (1941, Mexico – 1989, The Netherlands) began his career as a writer, studying philosophy and literature in Mexico, Paris, and Leeds, before settling in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from 1970 until the end of his life. He founded a distribution center for artists’ publications in 1975, and was closely involved with the In-Out Center, an alternative gallery in Amsterdam. Carrión’s solo exhibitions include Conjunctions, Art Meeting Place, London, UK (1975); Clues, Galerie Amsterdam, Amsterdam (1981); and Bookworks at Archive Space, Antwerp, Belgium (1990), among others. Recent retrospectives of Carrión’s work have been held at Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2016) and The Showroom, London, UK (2010).
