By Theis Ørntoft
Weekendavisen (in Danish; subscription needed)
July 14, 2024

(A rough Google translation)

On December 20 last year, Torben Ulrich died. In the days before, he managed to put the finishing touches on an essay, which now hangs and floats, I imagine, like a weightless meditation in the middle of “Still in Play”. The book was his last work. Ulrich had quite a diverse practice, for example it can be mentioned that he was a tennis player, clarinetist, visual artist, poet, Zen Buddhist, performer and jazz writer. For me, he was always most present as a tennis player and vitalist thinker. One whose books I could take off the shelf, read a few lines and get a microdose of inspiratory vertigo. His thoughts revolved around athletics in all forms, improvisation, the theory of elements and quantum physics. He mixed Western and Eastern thought; perhaps one can imagine that during the tennis matches he saw a yellow ball come flying, but also a small, flaming sun. I never met Torben Ulrich. I didn't see him play tennis either, and I never related to his paintings. Not until a few weeks ago when I received “Still in Play”.

In the years 1981-2018, he painted over 120 pictures in the series he named Imprints of Practice. With few exceptions, the paintings were created via the same concept over almost 40 years; he would take a skipping rope and a tennis ball, dip the rope in black paint and the ball in red, then throw, flick or fire them at the rice paper. In each picture there is this imprint of a ball. On the outskirts or in the center. One can see it as a red sun in the image's universe, or an imprint of a force that is at once athletic and cosmic. The paintings seem to stand and waver on the border between movement and stillness, between the human and the dissolved. And in the same way perhaps Ulrich's legacy does. There was something both concrete and abstract about him, something both close to the world and distant from the world; he seems to be completely inside matter and existence, but at the same time also condemned to step on distance from it, remove oneself from it, open and close the doors of life in an infinity, to get these small glimpses of the immense labyrinth.

MONDAY JUNE 3. Sun and blue sky over Nørrebro. I am on maternity leave. My daughter is at a stage of development where she follows me around everywhere in the apartment, I go in front, she comes crawling a few meters behind, if I just need to go to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Unless I open the balcony door. Then she forgets everything and starts crawling, goes out to the potted plants and buries her fingers in the soil. I squat next to it. No, I say. She stops and stares at me uncomprehendingly. Then she turns and digs further, the temptation is too great, the gods must know what it is about; perhaps her cells remember what it was like to be a mole long ago, a blind, agile creature underground. Or maybe she is just curious because she understands that there is something that is forbidden for the first time. Sometimes when she refuses to take a nap and I don't really have more to give, we sit on the couch and watch a few minutes of the French Open. The fourth round matches have begun. Yesterday Clara Tauson dropped out, Holger Rune is still with us. If I'm lucky, I might get to see about five minutes. The other day I saw a tired, aging Nadal about to lose to Alexander Zverev. He is worn out, the little Spanish Samson, with the strong, brown upper arms and the beautifully awkward racket grip. As a rule, the French Open is interrupted because she leans forward and starts typing on the computer. She has no concepts; the living room is still a raw and quivering field of energy for her, I think, full of lines, geometries, points of light and bodies. And perhaps in that way she perfectly lives up to Torben Ulrich's basic ideals. For example, about considering a tennis match as something open and free. Don't lock it into the shape of the competition, don't care who wins or loses. So better moving around the court in shared curiosity, playing with each other, not against each other, not counting the points, but instead examining the lines, the heat and the speeds, the reddish color of the gravel, releasing energies from the prison of competition. The white lines of the court record at once a reality and an illusion, you can play tennis anywhere, in a parking garage, in an elevator, in the middle of 5th Avenue. You can also, in our case here at home in the living room, physically unleash the tennis match, that is to say hammer on the computer screen with both hands as if it were a magic drum of colors and light.

When Torben Ulrich described a tennis match, he was describing a force field. A physical concentration in the room, something that stood and quivered and hummed with energy, not unlike a beehive in the forest, or a construction site in the city. For him, the tennis match was an open field of force, and therefore it was never separable from its surroundings; a tennis match, too, is informed and invaded by all that is around it; of the mood of the players, the vitamins and minerals of the breakfast, the atmosphere among the audience, the time of day, the very special humidity of the air. Seen from a certain perspective, the tennis match is a dance of molecules. But when the game is on and the yellow ball is flying, you forget about it. All those points. All those thoughts. Not really that important. It's so nice to be free. You have no body, no psyche, you are a child, melted into the chemical swarm, you become part of the force field, forget your ego. That Ulrich should figure in today's top tennis is virtually unthinkable. Today, the players are so disciplined and focused that any Zen Buddhist wonder would be a mere distraction; everything irrelevant and romantic is purged away, because that's once again how athletes perform best. The only tennis player I can think of who deviates from this regime is the Greek-Australian chaos element Nick Kyrgios – but Kyrgios has symptomatically lost his joy in the game and has become a commentator.

Which figure from the modern era embodies Torben Ulrich's greatest opposite? One bid could be Novak Djokovic, the winningest player of all time. I can think of three reasons for the opposite relationship: First, Djokovic appears determined in every way. Everything down to the smallest meal has been thought through. Second, the Serbian's game, unlike Ulrich's, is virtually free of play and experimentation. At least on the field. The only thing that can throw Djokovic off his feet seems to be his own mood. In the few days when it's against him, you see how decisive it is, and conversely, when the stars align, which they have done almost continuously for ten years, there is no one in the history of tennis who can beat him. The third and final reason is more of a speculation: Djokovic wasn't really meant to be the best. That role was intended for Nadal and Federer. Djokovic's championship is fundamentally a disruption of the order of the tennis universe. He was the archetypal three, the eternal suitor, he really shouldn't have become that good; it is, in a way, a flaw in the fairy tale that it happened. He managed to break free from his own fate. How? By means of anger, I think. If a person has a lot of anger in them, but is just able to tame it, turn the anger into a resource so to speak, this person can go terribly far. Great beauty often springs from primitive, questionable resources. As Carl Jung wrote: If a tree can stretch its branches all the way to heaven, it is because it has roots in hell. Why did Djokovic get angry? Maybe because he wasn't as talented as Nadal and Federer in the beginning. Maybe because the audience didn't love him. Perhaps because the sight of the booing masses ignited something in him, made him burn and glow so fiercely within that the anger alchemically melted and became fuel, the liquid, glowing fuel of a space rocket; Djokovic should have stayed down here on Earth with the rest of us, but instead he fused anger and discipline, cheated the heroes of the fairy tale and became the best ever.

This existential setup, this mindset, could probably not be more foreign to Torben Ulrich. I see no trace of anger in “Still in Play”. I feel no pent-up desire to be the best at anything. The paintings are not based on fear.

TUESDAY JUNE 4. Blue sky and sun again. The day started at 4:30. Before I got up, I checked the night's tennis score on a flash score. Holger Rune lost in five sets to Alexander Zverev. I watched the first set last night then had to go to bed. I hear P1 Morgen now. Former FCK player William Kvist is in the studio; he talks about children and sports culture in Denmark, the message is that the element of competition has gone too far when the 5- to 13-year-olds go to sports. I take the phone with me into the kitchen, listen on, pour a glass of water, go back to the living room. The 5- to 13-year-olds. It immediately sounds like a wild age spectrum to draw data from. I remember it as feeling quite differently when I was five and 13 years old. I remember it as if we were playing football in the schoolyard from the time we were six. We played for the win and had fun with it, one team won, the other lost, and I remember it as if we all survived. William Kvist and the others probably think first and foremost that children should be allowed to be children. But does it necessarily lead to a problematization of competition as such? They claim that the vast majority of 13-year-olds are more concerned with playing than competing. That doesn't sound like the reality I grew up in. In that reality, competition and play were inseparable, not just on the field. Formulated in another way: A tennis match on points is also something you play, the loser at least lives on afterwards, nobody dies. Competitions are not only evil machines that produce individuals for the neoliberal social order, they are also rituals, ancient rituals, with roots in something long before the origin of man, a competition is what anthropologists call the ritualized conflict, and conflict is a of nature's oldest matrices. But maybe it makes a lot of sense to give the little heads a little more safe space to run around in. We'll see in a few decades. It may also be that you internalize the idea in the children's world that competition is something dangerous. It may be that one overlooks the fact that competition is a natural law on a par with gravity, a phenomenon that cannot really be legislated for, and which therefore just finds other, more obscure ways into the children's world.

When I was eight or nine years old myself, I started playing football. I was one of the mediocre ones, neither bad nor good, usually I was substituted in the last third of the game. And it wasn't so cool. A few years later I started table tennis instead. I was better at that, good actually, and viewed from a distance I think that I really wasn't particularly traumatized by my experiences with football, maybe it was actually very good to learn that you are not equally good at everything, that there are difference in sports, difference in skills, difference in people, that we each have our strengths and challenges, are good at different things. There is a word for all this: diversity.

In another radio program I heard a few months ago, the vice-chairman from Denmark's Sports Confederation was in the studio. He said that athletes do not actually get better from competing in the early years. The most important thing, he said, is that you don't exclude anyone, everyone must feel that they can participate. But does that really not make them worse athletes? asked the studio host. No, on the contrary, assured the vice president, they will get better.

Who knows. Not me. But I can see from the current ranking that the world's four absolute best table tennis players are Chinese. The Chinese make up over half of the top ten, and it has been that way for years. Was it an inclusive and playful atmosphere that made these Chinese table tennis players so supreme? Are these the values they were raised with? Hard to imagine.

I scatter toys on the floor, go into the living room and open “Still in Play”. Pages. Several of Torben Ulrich's paintings makes me think of spiral galaxies. The Fornax cluster. M63. One particular painting appears to depict a flock of comets traveling through such a galaxy. Streaks of black energy. Travels and collisions. And then the red spot again. An explosion of energy. It appears in all the images, organizes the whole as it were, like the sun in a solar system, or like the ball in a match.

The best of the paintings are from 2017-18. They are simple. White, red, black. Good colors. I can get the idea when I look at the paintings from those years that they are a draft of a Taoist alphabet; that Ulrich investigates the possibility of inventing signs that stand and alternate between meaningful words and meaningless abstractions. According to Lars Movin's foreword to “Still in Play”, Ulrich's paintings are not to be considered finished in the conventional sense. So I try not to do that. Perhaps this also explains why not all the paintings are equally successful. Several of them appear too illustrative. And by that I mean they are trying to portray something. They become visualizations of his thoughts and ideas. It's an artistic problem, I think. That something from the domain of the intellect has been tried to be transported into that of art, without an independent mutation of the material having taken place. But maybe I'm just hopelessly work-oriented, unlike Ulrich, who was always procedural. And maybe that is also why I can sometimes get the feeling that something in the paintings points more to the artist's wild and experimental life as such than to the art itself.

Let me dwell on this for a moment. Because a strongly vitalistic vein runs through Ulrich's world. He is the experimental person, the wild-thinking individual who never undertakes to complete anything and, for example, come up with a crystallized theory about the world. I have thought several times about the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze during the reading of “Still in Play”. Deleuze must also be said to be a person of the flowing and processual. But at least he completed his theories, he committed to them. Did Ulrich do it? In process-oriented art, it can often become a problem that everything that is apparently so improvised and spontaneous ends up forming its own sets of rules and codes, becoming predictable, simply – which is precisely what it was supposed to deal with.

Occasionally an artist must depart from his own habits. Leave them and travel away. Pitch your tent in the land of your enemies, camp there for a few months. Sometimes you have to complete something in the conventional sense. Ulrich never presents any finished philosophical theory. You might not expect that from someone who is not a philosopher either. But what was he? His text in “Still in Play” is entitled » Circling the uncatchable «. And maybe that title answers my question: There is nothing inside the center. There is only the movement. The text is like a long meditative poem, a quietly driving meteorology of thoughts, a summary of his vitalist-Buddhist universe.

THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Torben Ulrich developed his idea of co-play. He envisioned supporters instead of opponents. I have always sympathized with that idea. I have also always had my reservations. In an interview from 2004, he says: "A situation that is governed by that lose-and-win mentality becomes almost definition marked by some rational or fixed options.'

But is it true? When I look at today's tennis players, who are subject to what Ulrich calls a lose-and-win mentality to an exceptional degree, I almost don't think I see anything but superb athletic displays. I can also formulate it as a question: Do competition and points really exclude spontaneity, play and experimentation? I can not see it. When I think of the Spanish football club Real Madrid, I imagine a calculated undertaking in every measurable way. It's about money and victories, you want to win La Liga, you want to win the Champions League, you want to sell a lot of shirts with Vinícius Júnior's name on. But at the same time, in the middle of this cold system of money and competition, as if on another level of the whole, the best players in the history of the world run around. They are really just playing their sport. They are athletes as athletes have always been; their blood is warm, their minds empty of thought, they swarm around the grass like a superior superorganism, dribbling effortlessly, the athletic movements and decisions flowing in and out of each other in a myriad of spontaneity.

Personally, I would never sit and watch the French Open if it was a scoreless game, it would quickly become directionless for me, the duels would lose their meaning; a competition does not only create winners and losers, it also creates dramaturgy, development, differences, events.

At this point one could perhaps add that Ulrich's idea of complicity reflects an anti-growth philosophy in our time. The competitions led us down the wrong tracks, one could argue, they made us forget that there are other tracks than linear, material growth. Drop the competition, human. Slow down. Live quietly, locally and self-sufficiently. Be curious, not about the points and the contests, but about the ground on which they are played. Live cyclically, not linearly. These kinds of thoughts can probably be derived from Ulrich's philosophy of playing along. Perhaps it is actually even here that he is most up-to-date. But to be honest, I can't think about it; perhaps because I have nothing to add to all that has been said and written over the decades about anti-growth and ecology.

It is said that Ulrich interrupted a semi-final during the Danish championships in 1966 because he had to go home and watch the World Cup final between England and Germany. He went up to the net and shook his opponent's hand, and then he went home. It's a funny gesture. It's also a bit self-imposing. I don't know how much "complicity" there really is over it. But you can perhaps see it as a concrete example of an overarching life ethic. Maybe Ulrich is just saying: Stay curious and open, friends, don't stiffen. It sounds so trite when I write it. In Ulrich's language, it always lifted and gained flight height. He was good at complicating the elementary.

WEDNESDAY JUNE 5. It's Constitution Day. I got a few hours off to work. As I cycle over to the office, I think of an old interview with Torben Ulrich. He talks about attending Wimbledon in the years after the Second World War. And he says something about there being holes in the turf from shrapnel. The Germans had thrown a bomb in there, or near the stadium, possibly a small crater had also appeared in the field.

He was a child of the post-war era.

I can't get into that.

The atmosphere must have been completely different from today. The time after a war. In almost every way, it feels like we are in the pre-major collapse era. Before and after. These are two very different stages. The German film director Werner Herzog is another child of the post-war era. In one place he talks about running around and playing in a ruined city. What it's like to go up the stairs in a demolished building. You can look out of bullet holes. In one apartment there is a large bomb crater in the wall, and you can wade straight through it, from one apartment into another, from someone's living room, into someone else's kitchen. Alien spaces in a row. A world resting after an immense convulsion. The humans survived and the birds are chirping. Now the children run through the living rooms, through the walls, nobody owns anything, everything is connected, everything is serious and fun, everything is ruin and adventure.

Theis Ørntoft is a writer and poet.

Still in Play: The paintings of Torben Ulrich
is edited by Lars Movin and published by Forlaget Spring.