Molotov Cocktail is from one of Ulay's most famed series, Can't Beat the Feeling - Long Playing Record. Conceived of as a participative and social experiment, he invited a number of Afro-American homeless people to be both the subjects for his Polaroid portraits and the enactors and provocateurs at the opening of the exhibition. Inspired by Jean Genet, Ulay extracted paragraphs from his play 'The Blacks: A Clown Show' (1958) and played with the literal and symbolic meanings of the words. Ulay intended the series as a critical investigation on how inter-racial issues affect artistic perception.

This Polaroid is the largest ever made: the camera was almost 3 metres in height, and Ulay had to literally stand inside to "take" the photograph. As an object, it is an important piece of photography's history, showing the experimental nature of the Polaroid camera. The camera no longer exists.