Orlan Overview

Orlan is a devoted martyr and a jaded exploitationist, a sincere Feminist and a technological utopianist, a social artist and a shameless self-promoter all rolled into one. Her ongoing Performance art piece, which has been variously entitled "The Reincarnation of Saint... [more]

Orlan is a devoted martyr and a jaded exploitationist, a sincere Feminist and a technological utopianist, a social artist and a shameless self-promoter all rolled into one. Her ongoing Performance art piece, which has been variously entitled "The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan" and "Image -- New Images," has shocked, appalled, and intrigued people since its inception in the early 1990s. The French artist's project involves her own willing "rebirth" -- a complete personal reconstruction wrought through a series of highly publicized and often televised plastic surgeries. The goal: a face that is made to look as similar as possible to a computer composite of her own design. This project is rooted in her past performance and visual projects, which have examined the status of the body within society since the 1970s. She exemplifies the malleability of both the physical body and of the personality (which Orlan is also constantly re-fashioning) in a manner that most people find disquieting, or at least a bit distasteful. Orlan's facial composite was created by selecting various so-called ideal features from representations of women in the art canon. The characteristics were selected, says Orlan, for what archetypal traits they emblematize, not for their physical attractiveness. She incorporated the nose from a Fountainebleau sculpture of Diana, the mouth from Boucher's Europa, the forehead of da Vinci's Mona Lisa, the chin of Botticelli's Venus, and the eyes of Gerome's Psyche. Aside from the conceptual significance of her altered face, Orlan makes quite a spectacle of the operations themselves, ensuring that they offer both thematic and visual impact. Amazingly, the surgeries are performed while Orlan is completely conscious. As her flesh is opened up and rearranged, she often reads from relevant theoretical texts, or even answers questions submitted via telephone and e-mail. She intentionally evokes a carnivalesque scene in her "Theater of Operations," employing famous couturiers such as Issey Miyake and Pacco Rabanne to design gaudy costumes for her and her co-stars, the surgeons. The ghastly garb is later auctioned off -- bloodstains and all --to fund her next surgery. She has also been known to feature male exotic dancers as her opening act and to include cheesy props, like plastic skulls and cardboard cutouts of people which are strewn about the operating room. Orlan subscribes to so many conflicting visions and ideologies that she is very difficult to categorize, not to mention criticize. Her relationships with the Feminist movement and the greater art world are tenuous at best, though she purports to be a part of both. She sometimes invokes a rhetoric of empowerment, citing technology as a means to transcend human limitations. Other times, she poses her work as a critique of the cult of beauty that imposes unfair standards on women's appearances. She and her Feminist supporters argue that by exposing the gruesome reality of plastic surgery and the impossibility of physical perfection, she is making a statement about all norms of appearance insofar as they are oppressive to women. From either of these, or any of the numerous other angles from which her endeavor has been viewed, she raises interesting questions about what counts as art -- and, ultimately, about what counts as human identity and existence. As the artist herself puts it: "My body has become a site of public debate that poses crucial questions for our time." [show less]