The World's Greatest Plagiarized Paper
A Critical
Analysis of Orlan's Use of Technology as a Means of Artistic Expression
Orlan has engaged in a series of surgical operations to alter her body (mainly
her face) in ways that both question the traditional male notion of an ideal
beauty and criticize
the construction of female-subjects in the modern Western societies.
Orlan employs multiple technologies--medical, sartorial, communications--in order to make her body, and her changing physical identity, a spectacle in every sense of that word, and to chart the costs of that spectacle. She has undergone a series of plastic surgical operations to transform herself--from goddess to savage, from cyborg to saint: so the logic goes--into a new being, modelled on Venus, Diana, Europa, Psyche and Mona Lisa. By creating highly structured images in photographs, videos, and of course, on her own body, Orlan questions whether society is still convinced it’s necessary to bend to the decisions of Nature, a lottery of genes distributed by chance.
Orlan is credited as the creator of Carnal Art and the first to use plastic
surgery as a medium of artistic expression. Carnal Art is concerned with distinction, atheism, perception,
and freedom. The art is somewhere between disfiguration and figuration,
it is an inscription in flesh, a self-portrait as our age now makes possible
through surgical operations and
advanced technology.
In terms of distinction, Carnal Art seeks to modify the body, and engage in public debate. In terms of religion, Carnal Art points to religion's denial of the 'pleasures of the body', and puts the naked body in the spaces opened up through scientific discovery. Orlan challenges both religious traditions and art-world assumptions, the former through blasphemous imagery, the latter with real time/real place actions identifying art with life Carnal Art ceases to deal with the 'judgement of God'. Orlan notes, "Henceforth we have epidurals, local anesthetics and multiple analgesics; long live morphine! Pain is defeated!" Psychoanalysis and religion agree in saying: 'One must not attack the body,' 'One must accept oneself.' These are primitive, ancestral, anachronistic concepts. We think that the sky will fall on our heads if we touch the body, but Carnal Art is not self-mutilation. It is not against cosmetic surgery but, rather against the conventions carried by it and their subsequent inscription. Carnal Art opposes the social pressures that are exerted upon both the human body and the corpus of art. The body is a sack or costume to be shed.
In terms of perception and freedom, Carnal Art affirms the independence
of the artist to engage society and the media, to challenge the rigid standards created
by the Euro-American beauty culture, and to observe our bodies
cut open, exposed, beautiful.
Whether her art is Carnal Art, a theater of operation, or body
sculpting, Orlan expresses her
message through the technologies of our time. Influenced by Duchamp, she considers her body a "readymade" and, as a result, Orlan's art offers commentary
not only by questioning the notion of an ideal beauty, but also the lengths
to which people will go to achieve it. Her art isn’t merely
the lying on an operating table. In one example of performance art,Orlan stationed herself outside the Grand Palais,
site of FIAC, the French art fair, next to a life size photo of her torso
transformed into a slot machine that she identified as an automatic kiss.
In this controversial work, customers who inserted five francs, could
watch the money descending to her crotch and then receive a kiss
from the artist standing on a pedestal nearby.
In another
performance,
Orlan addresses the quote from Freud, "At the sight of the vulva even the devil
runs away." Here
Orlan displayed her sexual organs during her period, under
magnifying glass. This project can be viewed as a contribution to the postmodern feminist
theory on identity and represents the postmodern celebration of the body exposed, without suffering. Orlan's taboo-challenging
investigations are esthetic actions that force us to reconsider the boundary
that separates "normality" from madness,
But as any feminist can tell you, history demonstrates that
all bodies, all icons, and all shocks aren't interpreted equally. One year later,
in 1978, she gave her first surgical performance. Early
in her career, she realized that it's not enough for a feminist artist to
shock in her explicit body work; to have the desired political effects, she
discovered, her body must produce the right kinds of shock. After her first "surgical performance, she became seriously ill and was in need of an urgent operation. Riding
in an ambulance to have this emergency operation, Orlan
found what she was looking for. Even at a critical moment like this, she started
to philosophize, considering her life as an aesthetically recoverable phenomenon. She saw technical and medical advancements as beneficial-replacing
our traditional view of the necessity of abiding to nature.
But, Orlan asserts that art is
a matter of life and death, and she isn't kidding: each time she is operated
on, there is an increasing element of risk.
The
operating room, entirely
redesigned, becomes Orlan's artist studio from which
comes the works of art, becomes her atelier. And what a surreal theatre it is; you can
find blood-drawings, reliquaries containing
Orlan's flesh, shroud, photos, videos, and films. Each of the operations has altered
a specific facial feature. As of 1998, there had been at least nine operations,
and another, the reconstruction of her nose ("the largest nose technically
possible and ethically acceptable for a surgeon of this country"), is
in the planning stages.
Soon the media started to spread
her story but also, as we could have expected, their
own deformed, self-fabricated stories.
With
such
stories, Orlan worked all the more aggressively, linking technology with the body. In 1993 during her 7th operation,
silicone-implants were placed at both sides of her forehead, creating two
bumps. This was filmed and seen world-wide by satellite. During the performance
the artist talks to the audience, answers questions, music is played, and poetry read. Orlan is both subject and object, actress and director, passive patient
and active organizer She lies on the operating table fully conscious of the events taking place,
since only local anesthetic is used. Videos of these performances have been exhibited in a number of galleries
in Europe and the
She morphs sections of her face to match the facial structures of icons
of feminine beauty, as projected by male artists throughout history. She supplies surgeons
with computer- generated images of the desired attributes. Of the operations performed so far, one altered her mouth
to imitate that of Francois Boucher's Europa; another
"appropriated" the forehead of da Vinci's
Mona Lisa; yet another imitates the chin of Botticelli's
Venus. These models were not chosen by Orlan purely
for their ideal beauty, however, but also for their mythical and symbolic
connotations. The carving up of her body sets up an intentional parallel between religious
martyrdom and the contemporary suffering for beauty through plastic surgery
that writers like Belgian feminist France Borel
have identified as the rite of passage of our epoch.
Such surgical operations deconstruct "the beauty concept"
and recreate it in her new feminist aesthetic: one that emphasizes the contradictions and
ambivalence within the lives of everyday technological women here, and now,
in contrast to women who are using esthetic
surgery for rejuvenation and to gain the typology of beauty standardized and
accepted generally. Her actions call into question whether
our self- representations conform to an inner reality or whether they are
actually carefully contrived falsehoods fabricated for marketing purposes--in
the media or in society at large.
Orlan deals with the problem of dissection, peeling, and unveiling, challenge rigid standards of the anatomist's ruthless penetration
-- the thrust of the male creator. However, technology allowsOrlan a total change of identity
at will: from cyborg
to goddess, from beauty to masochism. She is
transforming herself, having herself sculpted to resemble an image that she
herself created from the outside, of her inside. In her attempt to locate
her interior image she has placed her exterior physique in a state of flux.
It is not still and not fixable.
Orlan enjoys undertaking these plastic surgery
sessions, where she is able to be both patient and spectator. The position
must be overwhelming and beautifully horrific To fund the operations, Orlan sells videos and postcards of the surgical events, accepts
payment for interviews she grants, and sells vials of her blood and fat, grisly
by-products of the operations,
Some fear that her natural love of attention and aspiration to achieve superstar
status suggests her art is all for money or publicity. When
the total self-transformation she plans is complete, an advertising agency
will select a new name consonant with her new image. However, Orlan's
brutal, blunt and sometimes gory imagery flatters neither herself
nor the public. Nonetheless, Carnal Art might be considered as an anti-authoritarian
political discourse because it rejects authority, domination and codes of
the power as a kind of bio-opposition. Orlan’s art
is anti-formalist and anti-conformist. Orlan sacrifices
and spends her body day to day for art and it is not an endless source.
Will her operations culminate in splendid
design or the grotesque?
"Orlan (Interview)"Transcript:
A Journal of Visual Culture. 1996/97
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/transcript/volume2/issue2_2/2_2menu.htm
"Orlan (France), Biography, Quotations, and Critical Text" by Jeremy Drummond
http://www.digibodies.org/online/orlan.htm
"Who is Orlan?" by Denee Pescarmona for English 114EM: Women Writers, 1650-1760, taught by Professor Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook.
http://english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ecook/courses/eng114em/whoisorlan.htm
"Skin Deep: Orlan Takes Beauty to
a Whole New Level" by Elizabeth Switfh. Jolique: Exploring Dress and Culture. http://www.jolique.com/orlan/skin_deep2.htm
"Canal Art by Orlan: Deforming The Human Body in The Name of Art" by Martijn Persoons and Naamah van der Leeuw. http://www.fdcw.unimaas.nl/cwsiot/shopwindow/art/persoons,%20van%20der%20leeuw%20(orlan)/page1,%20carnal%20art.htm
"Feminism,
Technology, Performance: A Talk for the Women and New Media Panel" By Theresa
M. Senft. Women and the Arts Conference.
Accessed: November 2, 2005
"Orlan." Wikipedia,
The Free Encyclopedia. This page was last modified 11:01, 26
September 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlan
Accessed: November 2, 2005
"Surets of Orlan" by Kubilay Akman,
Research Assistant,