Orlan became famous for bravely using her own body to promote her vision of contemporary art.

Orlan Artist Bio

Orlan was born in France in 1947. She never limited the means of expressing her vision of art and worked with drawing, photography, and sculpture. However, the artist became famous for the projects where she used her own body as an instrument. During the "Documentary Study: The Head of Medusa" performance, Orlan demonstrated her genitals to the public under a magnifying glass, refuting Freud's claims that even the devil runs away at the sight of a woman's vulva.

In the early 1990s, Orlan literally turned her body into an art object. She did nine plastic surgeries as a part of performances, broadcasting them live. During one of the operations, she had two implants protruding from under the skin on her forehead, which haters have already called "demon`s horns." The artist says she has been changing her body to recreate herself.

Works

For the first time, Orlan decided to film her own surgery back in 1978 during an art symposium in Lyon. That urgent surgical intervention was not caused by aesthetic reasons — the artist, however, does not want to reveal what really happened. Her surgical performances in 1990 were called grandiose rituals. The artist herself and all of the surgeons were dressed in church brocade robes. Orlan, who lied on the surgical table, was reading various philosophical and poetic texts. She was not completely satisfied with her job of bringing classical masterpieces using her own body. Thus, she wanted to turn her own face into something that had not been seen before.

Interesting Facts

In 1972, at an exhibition in Milan, she showed "sculptural" costumes. She put on exuberant pseudo-baroque robes and made herself "living pictures." One of them represented “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa,” a marble sculpture made by Bernini. Orlan’s impersonation of a Saint woman was a protest against the hypocrisy of modern society, in which the traditional woman's image implied either the Madonna or a prostitute.

She began performing surgery shows in 1990 at the age of 43. She used her own body as a means of transformation, offering it as a material for "sculpting." This martyrdom and suffering were for the sake of achieving a new ideal of beauty. Orlan began to represent different mythological images of women. Moreover, she chose the famous Renaissance or post-Renaissance images of idealized female beauty. These were not traditional oil paintings on canvas. Orlan's “paintings” were the result of the use of plastic surgery techniques on the human body (self-portraits painted with blood during plastic surgery). During her performances, the surgery was depicted as not something special, it lost its main function and turned into art, and it was no longer a place for plastic operations but her creative laboratory.

Body Modification

In fact, Orlan had 9 surgeries, although her fans may think that she used to modify her body much more often. All of the surgeries belonged to the project "Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan." The first step was creating a digital photo, combining the features of her body with women from artworks — Botticelli’s Venera, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Jerome’s Psyche, etc.

Orlan was interested in the role of the body, in particular, the female body, in society. She admitted that her art was radical and modern, but it was based on the classic approach to self-portrait, which is why she continued to improve her image.

Most Known Exhibitions    

Almost all of her works and performances were in the center of people's attention who liked her extreme creativity. Orlan's performances were well documented, but in order to truly appreciate the impact of her artworks on the viewers, they must be seen. Among the most striking are:

• “Self-hybridization” —a photo session where Orlan's face was transformed into images of different civilizations. The model's face was made from masks, images depicting representatives of Africa and pre-Columbian America. Large hybrid photographs were obtained not with the use of surgery but by putting African and pre-Columbian American masks on her face, followed by digital image processing. The concept of "beauty" in Africa and pre-Columbian America was very different from the West (sharp, bizarrely modeled faces, high foreheads, big noses, and scarred skin).
• “Le Plan du Film” — posters of non-existent characters from non-existent films, works of writers, artists.
• “Harlequin's Coat” was a bio-art installation created together with the Australian lab SymbioticA
• “The Stitch / Hybridization / Recycle” — re-made clothes with an accent on the stitches.

Orlan's performances can be understood as rituals of female obedience, a kind of society`s purification from any aggressive manifestations towards a woman.