Orlan, a contemporary artist who lives and works in Paris, worked within various art scenes — sculpture, photography, performances, and so on. Her most vital, most challenging and radical invention is carnal art: self-portrait and self-transformation within her own body. This article will talk about that: about Orlan using plastic surgery to make her body into an art piece — or multiple art pieces, really — and interrogating the male world’s opinions on women’s beauty, their physicality, and their objectification. 

Orlan Bio and Childhood

ORLAN is a pseudonym Mireille Porte took in 1971. It’s difficult to find any information about Orlan's childhood — all we know is that she was born in France in 1947. Such a mystery, though, aligns perfectly with the idea of continuous rebirth and reinventing herself artist promotes. 

She happens to be one of the most prominent celebs within the world of high art — and she often gives lectures and talks on art. You will find a lot of information about her art, performances, and projects: her tableaux vivants and The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan — but pretty much nothing is clear about the early years of her life.

Way to Find Herself in Art Through Body Changes

Her artwork is unique. She utilizes the well-known depictions of women created by male artists and replicates them in her body. 

According to the artist, she was concerned about depictions of women in art throughout history because they were supposed to delight the male eye. She tried to alter these in an outspoken and powerful way, challenging the male gaze, a common, conventional image of an Ideal Woman that usual, ordinary, real women are forced to comply with. 

She is not against plastic surgery. She does not reject the masculine. There are no limits to her identity — she states that it is something that keeps changing constantly. Her work, she says, is a fight against everything: from Nature and DNA to God.

Losing one’s name and disregarding one’s body often ends up with being forgotten — but that’s not what happened to Orlan. Her art is diverse because Orlan uses all possible and impossible means — from surgery to biotechnologies — to introduce something outstanding to her body. And she uses her body to create art.   

In her work Harlequin Coat, for instance, she works with an idea of chimera — an item that’s composed of two. Her chimera was a coat from skins of different origins and ages, from in vitro grown skin cells in Petri dishes, shaped like diamonds, coming together in a patchwork design. This way, Orlan wanted to explore the life and death of a body and a material, the way both of them are formed — the way both of them are dying — the way both of them belong to their owners and do not, at the same time. 

First Modification

Orlan has always questioned the human body’s status within society, as well as the pressure that is caused by politics, religion, and social bias. In 1990, she had to undergo emergency surgery, which opened new possibilities to her. 

After that, she started exploring her own body and on her 43rd birthday, she had the first surgery that changed her face completely.

Body Modifications: The Whole List of Changes

Later, she had a few surgeries for carnal art. She believes that there is a huge difference between body and carnal art because the latter does not long for pain; the latter simply exists. The creation of carnal art through body modifications isn’t for purification — or for the improvement of one’s beauty, which plastic surgeries are so often for. There’s no interest in the surgery’s result. The main purpose is to undergo the process that changes the human body — go through the metamorphoses, and Orlan’s body is a canvas for them.

In total, there have been nine surgeries that Orlan underwent from 1990 to 1993. All of them were a part of the well-known project called The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan. The first step she made was to create a digital picture, combine her features with features of women on famous art pieces — Boticelli’s Venus, Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Gerome’s Psyche, etc. 

Orlan is interested in the context in which bodies — in particular, women's bodies — exist in society. She used to say that although her art is radical and modern, it draws from the classic approach to autoportrait and continues it. 

Future Modification Plans 

Even though people believe that Orlan has gone through numerous plastic surgeries, there have been only nine of them. Overall, Orlan is not against plastic surgery ­– she is against what it has done to people, women in particular; what beauty standards as a whole do to them. 

She states that we are all unique and should not look like one another. Currently, she does not plan to change anything in her appearance, but there will be more artwork.