"I can observe my own body cut open, without suffering!... I see myself all the way down to my entrails; a new mirror stage. "I can see to the heart of my lover; his splendid design has nothing to do with sickly sentimentalities"- Darling, I love your spleen; I love your liver; I adore your pancreas, and the line of your femur excites me."
–Orlan from Carnal Art Manifesto |
On May 2nd Orlan made her appearance in the Hammer Museum with a talk on “Omnipresence and After.” It was scheduled as part of a series of lectures entitled “On the Subject of Violence: Representation and Resistance in the Field of Vision,” in which internationally renowned artists and theorists such as Kaja Silverman and Jacqueline Rose addressed the psychopolitical interface of violence and how it comes into being in the field of visual representations, or just resisting the field of vision.
Dressed all in black and with a mass of cottony hair half blonde and half black, with round glasses to match, the artist was on stage for nearly two hours showing a dazzling overview of her works in a non-chronological sequence.
Embracing her engagement with several visual fields ranging from sculpture to video, photography, cinema, installation, painting and advertising, the artist focused on her use of self-portraiture. This was conveyed as a form of ironic and playful identification/
disidentification with the self—traversing gender, historical periods, civilization, and media. Humor and playful self-mockery characterised also her opening in which she confessed that she had been looking throughout LA for some special batteries that would have allowed her to make her brain switch into English, but, alas, there were none to be found. Therefore, a translation—one more form of enacting by alteration— was necessary. The translator had no easy task keeping the pace with the intellectual ebullience and artistic exuberance of the very embodied Orlan who spoke at the pace of a TGV.
The French artist who has made her body as the medium of her art and refers to her work as “Carnal Art” needs no long introduction. Gaining international fame because of a series of self-inflicted surgical operations in the 1990s, which she termed ”The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan,” she has became an icon for feminist theorists who find her work conducive to Lacanian analysis and ideal for explicating elements of Merleau-Ponty’s quest in phenomenology. Despite this critical acclaim, Orlan has still not been fully acknowledged in the artistic realm. The different cosmetic surgeries were given names; the one named ‘Omnipresence’ consisted of the sewing of implants into Orlan’s temples. The two sewn-in lumps are still part of today’s Orlan autographed appearance. Some of her operations—rumored to be nine in number—were broadcast via satellite to several parts of the world and the artist responded to the call-in questions from the audience.
|
In an attempt to make herself resemble an ideal of beauty, she has chose to piece together a new self not from dead body parts like Dr. Frankenstein but from art historical references: the forehead of the Mona Lisa, the eyes of a School of Fontainebleau Diana, the nose of Gerome’s Psyche, the lips of Boucher’s Europa, and the chin of Botticelli’s Venus. This self-directed violence establishes her body as a site for public discussion in the realm of beauty and the violence done in its name. The artist’s use of cosmetic surgery as a medium for artistic expression amplifies the social pressures on women to conform to patriarchal standards of beauty, which are unrealistic and therefore unsustainable. Her work exposes the violence of these standards of beauty by showing how her “reincarnation” project embodies these practices of excess, morphing, and self-inscription. It also aims to avoid any form of polarity and erases the boundaries separating what we are able to distinguish as internal/external, visible/invisible, self/other, Western/non-Western. It is this incomplete and fraught polarity that is at the core of Orlan’s project. Her skin becomes the point of connection, the interface through which she articulates her central problematic. Her open-ended self finds closure only in the iteration/repetition/relocation of the
self-portrait.
These surgical operations are seen by some as her most famous, most dangerous, and most controversial work to date. However, others find her work a commercial emulation of much more radical interventions made, for example, by such artists as Chris Burden, Stelarc, and Gina Pane, who created auto-mutilative performances before she did, or by punks and modern primitives, who also perform on themselves.
What made this lecture unique was the chance to be a live spectator in Orlan’s theatre of the self and be exposed to and violated by a large spectrum of engagements and interventions with different artistic fields through the use of different media. Her extremely prolific career cannot be reduced to her surgical operations, even though they constitute the apogee of her fame. By offering a mesmerizing overview of her immense versatility and accurate staging of the self, she shows no signs whatsoever of having outsourced her creativity. For more insight, visit her website. |
