Orlan

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This article is about the performance artist. For the series of Russian space suits, see Orlan space suits.

Orlan is a French artist, born May 30, 1947 in Saint-Étienne. She lives and works between Los Angeles, New York and Paris. In 2006–2007 she is invited as a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She is on the board of administrators for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and is a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Cergy.

Orlan is not an artist of one medium. She is mostly famous for her work with plastic surgery in the early to mid nineties, but she has a body of work that started long before, and that still today, is evolving and innovating.^{[citation needed]}

1 Biography
2 Important works
3 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early phases

In 1964, still in her home town of St Etienne, she started the "Marches au ralenti" ("Slow motion walks"), in which she would walk as slowly as possible between two central parts of the city.

From 1965 to 1983, she started the "MesuRages", in which she would use her own body as a measuring instrument, called the "Orlan-body". In this complex performance, Orlan would use her "Orlan-Body" unit to define how many could fit in a given architectural space.

In the "MesuRages" and in posterior work, Orlan would make great use of her "Trousseau".

From 1964 to 1966, Orlan executes a series of photographic works now known as the "Vintages", as there is only one remaining copy of each original photograph, the original negatives having been destroyed. In this series she poses naked in various yoga like positions. One of the most famous pictures of this series is "Orlan accouche d'elle m'aime".

From 1967 to 1975, a new series starts, the "Tableaux Vivants".

In 1977, her performance "The Artist’s Kiss" (Le baiser de l'artiste) during the FIAC in Paris was a huge scandal. She would sit on her stand for the duration of the fair and exchange kisses for a small amount of money.^{[citation needed]}

In 1978 she created the International Symposium of Performance in Lyon.

In 1982, she founded the first on-line magazine of contemporary art, Art-Accès-Revue, on France’s precursor to the internet, the Minitel.

[edit] Surgeries

She wrote the Carnal Art manifesto, and from 1990 to 1993 she conducted her series of nine surgery-performances, filmed and broadcast in institutions throughout the world, among which the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York. Orlan's goal in these surgeries is to acquire the ideal of beauty as suggested by the men who painted women. When the surgeries are completed she will have the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Gerome’s Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana from a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Orlan picked these characters, “not for the cannons of beauty they represent…but rather on account of the stories associated with them.” Diana because she is inferior to the gods and men but is leader of the goddesses and women; Mona Lisa because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, she represents; Psyche because of her fragility and vulnerability within the soul; Venus for carnal beauty; Europa for her adventurous outlook to the horizon, the future.

Many feminists have called Orlan an anti-feminist due to her goals and the means of reaching them. Instead of banishing cosmetic surgery, she embraces it; instead of rejecting the masculine, she incorporates it; instead of define her identity, she wishes for it to be “nomadic, mutant, shifting, differing.” She negates both patriarchal culture and the feminist ideal by creating her own identity for the future. As Orlan states, “my work is a struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as far as artists of representation are concerned), and God!”

"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)

Orlan then experimented with getting implants or books up her spine.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Refiguration/Self-Hybridizations

[edit] Important works

Her most famous and controversial works include:

Documentary Study: The Head of Medusa– it took place at the Musee S. Ludwig, Aix la Chapelle. The motto of the performance is Freud’s text on the Head of Medusa "At the sight of the vulva even the devil runs away.” The artist displayed her sexual organs during her period, under magnifying glass.

The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan which started in 1990 involved a series of plastic surgeries in the course of which the artist started to morph herself with some of the most well known paintings and sculptures including Mona Lisa

This Is My Body, This Is My Software performance accompanied by a book and a CD ROM.

The Kiss of the Artist performed in 1977 outside the Grand Palais, site of FIAC, the French art fair. A life-size photo of her torso was turned into a slot machine. After inserting a coin, one could see it descending to the crotch and then was awarded a kiss from the artist standing on a pedestal nearby. This piece will be shown again at the "WACK!Art and the Feminist Revolution"