Is it art? Orlan and the transgressive act - French performance artist Orlan

The French performance artist whose assumed name is Orlan has embarked upon a campaign of self-transformation [i]or[/i] part of to the other plastic surgery. The photo-documentation of her operation/performances furnishes one as well as the other the imagery and the financial support for her art. Below, the author grapples with the many issues raised through a body of work that gives of recent origin meaning to the term "cutting edge"

Orlan is not her name. Her face is not her face. by and by her body will no be her material part Paradox is her content; subversion is her technique. Her features and limbs are endlessly photographed and reproduced; in France, she appears in mass-media magazines and upon television talk shows. Each time she is seen she direct the eyes different, because her performances take place in the operating swing and involve plastic surgery. What we actually know about the video-and-performance artist who calls herself "Orlan" is les than what is known about Orlon, the synthetic fiber whose trade name closely be likes her chosen alias. This assumed name, moreover, will turn round be altered: when the total self-transformation she plans is without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw an advertising agency will prefer a new name consonant with her of recent origin image.

Throughout her career as a well-known French multimedia artist, Orlan has trafficked in notions of an ambiguous and constantly shifting identity. 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 views - in the media or in society at large.

Orlan's journey from the art gallery to the operating sweep began in the late '60 in the roads of her home town of St Etienne. As part of the radical activities triggered by means of the liberation movements of le evenement de mai 1968 she improvised her first performances and public spectacles. In the '70 she did performance pieces in Lyon and, later, outside the Guggenheim Museum in novel York. These consisted of abstract measuring actions relating her material part to a medieval convent and to a present art museum. Her subsequent work ofttimes came to relate religious iconography to makes of the art world. She challenged the couple religious traditions and art-world assumptions, the former [i]or[/i] part of to the other blasphemous imagery, the latter with real time / real place actions identifying art with life.

As a star in her have a title to literal "theater of operation," Orlan leaves her background deliberately fuzzy the better to maintain the anonymity required to throw an enigmatic "star quality." Here is what we know: She was born upon May 30, 1947, in the industrial town of St Etienne. In 1980 she mov to Paris. Her studio is in the working-class suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, nearest door to the insane asylum where the original artiste maudit, Antonin Artaud, died. Like El Greco and Gericault, who used inmates as types she recruited inmates to appear in her early tableaux vivants, similar as her video-and-performance piece inspired by dint of Caravaggesque stereotypes, St. Orlan and the olders Presently she earns a living as a professor of fine arts at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Dijon. She also barters images of her performances and her plastic surgery operations, documented in films, videos and elaborately staged photographs.

Like many artists of her generation the couple in France and in the U Orlan was influenced through Duchamp. Her response was an farthest one: to consider her have a title to body a "readymade." Through Ben Vautier, who showed her work in his famous Nice gallery where Yve Klein and in like manner many other members of the French avant-garde got their start, she came into contact with members of Fluxus, and she continues to collaborate with Jean Dupuy In 1971 she baptized herself "Saint Orlan," festooning her material substance with billowing draperies made of black vinyl or white leatherette. She exhibited these elaborate sculptural style of dresss in a show in Milan in 1972 by and by she began to wear her at any time more exaggerated faux-Baroque costumes in staged tableaux vivants. High contrast color photographs of Saint Orlan, the pair living doll and living plastic art were integrated into photo-collages, videos and films tracing a fictive hagiography.

Convinced that with its exaggerated emotionalism Bernini's St Teresa in Ecstasy was the first postmodernist plastic art Orlan found relationships between the forced pathos of Counter-Reformation esthetics and the historical regards of contemporary artistic practice. The prototype image of Saint Orlan was a marble plastic art she carved and then, in the tradition of academic plastic art since the Renaissance, sent to be enlarged or "pointed up" to replete scale. Her incarnation as Saint Orlan focused upon the hypocrisy of the way society has traditionally split the female image into madonna and whore. She played not on this long-entrenched dichotomy by exposing solitary one breast (as the nursing Virgin Mary is depicted), to differentiate Saint Orlan from a topless pinup. (The single expos breast also referr to the Amazons of ancient mythology, exhibited as having only one breast to be independent to sling warriors' quivers above exposed chests.)